Comment by sfink
This article is annoying. It's not wrong, but it also doesn't come across as terribly relevant without suggesting some vaguely plausible alternative. The closest it comes is that everyone should go back to using "regular" search engines that will return "regular" pages. and that if all the players (browser makers + search engines) did that then everything would be just fine.
That'd be great, if that pristine Web still existed to search and people were happy with today's results of searching it. But in the real world, the Web is a pile of auto-generated and auto-assembled fragments of slop, SEO-optimized to death, puddled atop and all around the surviving fragments of value. (The value is still there! I suspect the total value in the Web has never stopped increasing. Just like those monkeys are always typing out more and more Shakespeare.) Also in the real world, people are decisively choosing the AI-generated summaries and fevered imaginings. Not for everything, but web search -> URL -> page visit is becoming a declining percentage that won't always be able to support everything that it does today.
It's not that I particularly want AI in my browser. I would say that I emphatically don't, except that automatic translation is really nice, and Firefox's automatic names for tab groups are pretty cool, and I'm sure here and there people will come up with other pieces. I'm actually ok with AI that targets real needs, which is 0.01% of what people are pushing it for. But I also think that we're past the point where NOT having AI in the browser is a sustainable position. (In terms of number of users and therefore financially.)
Should Mozilla be head over heels in love with AI, as it appears to be now? I'd definitely prefer if it weren't. But telling Mozilla "don't do bad thing, it'll make you irrelevant and have no users" is fine and dandy but ultimately pointless unless you have an alternative that doesn't require the entire world to cooperate in turning back the clock.
(Disclosure: Mozilla pays me a salary to write bugs.)
(And working code! I write some of that too!)
(And no, I currently don't do anything that adds AI to the browser, nor can I think of anything I'd want to work on that would add any AI.)
I think the vast majority of attempts to shoehorn ai into the browser are deeply unimaginative and very much coming from a "who ordered that?" baseline. But I suspect we're going to converge on some specific use cases that everyone's going to want and it might just be important to be in the game now as we collectively figure out what they are.
Recently some Ycombinator funded project got highly upvoted on HN, a Chrome based extension that used LLM capabilities to effectively do grease monkey style scripting. Now that is interesting, and it's a specific application that's actually meaningful and it's not just another AI chat sidebar.
I think it's a matter of workshopping but I bet we're going to be discovering things users actually want that are not yet obvious to us. The example I keep thinking of is non-stupid agent tasking. I wouldn't mind an agent that browsed Amazon for Kindle unlimited hard sci-fi books with critical acclaim.