I want AI in Firefox 👋 as long as it's opt-in. And this is good for normies, as they'll be flocking to Perplexity and other browsers that will be way more privacy invading and insecure.

If anything, my problem with Firefox is that I can't bring my own offline AI or my own API keys, and because it appears to be loading a website each time you open it, latency is high. That chat sidebar is half-baked. If people aren't using it much, it's no wonder.

I understand the reluctance, but I think that Mozilla appealing to tech luddism is a losing proposition. Firefox has been bleeding market share partly because, on the tech side, they've been too conservative, and normies simply don't care about all the reasons for which Firefox doesn't do what Chrome already does. When push comes to shove, people will pick the standard, and featureful solution that does what they want.

As a data point, the Brave browser passed 100 millions monthly active users, while Firefox is at 150 millions MAU and still hemorrhaging users. And I'm pretty sure that's Firefox's market share they grabbed, not Chrome's. Let that sink in, a Chrome fork, with minor customizations, ad-blocking, AI integration and freaking cryptocurrency baked in, is poised to be more popular than Firefox. And when you ask its users, most will just say “oh, I just don't enable the crypto crap”. Apparently the users of other browsers realize they can just not opt-into features they don't want.