In fairness I’ve seen humans make that mistake. We had a complete outage in the testing of a product once and a couple of tests were still green. Turns it they tested nothing and never had.
Those slops already existed, but AI scales them by an order of magnitude.
I guess the same can be said of any technology, but AI is just a more powerful tool overall. Using languages as an example - lets say duck typing allowed a 10% productivity boost, but also introduced 5% more mistakes/problems. AI (claims to) allow a 10x productivity boost, but also ~10x mistakes/problems.
Same here. I find it useful, and it doesn't feel like it took several engineering years to build, diluting Mozilla's focus from "just building a browser".
Actually, whenever I hear people argue that that's all Mozilla should ever be doing, I wonder if they really mean a HTML and Javascript engine? While that's important, browsers are more than that; the chrome matters too.
I think a lot of folks feel that Firefox has outstanding features and issues that prevent more widespread adoption and current user happiness, as opposed to spending effort on AI features.
The average person doesn't care about an AI pane and that won't cause them to change browsers. Mozilla adding tab group support actively got non-tech people I know to switch, in addition to uBlock Origin and generally better privacy.
> The average person doesn't care about an AI pane and that won't cause them to change browsers.
Are you sure? "Summarize this website" seems pretty useful to the average person. It's the type of thing that will probably only make very few people switch to the only browser that supports it, but quite a few more would switch away from the only one that does not supprt it.
> Mozilla adding tab group support actively got non-tech people I know to switch [...]
And tab group autosuggestions and auto-naming are powered by on-device LLMs, as far as I remember. I personally don't use tab groups, but having them automatically arranged seems pretty useful.
Nobody would have an issue with those features being add-ons. In fact the Pocket integration is actually an add-on, silently downloaded on first run based on some online check.
If they’re gonna be bundling add-ons, I’d rather have them bundle something universally useful like uBlock Origin, but obviously they won’t do that because publishing a browser with an actually unique and useful selling point is not in their best interests.
I recall the original interface of Firefox was abandoned in favor of copying Chrome's with the rationale being that "it could be implemented as a third-party add-on" or some such.
"Why does the default interface get relegated to an extension when things like pocket and hello and AI chat are opt-out?" I ask, rhetorically.
But that's it's thing. C++ with improved syntax (think Kotlin for C++) isn't really enough to gain popularity. It's like how Dvorak is sorta better than qwerty, but it doesn't offer anything new, and it isn't so much better it justifies migrating.
That does sounds like a dream but alas it is not all that “good”. I for one would be first in line though if Microsoft ever made a true bare bones dev focused shell or something or other; maybe a complete rethink on compute.
Of course, it's still a piece of shit Windows. But I have basically copied the list from multiple third party sources, so, what got listed are actual features of the LTSC. And I think it's better that what's achievable with debloating scripts, especially if one isn't running them over and over again.
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