this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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Firefox

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (5 children)

why, when it can actually be helpful? Using chatgpt for searches is already much faster than denying 10 cookie banners. Some more privacy focused AI would be great, if firefox does that.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Using chatgpt for searches

I cannot stress this enough: LLMs are not, have never been, and quite likely never will be search engines. You may as well ask your a auto-complete questions.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

But LLM can and do use search engines and create summary of the search with references to actual pages, where they found this information. ChatGPT saves tons of time by doing search for you. Want to double check? Go and click the reference. But so far it was very reliable in my experience.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

They are better than search engines. I can ask anything and get a good answer in a second, without having to search the web.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Thing is you don't know if the answer is good. The answer looks good, yes, but how could you tell if ChatGPT just pulled the thing you looked for out of it's digital behind?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Exactly, without knowing the source(s) you can’t determine the quality of the answer. Although in saying that, I imagine people who use ChatGPT as a search engine might also not be super critical of search results.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

This is a dangerous attitude. You're blindly trusting everything the LLM says. You will be susceptible to misinformation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I mainly use it for finding tech related things, like helping with code and such.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I figured, but this thread wasn't specifically about helping with code. It was about replacing search engines. Common uses of search engines include finding information about ongoing events, e.g. the COVID pandemic or an upcoming election. Your comment implied that you thought this information is better obtained from ChatGPT than from Google.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Well I use Kagi but sure, for ongoing events a search engine is the only way currently since chat gpt won't have the latest events. :)

I expect that to change though, and we will all use chat bots instead of search engines in the future.

[–] TropicalDingdong 11 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You miss the point. This takes away from them actually building and maintaining a browser. If they want to do this as a plug in or something, that's fine. I do not want it and am not interested in anything AI related being built into the browser. Its that toxic, VC mindset around everything having to be everything and following the hype of the moment. Its dumb and the announcement was a redflag warning.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Why should it be relegated to a plug-in? It is a feature everyone would find useful because no-one speaks every language. Also, since Chrome has this feature, new users would expect to have it work without having to research which plug-in to use.

You might not want to use it, but some people don't use Firefox bookmarks and you don't hear them demanding that bookmarks be moved to a plug-in. It's been a very long time since a browser was solely an HTML renderer, and while people were also against CSS and scripting at first, we've moved on.

"AI" has been used for many things for many years. The fact that the news is full of machine learning and generative AI doesn't mean that it's sensible to condemn anything using it.

[–] TropicalDingdong 2 points 7 months ago

“AI” has been used for many things for many years. The fact that the news is full of machine learning and generative AI doesn’t mean that it’s sensible to condemn anything using it.

Maybe you should move onto Edge. I hear they are big on AI in the browser.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I disable searching in the browser. When I wish to search, I go to a specific search engine web page.
When users have to work to DISABLE stuff in a browser, it reduces the trust people have in the browser. Consider why people have been switching back to Firefox, and now you are making the same mistakes that drove people away fro their former browsers.

KEEP IT SIMPLE AND TRUSTWORTHY.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Are you saying you've disabled searching from the address bar and instead load up whatever.com and then type your search into there? I don't understand what you think you're gaining by enforcing this extra step.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

@[email protected] @[email protected] Control? Who decides if something is a search term instead of a website?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

You have other options. You can use the separate search box. You can use smart keywords to only trigger searches when you want.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I have some genuine hope for this plus the semantic web. Have quick general answers be answered by the LLM, and use it to also generate vector (or a knowledge graph from wikidata) results of the other content on the internet so that if want to dig deeper it can ingest a specific sources data (or route to an models with that info already embedded) or just return it to you for your personal reading.

Pretty exciting tbh, and hopefully all open source, open data, on local or distributed systems!

At least all the pieces are moving to make that possible.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Nope, I'm with Tropical here
Long time Firefox user, but if they start shoving AI stuff into it, I'm out
Servo is looking kinda fine there, might as well make my own browser

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I mean Servo was what Firefox was working on, and imagine still the roadmap to reintegrate into Firefox in the future.