{"id":60969,"date":"2025-11-20T12:05:56","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T15:05:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/?p=60969"},"modified":"2025-11-20T12:05:56","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T15:05:56","slug":"reply-anil-dash-firefox-mozilla-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/en\/reply-anil-dash-firefox-mozilla-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Reply to Anil Dash, re: I know you don&#8217;t want them to want AI, but"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was flattered to get <a href=\"https:\/\/www.anildash.com\/2025\/11\/14\/wanting-not-to-want-ai\/\">a reply from Anil Dash<\/a> to my post about <a href=\"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/en\/mozilla-firefox-window-ai\">the backlash Mozilla faces<\/a> for its plan to add AI to Firefox. I\u2019ve read Anil for a long time and admire his work.<\/p>\n<p>That said, I respectfully disagree with his arguments \u2014 here\u2019s why.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->I use generative AI tools daily, but not embedded in my web browser in a visible way like Mozilla\u2019s proposed \u201cWindow AI.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Pushing development in that direction can only produce something like OpenAI\u2019s Atlas, which Anil himself rejects as a model to emulate:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>We see with tools like ChatGPT\u2019s 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Well\u2011intentioned as it may be, how does Mozilla expect to fit a square peg in a round hole?<\/p>\n<p>There are sensible uses of AI in browsers. Mozilla already has a strong case: <a href=\"https:\/\/support.mozilla.org\/en-US\/kb\/website-translation\">its local website\u2011translation system<\/a>. It\u2019s not as good as the top cloud alternatives, but it\u2019s an aligned, privacy\u2011minded approach that fits Mozilla\u2019s values.<\/p>\n<p>All I could imagine based on <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/en\/firefox\/ai-window\/\">Mozilla&#8217;s description<\/a> of Window AI is an AI chatbot and\/or an \u201cagentic\u201d browser:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It\u2019s a new, intelligent and user-controlled space we\u2019re building in Firefox that lets you chat with an AI assistant and get help while you browse, all on your terms.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That&#8217;s\u2026 disheartening.<\/p>\n<p>Anil likened criticism of AI features in Firefox to the adoption of tabs in browsers. That feels strained to me \u2014 tabs keep the focus on web pages; generative AI and chatbots do not.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019d offer a different analogy I think is closer: Mozilla\u2019s stance on embedding AI in Firefox is like a hypothetical early\u20112010s push to bake the era\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>At the end of his piece, Anil warns that some people \u201cforgot Firefox exists,\u201d and that concerns him most. It worries me too. Positioning Firefox as yet another competitor to ChatGPT or Gemini \u2014 and possibly a worse one \u2014 doesn\u2019t seem like a promising path. The only browser left that doesn&#8217;t have an AI assistant nagging me every other minute? This I can see working.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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\u2019ve read Anil for a long time and admire his work. That said, I respectfully disagree with his arguments \u2014 here\u2019s why.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_locale":"en_US","_original_post":""},"categories":[1575],"tags":[1833,2104,2102,1913],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60969"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60969"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60969\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60977,"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60969\/revisions\/60977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}