this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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[–] Carighan 38 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Why would I say no to them providing a sidebar option for that?

Tons of people love to engage with LLMs, would be utterly assinine of Mozilla to not do something this benign to make it easier to use stuff?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

They can make it into an extension then.

Like Container tabs, which, of all things, should be baked into the browser.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They can, but why? If I can be enabled/disabled, what's the harm? If I thought Firefox is nefarious it wouldn't use it at all, not just avoid their extensions. It's not like that's the only way they could have to spy of it was the goal.

This will be aimed for the average Joe that thinks it's "neat" edge has it and doesn't know about extensions.

Mullvad and Librewolf might have it disabled, it's an easy switch.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The harm is that it contributes to software bloat. I haven't met an "average user" that desperately wants AI in any product, at least the type of AI that these companies keep trying to shove down our throats.

The harm is that AI is still very new, with many of its use cases not panning out.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

So no harm, noted.

[–] Carighan 4 points 2 months ago

Container tabs are baked into the browser? 🤷

But one of the devs replied to the expansion thing in the feedback, and says it would not work well as an expansion. I dunno, can't judge that, never worked on the FF codebase before.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] Carighan 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Well they're adding more options for people, that's exactly what people always want them to spend their time on. More options and user choices, default off, seems they're doing it exactly what people always want them to do? 🤷

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That doesn't address the opportunity cost. Spending time on this means not spending time on something else. There are other optional things and user choices they could work on instead. This is always the case when doing anything, but AI is very far down the list of things I think are worth paying the costs for.

[–] Carighan 2 points 2 months ago

Well, I can't judge it for everyone personally of course. And I don't like AI conceptually. But fucking hell if not every single person is constantly interacting with the common chat LLMs. To the point where they actually use Edge because it has it fully integrated. So from a browser-maker perspective, I kinda get it. The users at large seem to have decided that constantly asking an LLM first is "the future", much as that sucks.

I still don't like it personally, but so long as it's default-off, eh, sure. Do it for all the people who care, which frankly seem to be the overwhelming majority most days.