“Don’t worry, we’re going to open source Pocket and make it optional any day now.”
- Mozilla Corporation (note: not Foundation), 2017
Man, I hope this is not the new Pocket.
I will try it. People are too negative about mozilla. They are a hundred times better than Google and we need them to survive.
Yes we need them to survive,
yes they’re better than Google.But no we’re not being too negative/hard on them!
Lately Mozilla has been pulling a lot of anti-consumer yet pro shareholder shit.
AI is a perfect example of that,
unwanted by the majority of their community, yet still forced upon us by shareholders, for now through an optional addon, which appears to be a foot in the door, which can quickly grow into a baked in addon which ships with FireFox by default.Sources:
- Mozilla asked the community their opinion about AI, the general response was NO:
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/share-your-feedback-on-the-ai-services-experiment-in-nightly/td-p/60519 - Mozilla pushed a poll, tailored by shareholders in such a way that the results would appear that we still want AI:
https://mozillafoundation.tfaforms.net/100
Yet in the Lemmy comments about the poll,
again you can see that the general consensus is no:
https://lemmy.one/post/21332325
They blatantly ignore their community,
and for that we’re allowed to be angry with them.Yup.
DuckDuckGo’s search engine introduced AI assist and an AI chat as opt-out features, which it repeatedly re-enables at random, with no ability to disable it permanently, even though we’ve been able for years to set a bookmarklet to make all our other DDG settings persist.
Users are very unhappy, with requests for a way to permanently disable AI features ignored, receiving only patronising responses from DDG.
No matter, DDG’s utility for searching has deteriorated these past years so severely, even relative to the deterioration we’ve seen with many other options, that I wonder will it survive.
It is always unfortunate when a recommended privacy tool shifts away from privacy, but several doing so all at once is alarming.
You may self-host SearxNG (via Docker) and avoid direct interaction with search engines - be it google, bing, Brave or DDG.
SearxNG will act as a privacy front-end for you.
Have tried out SearxNG without self-hosting, via different instances, but had to abandon it as it is way, way beyond my mental capabilities to get it to work.
I doubt I could manage to self-host, having looked into Docker for some other matter.
Using Mojeek currently, which isn’t great but not too terrible.
You can send us in results via the submit feedback button or contact page when they’re not-so good, if you’d like to help
- Mozilla asked the community their opinion about AI, the general response was NO:
I appreciate the option to not install it.
Now if only Mozilla could migrate their built-in AI stuff to this optional extension so it doesn’t come pre-installed, that’d be great
The built-in AI staff,you referred to, is nothing but an accelerator to integrate with 3rd-party or self-hosted LLMs. It’s quite similar to choosing a search engine in settings. This feature itself is lightweight and can be disabled in settings if not required.
The built-in AI staff [sic]… is… an accelerator to integrate with 3rd-party or self-hosted LLMs.
Users are only shown Big Tech “3rd-party” options. Mozilla made this choice intentionally.
Since Mozilla is clearly capable of developing an add-on that is not forcefully installed on user’s devices, they should remove the built-in thing that endorses the highly unethical chatbots run by Google, OpenAI, etc.
Users are only shown Big Tech “3rd-party” options. Mozilla made this choice intentionally.
Well, how many users really have LLM local-hosted?
So we agree Mozilla only chose to promote Big Tech options.
- no account or login required.
- it’s an addon (and one you have to go get), not baked-in.
- limited to queries about content you’re currently looking at.
(it’s not a general ‘search’ or queries engine) - llm is hosted by mozilla, not a third party.
- session histories are not retained or shared, not even with mistral (it’s their model).
- user interactions are not used to train.
Thanks for the summary. So it still sends the data to a server, even if it’s Mozillas. Then I still can’t use it for work, because the data is private and they wouldn’t appreciate me sending their data toozilla.
Technically it’s a server operated by Google, leased by Mozilla. Mistral 7b could technically work locally, if Mozilla cared about doing such a thing.
I guess you can basically use the built-in AI chatbot functionality Mozilla rushed out the door, enable a secret setting, and use Mistral locally, but what a missed opportunity from the Privacy Browser Company
Firefox, tell your creepy little friend he can get the fuck off my property!
It’s an add-on, not something baked-in the browser. It’s not on your property at the first place, unless you choose to install it 🙂
For now, but one day Firefox will try sneak him into my house and hide him in a cupboard untill squatters rights kick in.
