Reply to Anil Dash, re: I know you don’t want them to want AI, but

I was flattered to get a reply from Anil Dash to my post about the backlash Mozilla faces for its plan to add AI to Firefox. I’ve read Anil for a long time and admire his work.

That said, I respectfully disagree with his arguments — here’s why.

I use generative AI tools daily, but not embedded in my web browser in a visible way like Mozilla’s proposed “Window AI.”

Pushing development in that direction can only produce something like OpenAI’s Atlas, which Anil himself rejects as a model to emulate:

We see with tools like ChatGPT’s Atlas that there are now aggressively anti-web browsers coming to market, and even a sophisticated user might not be able to realize how nefarious some of the tactics of these new apps can be.

Well‑intentioned as it may be, how does Mozilla expect to fit a square peg in a round hole?

There are sensible uses of AI in browsers. Mozilla already has a strong case: its local website‑translation system. It’s not as good as the top cloud alternatives, but it’s an aligned, privacy‑minded approach that fits Mozilla’s values.

All I could imagine based on Mozilla’s description of Window AI is an AI chatbot and/or an “agentic” browser:

It’s a new, intelligent and user-controlled space we’re building in Firefox that lets you chat with an AI assistant and get help while you browse, all on your terms.

That’s… disheartening.

Anil likened criticism of AI features in Firefox to the adoption of tabs in browsers. That feels strained to me — tabs keep the focus on web pages; generative AI and chatbots do not.

I’d offer a different analogy I think is closer: Mozilla’s stance on embedding AI in Firefox is like a hypothetical early‑2010s push to bake the era’s major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr) directly into the browser. Or, for that matter, any application other than reliably displaying and interacting with web pages and applications, which is what most people (everybody?) expect from a web browser.

At the end of his piece, Anil warns that some people “forgot Firefox exists,” and that concerns him most. It worries me too. Positioning Firefox as yet another competitor to ChatGPT or Gemini — and possibly a worse one — doesn’t seem like a promising path. The only browser left that doesn’t have an AI assistant nagging me every other minute? This I can see working.