TL;DR: Mozilla recently released AI controls for Firefox — a single control panel that lets people disable AI features in the browser or pick and choose which to leave on. On the surface, this sounds like a win for user choice in an era of AI-everything.
Look, AI is dumb, and probably not a good thing to integrate into a browser. But if it turns out to be an important thing in the future, then not integrating it right now would be worse than having it.
There’s a measurable fixed cost to adding AI features. There’s room for potentially infinite losses (i.e. entire loss of market share) if they don’t have AI features and need them. The calculus on this decision is pretty lopsided towards integrating AI, even if everyone thinks it’s likely to be unnecessary.
This is absurd.
This is like saying that if nazi propaganda becomes the main selling point of web browsers, then firefox should add it just to stay relevant.
The advantage of firefox is (was) that it takes a stance instead of blindly following market trends. Following AI, no matter how immoral and damaging it is, just to avoid a hypothetical loss, is absolute bullshit.
They are doing it because they lost the will to take a stance, and this is what is killing them. Straying away from the opensouce, privacy centric stance is costing them their user base, and people who weren’t wanting such a stance are not going to move away from their usual browser with AI and whatever.
It’s exactly the thing that leftist parties do when they try to appeal to the nazis, they just get buried in their own stupidity.
Why do you think firefox-based browsers are getting more and more popular? It’s because they bring back firefox where it should be, because no one with enough brain to want to use firefox, wants a firefox with data collection and AI slop.