@kboyd @dveditz @chutten
Hey, look, I get it. I myself am very solidly in the contra-GenAI camp. I blogged about it, I tooted about it - some of my rants stuck on rank 1 of HN for a long time. I run public/non-profit infrastructure and have directly suffered from wild GenAI crawlers. I'd happily state that I think that GenAI is one of the worst things that happened to the open internet. We're on the same boat in that regard.
But that doesn't mean Mozilla is somehow wrong about adding some integrations. Reality is not that simple.
I read quite a few of the posts on the r/Firefox subreddit, and one of my favorite things is to look at all the "Mozilla should just do X" posts. Doing that is kinda entertaining, because you get an endless list of "suggestions", a lot of which actively contradict each other or are even totally mutually exclusive. Driving products like Firefox is messy.
Let's, for the sake of the argument, assume that every single Monthly Active User on Mastodon (722k at the moment according to the server list) is an active Firefox user and has the same opinion ("Firefox should not contain anything related to GenAI"), telling as much in a survey.
You'd now have 0.722 million users saying "no". Firefox has, at the moment, 154.4 million MAU. What that means is that 0.47% of all Firefox users have voted "no". In reality, I'd be even less, because a) not every Mastodon user is using Firefox, and b) not every Mastodon user is actually against GenAI - there are quite a few GenAI users on here.
How would you argue that the responses from those 0.47% of users is somehow representative for not only the current users, but also potential future users, too? You could argue that Mastodon users are all nerds and they probably know best, but we know that's not true because a lot of Mastodon users make absolutely bonkers decisions like toggling privacy.resistFingerprinting against all advice and then yelling at Mozilla because half of the web is broken for them.
Sometimes, especially when talking about adding features, it makes sense to do it, because that means you avoid the risk of users using another product because they're missing it. And sometimes, it might even make sense to cater to a minority. Mozilla is doing that quite a lot, actually, and the two most recent examples are Tab Groups and the new Profile Manager. The vast majority of users only ever have single-digit tab counters, and the vast majority of users will never have a second profile (or just use --profile on the CLI because we're nerds). But it still does make sense to have those features. I'm somewhat confident you'd not call those features a waste of effort, despite both of them taking orders of magnitude more effort and more technical complexity.
A lot of people, like it or not, are using GenAI, and a lot of people are also using the browsers made by those GenAI companies. We don't know how many users, because these companies don't really publish numbers, and even if they did I probably wouldn't trust them, but they exist. I've seen multiple folks really enjoying the chat bot sidebar, for example, and they explicitly liked the way it's implemented where you can easily switch providers as opposed to having a big business deal with one provider and forcing every Firefox user to use that. That's very much "a Mozilla-like approach of doing things".
I'm confident that, whatever GenAI integrations happen, these integrations will not be forced upon people, and just like it is right now, it's trivial to just make them go away. You don't even need some secret about:config flags for that - the chatbot sidebar, for example, has the option to just make the button go away. I'm also confident that those integrations will have the absolute best possible privacy footprint. If that's not the case in the future, then sure, grab your pitchforks, and I'll even join you. But let's at least try to have a reasonable discussion.
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