TL;DR: Mozilla is killing localization on Support Mozilla, overwriting articles written by humans with machine generated translations. Although Mozilla knows that their AI doesn’t localize or adhere to style guides, Mozilla is going live with it anyway. I thank locale leaders and localizers for their tireless efforts. Locale leaders seem to be obviated by AI, and Mozilla has nothing to say about it.
There’s AI in Firefox? I’m running it as new as I can in Arch and have never seen a hint of it.
They’ve also put it into the right click menu. And I think they integrated into the “click and hold link preview” feature they just added. And, annoyingly, with all this added AI, they made no provisions for locally hosted AI.
They also added AI translation in addition to their old translation system for webpages. I think the old one just used Google Translate, so the AI translation is a privacy win because it is done locally, but I may be wrong on how it used to work.
You actually can set up the sidebar to use a local LLM. In about:config the key is something like “browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost”
I have it setup to use my local Ollama instance and it works great.
Unfortunately, I don’t see a way to specify an alternate external server, which would be nice.
Thanks for the tip of checking about:config. You can specify an external server, it is also in the about:config. browser.ml.chat.provider. I’m not sure it’s a feature I will ever use, but I tested it with my local Open WebUI and it seemed to work.
How nice of them to have easy options for paid third party services, and hide the local options under about:config where I’d have no idea it even exists without a kind stranger letting me know.
Sidebar on the left has one of those star icons that opens an AI chatbot, or you can hit ctrl + alt + x
They keep mentioning AI features, but I haven’t really seen anything annoying yet.
Oh ok. I rarely use any browser features beyond bookmarks. Thats pretty much all I need from a browser. So I don’t explore the side bars and stuff.