The poll is over, and the result is clear:
#FireFox users have very little interest for Chatbot integration into their browser.
I am very much aware that the people, who voted in this poll are hardly a representative sample, but more than 2.4K people is a better size than many “professional” opinion polls.
@mozilla & @firefox should take people, who actually care about their #browser choice, seriously.
I still seriously believe that #Mozilla’s fate matters,
https://berlin.social/@mina/113102817500429735
1/3
as being a prominent and established way of accessing the internet without using a product owned by one of three three tech giants.
No niche browser can play the same role.
To me, hopping onto a running train doesn’t seem to be the way to go when it comes to creating and keeping trust:
People, who think that cars are a terrible way of getting people around in cities, don’t want another Tesla, they want a good bike.
Here we have a problem, common to many non-profits:
2/3
Fake Professionalism!
I don’t believe that CEOs, who demand a 7 digit salary, have the ability to understand the soul and heart of a collective of people (in the case of many #FOSS projects: some of the world’s most skilled and talented programmers), who donate lots of their time and energy for a project they believe in, and hence lack the credibility and skills necessary for making them thrive in the long term.
Firefox’s ever falling market share proves that.
3/3
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please for the love of god almighty dont ad a chatbot or any other kind of gipity! even if one disregards all the concerns about privacy, software bloat and energy usage (climate change), one has to remember the purpose of firefox, or any other browser for that matter: loading websites. nothing more nothing less.
Why not just PWA to side bar extension support? If users want that side bar to a chatbot. Boom easy. If they don’t or any other option its there too.
If they really want to support local ai specifically focus on the web3 API stuff for it.
Just be a web browser dammit lol
Mozilla is desperate for any cash influx, AI in a browser is a hot sounding thing, right now. Perhaps they also hope they can leverage it for extra income.
I run a Nightly on one of my machines and it was weird seeing the option and I hope it does not make it or that it gets removed.
It’s just a plain integration with 3rd-party or self-hosted LLM service.
I’m not sure if Mozilla will make money from this feature in any way.
Have you read anything about it anywhere?
It gets them users, which are needed for funding.
Like it or lump it, AI chat integration is a feature, and lots of users (those who aren’t on a federated group discussion Firefox) will see it as an attractive feature. “It doesn’t even have a chat bot” is something that will legitimately be said if its the only major browser without it.
Maybe they can offer a LLM router and privacy proxy service like they do with VPNs?
Not who you asked speculating.
If you’re using a VPN at the OS or browser level, just like any other traffic, your query to the LLM service will be routed via the VPN. That VPN could be any VPN of your choice - Firefox VPN, Mullvad, or Proton etc.
The only problem is that most LLMs require a profile/login to work with. In such cases, using a VPN will be useless, as the LLM server will know who you are.
I mean I’m desperate for them to get a cash influx too, just not really sure how this does that. Maybe set up for another preferred default deal like they have with Google? Maybe privacy focused option as SaaS offering like they do with their VPN, but you ahead of the curve instead after VPNs became so common you trip over them.
I do not know either. But with the recent Google, Anti-Trust ruling, there is a chance the Courts could force Google to break the deal they have with Mozilla in the future. I assume Google will appeal, but if that goes, so does 80-85% of Mozilla’s income. Selling Mullvad’s VPN is not going to cut it, so maybe they think they can cash in with “AI” somehow. Since you are right, maybe the best VPN’s aren’t dirt cheap but they are certainly not expensive in most Western countries. Besides, most users do not use VPNs. As of 2023, only about 31-33% of all internet users do.
I mean, I don’t have anything against the chatbot feature, but this is coming before the tab group functionality…
Presumably this one’s less work, so even with them being worked on at the same time, no real reason to hold back the one that’s done sooner. But apparently you can try out tab groups already: https://lemmy.ml/post/20000489
why can’t we just have a fast, reliable browser with a clean UI that is fairly customizable with really solid extension support?
Extensions/plugins were supposed to provide the framework if users wanted a bunch of bells and whistles.
and I refuse to believe that a company with the resources of Mozilla cannot do that.
Minecraft is basically that in game form. A powerful voxel engine that has a massive amount of support for mods and plugins.
I guess, that is what most people want.
Minetest is probably a better comparison
Eh, fair point. Minecraft early on was more like what I was describing. For years now the devs have added a ton of content to the base game.
Still, most people I know play with at least a few mods, even if it’s just texture packs and some QoL mods for better UI/UX.
Eventhough I am not pro chatbot, such a poll is unfortunately completely worthless. Only random samples (or at least representative ones) allow to say something about a group.
If we go into an AI fanboy forum and ask the same question, we may find 3000 people saying the exact opposite. It just means nothing whatsoever.
There’s also the fact that it’s a false dichotomy.
100%. I feel like the broad fediverse community is not a fan of generative AI
Does that mean they are not representative of the general population…?
The general young population uses a fair amount of LLM services, so yes
Yes and no.
Obviously, the people questioned here, are not representative for the entire FF user community.
However: The Fediverse at large is a community of mostly tech-savvy people, who do care about independence from major corporations.
These are, in fact, also the people who are the core users and developers of FOSS software.
Whilst the exact percentage means nothing, the tendency is so clear that it should, at least, be taken into consideration.
Did you read part 2 & 3?
https://johnmjennings.com/an-important-lesson-from-bullet-holes-in-planes/
The responses needs to be contain representation at least equally to non Firefox people who no longer care to answer a poll about a product that they don’t use. Why? Only current users are going to answer the poll, not the people with the cuts and pain that forced them back to Chrome or safari. Asking survivors how to reinforce survival actually doesn’t solve for why do many people off board Firefox.
Frankly you should ask people like my 60-70yo parents why chrome not Firefox. You’ll learn more from that than the corrected responses of people who loudly have preferences but at the end of the day would stay either way. My parents tried Firefox, but then left it. Although they only tried from insistence from their son.
PS: I agree with the poll. I don’t want a chat bot either. If I did, I’d install a plugin that integrates once of my own choosing. Given the availability, privacy, and ease of lmstudio I’d rather leave it in its own place outside the browser and network. I don’t know how those like my parents feel about a bot that can probably answer their questions. I also doubt they care. Maybe it would help them ask questions they’re too embarrassed to ask friends and family for. Usually how to questions they’ve asked dozens of times. But that’s super dangerous.
A representative 300 sample would give a more accurate result than a biased 2.4k sample. Bigger number doesn’t mean better results.
That said, I’m not sure how to get representation from certain subgroups of the population, like the “never engages with polls” or “lies specifically to fuck with your data” subgroups.
Yes, It was easier to do truly representative polls, when people loved answering questions and everybody had a landline.
I remember a time when the phone or doorbell would ring and I would get excited to know who it was.
Now I seriously consider setting up a series of mirrors so that I can see who is at the door without giving up my ability to pretend like no one is home and my phone ringing causes an emotion somewhere between worry and rage.
Same!
But isn’t it a bit sad, we’ve all become so paranoic whilst at the same time being total oblivious to sharing lots of data, just because we want to know what the kitten did to the alligator?
I’m just tired of people trying to sell me shit. Or beg. Like I know I’m not interested 3 words in to the spiel but still feel like an asshole if I just say no and close the door or hang up the phone.
Though I did eventually tell my phone provider to put me on their no call list for their internet marketing because I got tired of them trying to get me to switch to their less good internet package.
Hoping (but not holding my breath) that we, as a society, squash the whole data broker thing sometime relatively soon, though.
aw man i missed the poll i would have voted “fuck no” to chatbot integration
Would you rather have a AI or have your browser 2x slower?
That is the kind questions that were asked
No that was a different poll. This one asked “do you want ‘enhanced privacy’ or a chatbot in the sidebar” which, of course, is a false dichotomy.
Is this the official Mozilla connect survey? I believe the question order and groupings were randomized, and that may have been a (IMO bad) control question.
lol. I’d take a browser that’s 10x slower as long as it has no AI or crypto.
Yeah but in that situation wouldn’t you just not use the AI?
I think this is more about wasting development times and what features are actually in the browser.
I like having TLS in my browser
We want lighter and faster browsers that load up less features, block all unnecessary data collection and spying and java scripts, consume less hardware resources, and don’t choke and heat up 8-gb ram laptops just because I openned 1 tab.
I don’t want Siri in my internet. I don’t even like it when it automatically searches and returns suggetions for mere typing anything in address bar. If I wanted a chatbot, I know how to visit chatgpt or any site myself.
It’s just an integration with LLM services and not AI baked-in the browser code. You can even self-host any such service (Ollama) and integrate Firefox with it. That will make sure your query is not leaving your network.
Just a minor nit pick but it’s JavaScript, not Java Scripts (javascript and Java are massively different things).
Also blocking JavaScript on the web in 2024 is really not practical. Nothing will really work without it.
You used to be able to run Java in the web, I remember the pain of applets.
It’s still not the same as JavaScript
Can this poll be considered official ? I clicked the link and it looks like a Twitter poll or something.
Of course, it’s not official.
I made this poll, as just a normal Fedi user.
It got more attention than I had anticipated, though.
This post is confusing because I recently did take an official Firefox poll involving AI features (and others).
I’m sorry.
It was certainly never my intention to impose myself like an official channel or something like that.
I still welcome a debate here.
I didn’t think you were! You’re fine lol. No apology necessary. ❤️
Firefox user here: Fuck no I don’t want a chatbot built into my browser.
You are definitely not alone!
I wish Mozilla would ask the end users what we want.
This is way a too revolutionary idea.
No shit
Its shocking how out of touch they are
Almost none of the people who are excited about AI know anything about computer science
I get this in penetration testing too.
The AI has never successfully hacked (technically it’s not hacking because it’s authorized but you get my point) any system of even moderate complexity. That doesn’t mean the system is secure it just means the AI isn’t good at it.
The main issue is it’s not good at “if X therefore Y kind of thinking”, It may very well successfully identify a system as having a particular type of architecture but then it doesn’t follow through with the connotations of that.
I may not have to write all my own reports anymore, but I’m still going to have to do the job.
