Mistral and Mozilla are bringing open, private and multilingual AI to your web browser: a partnership to bring privacy, control and choice to people using AI to browse online.

I don’t really mind AI features where it makes sense. That being said, as someone else commented, this should have been a plugin.

I’ll add on top of that: this should have been a plugin wholly developed by Mistral. Mozilla should stop spending time and money on side features and focus on the browser and its engine. It still is way slower than any chromium based browser, lacks features that have been standard on chromium for years (eg. HDR video playback) and it’s way less efficient on battery than the competition.

Complaining about Firefox doing this and groveling on “I’m good, I’m on <random fork>” is spitting upwards: even the most modified forks like Zen still rely on Mozilla’s aging engine.

Firefox actually picked up on good improvements at around the same they started with the AI stuff. Tab groups and vertical tabs were something people wanted forever and they implemented excellently. Firefox does have HDR.

I don’t know if firefox is slower than chromium in benchmarks or something but it’s certainly not noticeable to me in real usage.

By all means criticize AI features, but please don’t lie about everything else.

I am on the latest version of FF on Linux and I don’t have HDR working, not on YouTube, nor on standalone players like Jellyfin. Yes my display is HDR and Wayland+gnome is exposing HDR properly to games and Helium (chromium fork).

Since some govt and utilities sites only work on “chrome” (borked even with user agent switcher set to chrome+win on FF) I had to get this other browser, and the speed difference is noticeable on most sites, even tho theoretically FF should be faster since its stripping a lot of crap with uBlock Origin.

Tried flatpak’d Brave and also runs snappier than FF.