This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference, yet for inexplicable reasons Mozilla wants to normalize uploading your entire private browsing history to a cloud.
These (Mistral's and Mozilla's) marketing pages aren't candid enough to clearly explain the difference between local and cloud inference, and that they're asking you to consent to enabling the latter. I'd call that the bare minimum of ethics. If you're in a position of authority over your less technical users, you are ethically obligated to give them the full picture of what are you doing and why they should consent.
(Aside to any Mozilla people who might be reading HN, your page here[0] has an oversight, it advertises this model as "Mistral Small 4" but the hyperlink is to OpenAI's model card for gpt-oss-120b).
I am not trying to defend Mozilla doing this, and I don't support sending data to cloud based services like this in a way that users won't understand.
But I also think that the state of the art in small LLM and user device capabilities aren't there yet to put a "good enough to be actually useful" local-only LLM as a prepackaged thing in a mass market distributed browser.
You don't want a browser that takes 10GB of extra RAM (on top of the memory hog that is having just 3 or 4 complex tabs open on its own already) and pegs your CPU at 99% usage for minutes at a time. And not in an era when mass market consumer laptops are still commonly 8GB or 16GB of total system RAM. Many of those with integrated-into-CPU onboard graphics (eg: not a gaming laptop with a discrete GPU on the PCI-E bus).
It'll be a catastrophe for laptop battery life, among other resource use problems. And an LLM that fits in under 8 to 10GB of RAM for CPU-only inference is not going to be nearly as capable as an off-device inference system.
I wish they had just done this with a very clear up front opt in (not enabled by default) thing that explains what Mistral is, that it's not some big American cloud company but a relatively small startup in France, and that your prompts/LLM interactions will go to their servers. And some documentation on how it will be handled/stored in a supposedly trustworthy manner.
>But I also think that the state of the art in small LLM and user device capabilities aren't there yet to put a "good enough to be actually useful" local-only LLM
so then don't add it in as highly advertised feature until it is. doing things right and living up to your core values is a lot to expect from businesses these days but, at minimum, a non-profit foundation should be able to live up to these goals, yes?
Well, it depends on the task, doesn't it? "running shoes I looked at last week" / "Here's what I found in your browsing history:" doesn't need a 119 billion parameter frontier model; it's a RAG problem for the 0.6 B embedding models. That's an example Mozilla offers. Presumably to explain to their users why it's essential they hand over their last week's browsing history for this convenience (but it isn't! Hardly for that!)
I feel it's wrong to tell users that it's important and normal to relinquish all control of their—extremely personal—life history, in bulk, in plaintext, to strangers.
I agree wholeheartedly that remote server inference is super useful, and that local inference falls far short on many tasks. (I have no objection at all to Mozilla providing a cloud inference feature).
What I don't buy is that we must ask users to redraw their personal boundaries so that their most intimate life details, and remote frontier-model inference, overlap. They do not need to overlap.
You can accomplish a lot with private local inference with the smallest of models; and you can accomplish a lot on remote servers which aren't privy to everything. If some convenience is lost by not combining the two, well, so be it. I'm sure most people would agree, if all of this was laid out plainly.
I'm of the opinion that local inference should be done to the greatest extent that is realistically possible, at the earlier time that the hardware/average user platform is capable of doing so. I personally spend a fair bit on kWh extra in my home electrical bill monthly for having a good sized chunk of local inference ability in my house, but that's not a common thing yet.
If mozilla is doing things to send users down the path of doing this externally, they need to be much more upfront and transparent with the users about where their data is going, and not bury it in some terms/conditions that only nerds will hunt for.
I'm worried that the middle could fall out of the computing market across the board. If you can afford to keep up with the upgrade treadmill, you'll get private, local inference capabilities. If you can't afford to stay on the treadmill, you'll be stuck with whatever cloudshit malware Silicon Valley wants to foist on you.
I acknowledge that this is already the case, to some extent. The cheapest laptops at Best Buy are crammed with the most preinstalled malware. That's been the case for, what, 25 years? But you've always been able to wipe that cheap laptop and make it into a much more capable, trustworthy machine.
Well, assuming LLMs do become a pervasive part of the computing experience, what happens to the cheap laptops? Do all computers get more expensive to accommodate local inference? Does the rift between the everyday user's experience and the savvy user's experience grow even wider than it already is? Neither outcome seems good for the average joe who just needs to check his email.
The only people having an expectation of translations being done locally is exactly the nerds that keep whining that it's not using a local model. Every single normal person, when presented with a "translate" button either know it's going online, or don't care about it.
Begging the purists to run away from Firefox at this point so they can stop wasting everyone's time. Your demands for examplarity and whining about money not going ONLY to firefox and jerking yourselves on Servo was not enough, now you want to restrict the browser to owners of an RTX5080 if they want to use it?
It is so ironic that "normal people don't care about privacy, just you nerds" is an HN meme. Everybody I know cares, often in an extreme way, and I barely hang out with technical people in real life. I've met people so irrational and nontechnical about modern invasions of privacy that they think that it is being driven by demons.
The reason this is a meme on HN is because tons of HN posters are people who spend a lot of effort trying to invade people's privacy and to come up with new ways of concealing that fact.
Virtually every sleazebag trying to hide things in ToSes, updates, and "telemetry" has been an HN poster. And they're pretending that they speak for normal people, because they are scumbags, think normal people are animals that will do anything that they can get away with and don't care about any boundary, and that therefore 1) they themselves are normal, and 2) normal people deserve whatever happens to them.
This is what comes from making know-nothing Libertarianism/Objectivism a mainstream ideology, ironically at the same moment that Alan Greenspan, a direct Rand acolyte, was admitting that it had failed while the world economy was sliding into the toilet. Intellectual Libertarianism/Objectivism had failed, but the dumb kind had yet to properly rise. I don't know anything except you nerds are worried about nothing, I'm going to do it because I can and nobody is going to tell me what to do, nobody normal cares about this, and if they do let them try and stop me, why do you care anyway...
Please just do it and stop talking, you don't have anything to say.
Have you tried Ling-3.0-tiny? It runs fine on CPU-- on a 14700KF gets 40tg/s and 250pp/s and on a ordinary gpu (RTX 4070) does over 200tg/s with no MTP and 7185pp/s.
It's certainly not as capable as something that needs a high memory gpu for quick performance, but I was quite impressed with it for what it is.
(and fwiw, I had it translate your last paragraph to German, then used google translate back to english: "I wish they had handled this clearly and transparently via an opt-in mechanism—not enabled by default—that explains what Mistral is (not a major American cloud company, but a relatively small French startup) and that your prompts and LLM activities are sent to their servers. I also wish there were documentation explaining how the data is handled and stored in a way that inspires trust.").
How much RAM does it take up in total? I'll have to give that a try on one of my test systems. Looking at a somewhat randomly chose GGUF quantization of it, looks like just under 5GB on disk in Q4, so RAM usage somewhere around 5-6GB?
The privacy policy for Smart Window[1] indicates that prompts are not only sent to an LLM provider (Mistral in this case), but also to Mozilla servers first.
> The assistant sends the full prompt (including your query, any relevant Memories, and any additional relevant browsing context) to a Mozilla server.
>
> Upon receipt, Mozilla forwards the request to a third-party large language model (LLM) on your behalf. The LLM receives the request from Mozilla, not directly from you, and sees a Mozilla IP address rather than your own. The request includes only the information needed to generate a response or perform the requested action.
Where they do use an on-device model is for the initial query classification:
> When you submit a query in the Smart Bar, the assistant uses a local (on-device) intent classification model to determine whether the query is best addressed by a chat or a search.
> Smart Window infers information about you based on your interactions with the assistant and your Firefox browsing activity, including websites you have visited. This may include activity outside of Smart Window (such as in classic windows)...
Privacy-minded users who want to try this feature would need to create a totally separate browser profile to avoid data leaks.
This is complete bullshit. I am sick of fucking Mozilla doing this. I am writing this from Firefox and always test products to make sure they work, but fuck it is getting hard and harder to justify it.
To people who work at Mozilla and are pushing these. FUCK YOU.
Some years ago Firefox was the go to browser if you wanted to have "some" privacy in your browsing (together with uBlock origin). With news like this I m really wondering if my views are outdated and I need to to some good researching on maintaining some privacy in what I m browsing.
Mozilla has been in a bit of a recursive feedback loop death spiral for years now of: Browser loses market share -> try some weird thing -> very few people like or use it -> browser loses market share -> management says "oh shit we're losing market share we better try some weird thing"
I say this as a person that uses firefox with ublock origin 99.5% of the time. It's better in my opinion than Chrome. I can at least easily turn off the enabled by default crap features. Like the advertising and sponsored news links on the default new tab page.
I very much think it did, because FF once was recommended by us nerds, we installed it for people and praised it. And that made an impact outside of our circles.
Now I still occasionaly install it along with ublock origin because there is no alternative, but I don't praise it anymore (or bother to install it for someone in the first place) - but rather bitch about how they also sneak in advertisement and spyware.
I think it didn't help. Constantly adding or changing features makes it less consistent and predictable. For example several family members were confused by what is "pocket".
They have twice (that I'm aware of) tried rebranding as an advertising company. They are funded by Google (though not _necessarily_ influenced by them). There was an article in LWN by them about (in part) how they can't get enough information about users of Thunderbird so they were suggesting telemetry should be enabled by default and opt out instead of opt in because most people won't opt out.
I think they get a lot of credit because they aren't Google and not enough push back
It's more un-fathomable if you recall Mozilla were the people who *pioneered* local browser ML as a privacy feature. Back in 2022—when Chrome was doing language translation by uploading to Google servers, and Mozilla introduced the (actually innovative!) idea of baking small ML models into the browser,
And look: they were 100% cognizant, then, of how vital local processing is to privacy:
> "...called Project Bergamot. The ultimate goal of this consortium was to build a set of neural machine translation tools that would enable Mozilla to develop a website translation add-on that operates locally, i.e. the engines, language models and in-page translation algorithms would need to reside and be executed entirely in the user’s computer, so none of the data would be sent to the cloud, making it entirely private."
Even more un-fathomable, Mozilla's CTO has been writing a substack with the underlying theme of "if the AI isn't running on your hardware, you don't own it" https://newsletter.ownersnotrenters.com/
> This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference, yet for inexplicable reasons Mozilla wants to normalize uploading your entire private browsing history to a cloud.
I certainly agree that this option would be nice to have, but running firefox without an ad blocker on the modern web will ALREADY spin up my fans just rendering all the garbage, and I have a decent laptop.
You can't expect the median Firefox-running device to be able to run a capable enough local model effectively.
Indeed. Realistically a 'capable' small local LLM, even one that's definitely not as good as externally hosted ones will require a single 16GB GPU and access to basically all of the RAM on the GPU. That's not something people running Firefox on a $500 laptop with 8 or 16GB of total system RAM and a CPU-integrated basic graphics system have to spare.
> This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference,
How small is this 'small model' inference?
Browsers especially are expected to operate on a very wide number of devices. It makes perfect sense to me to start off with a cloud driven approach and later allow people to configure it to run locally if they have the hardware to do so. Anyone with the hardware to do so is already signaling that they'd have the technical interest to make that change while having the default 'works for everyone' mode be one that doesn't require a powerful local device.
I say this as someone using a 6 year old computer and only upgraded to 8GB of ram when the latest WoW expansion was released.
This is ridiculous. Not only does Mozilla support BYOM with Smart Window, but do we seriously expect your average user to be able to locally run it with ease?
Imagine for a moment the complaints that would arise the very next day because their browser is now revving up their laptop fans and hoarding precious RAM.
Local models aren't yet light enough to handle the required processing at the lowest end, so Mozilla chose the most responsible stewards they could find. There is no news here.
You can disable this in about:config by modifying extensions.webextensions.restrictedDomains. It's there to help prevent malicious extensions from hijacking official browser support. I reckon many people here don't need it.
You are choosing a really bad example to make your point. Not letting extensions operate on the actual site where you install the extensions isn't being "comically evil" by any means.
zdr is good, really confidential inference with attestation would be better. the same as a confidential vm TEE which confirms the integrity and privacy.
there are good providers available, i think it should become the standard.
I don't think it is comparable. Nowhere in the news they say it is offline but IMO Gemini Nano is offline (?)
I'm not a Google fan but I never understood the outrage as it is a local model ... sure, you have to trust them, but if you use their browser you already do.
It's interesting to see Firefox attempt to create slightly more privacy-focused cloud inference infra (assuming you can trust that they adhere to their own policies and don't have bugs, and that their partners adhere to their contractual obligations and don't have bugs). Unfortunately that's still a lot of trust that's pretty much impossible for the end-user to verify, but at least it's something? Arguably it's better than the alternative of directly trusting AI companies that have shown absolutely no regard for other laws like copyright, but the marketing of this as ultra-private still leaves a bad taste. I wish this announcement clarified the cloud aspects directly instead of needing to browse through two layers of links to find how it actually works on a privacy notice.
Would be very cool if you could type a long query and the model would just build an advanced google search query using what you typed. You could even ship a tiny model in the browser itself that does that.
Something like: "blog posts which talk about using sending emails to yourself as a notes taking mechanism".
The output could look like: "note taking" OR "notes" ("emailing yourself" OR "email to myself" OR "email yourself") (inurl:blog OR inurl:posts OR site:medium.com OR site:substack.com)
I think that's roughly what duck.ai is doing? If I type that in there I see it generating some search queries and then generating a list of links based on the different result pages.
Yes, and IME it also is true that "online search" means in fact google.com. And there's no distinction for search results and reading the google AI summary.
These are two companies that seem to be slipping in ethics recently. I'd prefer this over a chrome and openai offering, but I no longer trust these two to necessarily do the right thing regarding privacy
This sounds great, will have to try it out. Interested in the business value they gain from this, as this appears to be free.
I guess for mistral it's great marketing material.
Edit: Quite interested in the differences of local optimizations... that does allow for specific sensorship, but alas that's already possible in a more direct, reliable way.
I think that beyond marketing this is also a way to collect "AI browsing" trajectories. Not an expert but I think this is the kind of great quality data that can be useful when training LLMs.
"...working together to bring Mistal’s scientific innovations to consumers around the world"
A quick proof-read wouldn't have gone amiss here.
I also fail to see how privacy is enhanced by sending private browsing data to a cloud service which then forwards it to an LLM, in addition to storing 'memories' and dredging through my browser history.
Not sure if it's a locally run model or in the cloud. If it's the former they don't explain the size on disk and more importantly on memory. I know that google is using local models on the pixel phones, so it's doable. If it's the later, the "Mozilla don't keep the data" is hypocritical and I'm perplexed by the cost associated.
In any case as a french, I prefer my personnal data be exploited by a french company :D
Edit: after reading the comments, it is not a local AI so "Mozilla don't keeep the data and don't train on them" is really hypocritical if they cannot confirm that it's the same on mistral side. And there is still the question of the cost.
Didn’t OpenAI tried to build even a new AI browser and failed? I honestly don’t need AI in my browser and would not let an agent to access my login credentials/cookies/saved payment methods for various sites.
It's pretty nice for tedious tasks. I tried to have it look through job listings based on my criteria. It burned through my 5h Claude quota, but what I got was pretty impressive.
I agree on the privacy concerns but this could be useful with a local model, I think.
For me it’s not only privacy, I just don’t trust an agent to use my credentials without doing any destructive task because unlike an MCP, I cannot enforce any permission model on the browser
For me the draw is that Waterfox has partnerships in order to provide funding so if/when Mozilla truly loses the thread (which some may argue they have) WF can keep going on its own, whereas the Librewolf devs have stated that if push comes to shove they can't maintain an entire browser themselves.
AI are excellent at ingesting tons of data and getting something relevant from what you asked.
I ask it about linux behavior and it will dig through hundreds of patches & mails and will return me informations sourced with links to the patches, mails containing it's affirmations.
I really do not get the obsession with translation, particularly bad translations and translating by default. Most people who browse websites in languages other than the official local one are fluent in that other language.
Google Chrome keeps insisting that Spanish is Galician. PowerPoint insists on changing the spell checker back to the wrong language and ignores setting the language for the whole presentation. On Linux, ChatGPT insists it must enable the spell checker in the local system language, so everything is always red.
Privacy aside, a lot of software seems to be built assuming people cannot be multilingual.
I don't know many people, but I do know someone that relies on machine translation to browse the English web. Remember "most" is not "all." The web should be accessible to every single person.
this is chatgpt, web gui from mistral built-in Firefox, not for tech savvy users. I think anyone that will complain about this knows very well that you can just give your harness control over firefox through puppeteer, which is much more powerful. could firefox itself become a harness and speak openai api responses? maybe yeah, but why?
Mozilla lost the tech race and with it a lot of users. Firing a lot of their talented developers didn't help. Now Mozilla is giving up the only reason why they kept a core audience of privacy focused users by sending our browsing data to third party servers for inference just at the time when small local models are getting good enough for many/most use cases like summarization or translation. Chrome provides an API for local LLMs. Apple is trying to run as much interference locally as possible. Mozilla is worse than that. Claiming private browsing while sending data to third parties.
I don't care what their data retention policies are, I don't want my data to be sent to others full stop.
Private means it's mine, it's under my control. Handing it to third parties is not private.
All previous similar issues got hand waved with "Mozilla has to make money somehow".
I am afraid one day remaining users will decide that Chromium based browsers provide a better experience in most use cases, and now have same privacy guarantees as Firefox. Looking at market share maybe that had already happened and pragmatism won over ideology, and we will all suffer the consequences of such monoculture.
I get asked about stuff like browsers all the time, part of the fun of being the token nerd in a small backward town.
From here on out, my response is going to be that both Chrome and Firefox are malware. But, if you're going to use one, go for chrome so your shit at least kind of works.
Mozilla, if you're reading this: Enough is enough. I've had it with these motherfucking clankers in your motherfucking browser!
Cloud inferrance is not private: These providers, even if they don't get hacked, have bribed employees, or outright lie, cannot and will not resist a subpoena or similar.
Mozilla is acting unethically by obfuscating what's on offer here and overstating the privacy and security properties that can be achieved.
It's doubly unfortunate because simple translations are completely reasonable to do with cpu inference.
These (Mistral's and Mozilla's) marketing pages aren't candid enough to clearly explain the difference between local and cloud inference, and that they're asking you to consent to enabling the latter. I'd call that the bare minimum of ethics. If you're in a position of authority over your less technical users, you are ethically obligated to give them the full picture of what are you doing and why they should consent.
(Aside to any Mozilla people who might be reading HN, your page here[0] has an oversight, it advertises this model as "Mistral Small 4" but the hyperlink is to OpenAI's model card for gpt-oss-120b).
[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/smart-window-models
But I also think that the state of the art in small LLM and user device capabilities aren't there yet to put a "good enough to be actually useful" local-only LLM as a prepackaged thing in a mass market distributed browser.
You don't want a browser that takes 10GB of extra RAM (on top of the memory hog that is having just 3 or 4 complex tabs open on its own already) and pegs your CPU at 99% usage for minutes at a time. And not in an era when mass market consumer laptops are still commonly 8GB or 16GB of total system RAM. Many of those with integrated-into-CPU onboard graphics (eg: not a gaming laptop with a discrete GPU on the PCI-E bus).
It'll be a catastrophe for laptop battery life, among other resource use problems. And an LLM that fits in under 8 to 10GB of RAM for CPU-only inference is not going to be nearly as capable as an off-device inference system.
I wish they had just done this with a very clear up front opt in (not enabled by default) thing that explains what Mistral is, that it's not some big American cloud company but a relatively small startup in France, and that your prompts/LLM interactions will go to their servers. And some documentation on how it will be handled/stored in a supposedly trustworthy manner.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in/overview?_gl=1...
so then don't add it in as highly advertised feature until it is. doing things right and living up to your core values is a lot to expect from businesses these days but, at minimum, a non-profit foundation should be able to live up to these goals, yes?
I feel it's wrong to tell users that it's important and normal to relinquish all control of their—extremely personal—life history, in bulk, in plaintext, to strangers.
I agree wholeheartedly that remote server inference is super useful, and that local inference falls far short on many tasks. (I have no objection at all to Mozilla providing a cloud inference feature).
What I don't buy is that we must ask users to redraw their personal boundaries so that their most intimate life details, and remote frontier-model inference, overlap. They do not need to overlap.
You can accomplish a lot with private local inference with the smallest of models; and you can accomplish a lot on remote servers which aren't privy to everything. If some convenience is lost by not combining the two, well, so be it. I'm sure most people would agree, if all of this was laid out plainly.
If mozilla is doing things to send users down the path of doing this externally, they need to be much more upfront and transparent with the users about where their data is going, and not bury it in some terms/conditions that only nerds will hunt for.
I acknowledge that this is already the case, to some extent. The cheapest laptops at Best Buy are crammed with the most preinstalled malware. That's been the case for, what, 25 years? But you've always been able to wipe that cheap laptop and make it into a much more capable, trustworthy machine.
Well, assuming LLMs do become a pervasive part of the computing experience, what happens to the cheap laptops? Do all computers get more expensive to accommodate local inference? Does the rift between the everyday user's experience and the savvy user's experience grow even wider than it already is? Neither outcome seems good for the average joe who just needs to check his email.
?:
>marketing pages aren't candid enough to clearly explain
Begging the purists to run away from Firefox at this point so they can stop wasting everyone's time. Your demands for examplarity and whining about money not going ONLY to firefox and jerking yourselves on Servo was not enough, now you want to restrict the browser to owners of an RTX5080 if they want to use it?
It is so ironic that "normal people don't care about privacy, just you nerds" is an HN meme. Everybody I know cares, often in an extreme way, and I barely hang out with technical people in real life. I've met people so irrational and nontechnical about modern invasions of privacy that they think that it is being driven by demons.
The reason this is a meme on HN is because tons of HN posters are people who spend a lot of effort trying to invade people's privacy and to come up with new ways of concealing that fact.
Virtually every sleazebag trying to hide things in ToSes, updates, and "telemetry" has been an HN poster. And they're pretending that they speak for normal people, because they are scumbags, think normal people are animals that will do anything that they can get away with and don't care about any boundary, and that therefore 1) they themselves are normal, and 2) normal people deserve whatever happens to them.
This is what comes from making know-nothing Libertarianism/Objectivism a mainstream ideology, ironically at the same moment that Alan Greenspan, a direct Rand acolyte, was admitting that it had failed while the world economy was sliding into the toilet. Intellectual Libertarianism/Objectivism had failed, but the dumb kind had yet to properly rise. I don't know anything except you nerds are worried about nothing, I'm going to do it because I can and nobody is going to tell me what to do, nobody normal cares about this, and if they do let them try and stop me, why do you care anyway...
Please just do it and stop talking, you don't have anything to say.
It's certainly not as capable as something that needs a high memory gpu for quick performance, but I was quite impressed with it for what it is.
(and fwiw, I had it translate your last paragraph to German, then used google translate back to english: "I wish they had handled this clearly and transparently via an opt-in mechanism—not enabled by default—that explains what Mistral is (not a major American cloud company, but a relatively small French startup) and that your prompts and LLM activities are sent to their servers. I also wish there were documentation explaining how the data is handled and stored in a way that inspires trust.").
https://huggingface.co/bartowski/Ling-3.0-tiny-GGUF
To people who work at Mozilla and are pushing these. FUCK YOU.
I say this as a person that uses firefox with ublock origin 99.5% of the time. It's better in my opinion than Chrome. I can at least easily turn off the enabled by default crap features. Like the advertising and sponsored news links on the default new tab page.
I very much doubt trying weird things meaningfully changed their market share (aside from UI redesigns)
Now I still occasionaly install it along with ublock origin because there is no alternative, but I don't praise it anymore (or bother to install it for someone in the first place) - but rather bitch about how they also sneak in advertisement and spyware.
I think they get a lot of credit because they aren't Google and not enough push back
have you tried not using smart window (like you're currently doing)?
In fact, If I were asked to explain the opposite of private, I might give this kind of design as an example.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33792447 ("Firefox Translations: Translate websites in your browser without using the cloud (addons.mozilla.org)")
And look: they were 100% cognizant, then, of how vital local processing is to privacy:
> "...called Project Bergamot. The ultimate goal of this consortium was to build a set of neural machine translation tools that would enable Mozilla to develop a website translation add-on that operates locally, i.e. the engines, language models and in-page translation algorithms would need to reside and be executed entirely in the user’s computer, so none of the data would be sent to the cloud, making it entirely private."
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/local-translation-add-on... ("Mozilla releases local machine translation tools as part of Project Bergamot")
They're still 100% cognizant! And yet.
I certainly agree that this option would be nice to have, but running firefox without an ad blocker on the modern web will ALREADY spin up my fans just rendering all the garbage, and I have a decent laptop.
You can't expect the median Firefox-running device to be able to run a capable enough local model effectively.
Is it really ? LLM take lot of ram and drain battery. People run Firefox on low end computer.
How small is this 'small model' inference?
Browsers especially are expected to operate on a very wide number of devices. It makes perfect sense to me to start off with a cloud driven approach and later allow people to configure it to run locally if they have the hardware to do so. Anyone with the hardware to do so is already signaling that they'd have the technical interest to make that change while having the default 'works for everyone' mode be one that doesn't require a powerful local device.
I say this as someone using a 6 year old computer and only upgraded to 8GB of ram when the latest WoW expansion was released.
Imagine for a moment the complaints that would arise the very next day because their browser is now revving up their laptop fans and hoarding precious RAM.
Local models aren't yet light enough to handle the required processing at the lowest end, so Mozilla chose the most responsible stewards they could find. There is no news here.
JFC, Mozilla is just comically evil at this point.
there are good providers available, i think it should become the standard.
two high quality companies: near.ai tinfoil.sh
Also supports Lemonade and Ollama, which are.
Hey at least "some" news/things from Mistral. Seems like ages ago when they launched vibe-code.
> Powers context-aware search, page summaries, and memory retrieval across browser tabs.
> Live in France and North America, with launches in the UK and Germany planned for later this year.
> Built on a zero data retention policy; conversations are not saved on Mozilla’s servers by default.
> Models are fine-tuned on regional languages, dialects, and local nuances to provide native-feeling responses.
> Extends Mistral’s open-weight AI models directly to consumer web browsing alongside its enterprise offerings.
I'm not a Google fan but I never understood the outrage as it is a local model ... sure, you have to trust them, but if you use their browser you already do.
Reading HN, I 100% understood “private” to be marketing copy for “local inference”.
How else could the information be kept private?
I begrudgingly suppose that there is precedent for the usage, like Apple’s Private Relay, but I really don’t think they are comparable.
I don't read this as offline ...
Pretty ironic then that here, Mozilla is specifically labeling their "we send it all to the cloud" service as "private."
Reading this as “Private Cloud Compute“ (PCC)
(Not iCloud Private Relay, the VPN)
Something like: "blog posts which talk about using sending emails to yourself as a notes taking mechanism".
The output could look like: "note taking" OR "notes" ("emailing yourself" OR "email to myself" OR "email yourself") (inurl:blog OR inurl:posts OR site:medium.com OR site:substack.com)
The idea is obviously applicable to other search engines.
What makes you say that?
I guess for mistral it's great marketing material.
Edit: Quite interested in the differences of local optimizations... that does allow for specific sensorship, but alas that's already possible in a more direct, reliable way.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/smart-window-byom
"...working together to bring Mistal’s scientific innovations to consumers around the world"
A quick proof-read wouldn't have gone amiss here.
I also fail to see how privacy is enhanced by sending private browsing data to a cloud service which then forwards it to an LLM, in addition to storing 'memories' and dredging through my browser history.
In any case as a french, I prefer my personnal data be exploited by a french company :D
Edit: after reading the comments, it is not a local AI so "Mozilla don't keeep the data and don't train on them" is really hypocritical if they cannot confirm that it's the same on mistral side. And there is still the question of the cost.
I agree on the privacy concerns but this could be useful with a local model, I think.
librewolf devs are just more honest about it
SeaMonkey exists. But, I'm sure Mozilla will fuck it up if they ever remember it exists.
Google Chrome keeps insisting that Spanish is Galician. PowerPoint insists on changing the spell checker back to the wrong language and ignores setting the language for the whole presentation. On Linux, ChatGPT insists it must enable the spell checker in the local system language, so everything is always red.
Privacy aside, a lot of software seems to be built assuming people cannot be multilingual.
I know a lot of foreigner for which the feature is really useful (local department store, booking a doctor appointment etc.)
"Firefox Smart Window" 21.apr.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47852016
"Firefox Smart Window" 18.aug.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49345179
"Firefox and Exa Partnership" 18.aug.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49346066
https://librewolf.net/
I don't care what their data retention policies are, I don't want my data to be sent to others full stop.
Private means it's mine, it's under my control. Handing it to third parties is not private.
Guess we just using buzzwords for marketing and have no morality or principles anymore. Bad timeline and people you should just not trust.
I get asked about stuff like browsers all the time, part of the fun of being the token nerd in a small backward town.
From here on out, my response is going to be that both Chrome and Firefox are malware. But, if you're going to use one, go for chrome so your shit at least kind of works.
Mozilla, if you're reading this: Enough is enough. I've had it with these motherfucking clankers in your motherfucking browser!
And also yes, I’ve tried Dia and OpenAI’s thing and I can’t for the life of me figure out what to do with the feature.
And then it dawns on me what I really want is a modernized bookmarks system…
Mozilla is acting unethically by obfuscating what's on offer here and overstating the privacy and security properties that can be achieved.
It's doubly unfortunate because simple translations are completely reasonable to do with cpu inference.
yeah ?