cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/37149554
If you have an iPhone 15 Pro or later with iOS 26+, the summary is created on your device using Apple Intelligence. On other devices with earlier iOS versions, the page text is sent securely to Mozilla cloud-based AI, which creates the summary and sends it back.
Ew
Mozilla introduces a new “jerk off your phone for AI” feature
how lazy do companies think people are? also, why doesnt Firefox see that most of their users dont like ai?
It’s all money. As in a lot of money has already been dumped into the infrastructure to host LLMs and “in an ideal world” they’d be making the money back from selling all the data these “Ai” type features can collect. But casual users haven’t embraced the change as much as companies were hoping. So the only way to get users on board is ramming it down their throats until they got no choice but to swallow.
And sadly people are “lazier” than most people want to believe. You give people an optional Ai search feature next to the standard one and most people will ignore it. Take away the original and only a subset of users will jump to another ship to seek that “old” user experience rather than just getting used to the “new norm”.
prolly partnered and taking money…?
I moved my device too much and accidentally sent secure information to an unknown third party.
Thanks I hate it.
Am I alone in thinking this doesn’t suck? Like, I don’t use ai summaries, but I do know people that do, and this is a pretty elegant way of doing it.
Please don’t be reasonable on Lemmy, we hate that here.
Most things on the Internet are short and written for a 6th - 8th grade level, I think. You should be able to read them. Reading is a skill that needs practice. So is skimming. Plus, ai isn’t always good at summaries .
It’s weird to be like “git gud” about reading but come on. (Accessibility or translation are separate concerns, which may or may not benefit from LLM tooling)
Oh I agree, but like half of americans read under a sixth grade level. This is bad, but that’s a big portion of people that will get use out of that feature.
I’m not sure if those people would read the summary. I think that person is watching a video instead. But maybe it would be helpful for them, as you say. It would be far, far, better to invest in public education than AI slop, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
edit: Also, most things have the most important bits in the opening paragraphs. Inverted pyramid and all that.
I completely agree, but sometimes info is only in article form, and mozilla can’t run schools.
Also I wish the inverted pyramid model was still omnipresent, it feels like half the articles I read are meandering and don’t spit out the most important info until it’s mostly over.
Also I wish the inverted pyramid model was still omnipresent, it feels like half the articles I read are meandering and don’t spit out the most important info until it’s mostly over.
That’s probably because of advertising’s dominance. If they can get you to scroll through the whole page that’s so many more ad impressions! I wonder why original newspapers weren’t so bad? Probably because you paid for it up front?
100% agree, the best news source I know of is Le Monde (I read it in french) and they charge upfront.
Yes.
All I want to know is where’s the off button for this garbage.
And people wonder why I don’t let apps auto-update?
In the first place, you have to turn it on to use it:
You’ll see a prompt the first time you come across content that can be summarized, and you can turn the feature on or off in settings anytime.
I think so, yes. I don’t want features that are privacy invasive that will likely be turned on by default when they show up. I’d rather not have the worry that something in the background may be harvesting data to feed to a model somewhere. Were this an extension that needs to be installed independently in order to even be present, would i agree? Sure. As a “now this app has AI built in” feature? Absolutely not. I will keep avidly avoiding software which adds AI, whether it’s something I use or not.
I get that, but I disagree, given the model runs on-device.
I do agree there should just be one toggle for AI features of the sort during setup though, it shouldn’t just be preenabled for everyone.
Great, another few unwanted feature for me to disable.
I assume that you can turn it off in about:config by setting browser.ml.enable to false, which appears to my quick skim to be a global setting for AI-related functionality.
iPhone has about:config?
Still worrying if they do end up baking something into the browser and hiding the Off switch behind an obscure setting
iPhone has about:config?
I don’t use iOS, so I don’t know for sure, but I assume yes. The Fennec build does on Android. I’m currently using the official Mozilla Firefox build on Android because of the Fennec guys breaking their build, and it looks like they only have it enabled by default in the nightly and dev builds…but it’s present in the regular builds as well, just off by default, and you can flip it on.
You need to go to
chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml, and it’ll have said advanced settings. By default, Firefox-on-Android will eat thechrome://bit if you paste it into the field, so you want to be sure to have that there.There’s also a setting there,
general.aboutConfig.enable. If you set that to True, it’ll makeabout:configalso go to the advanced settings page.I’m surprised you (incorrectly) assume that iOS build (which, per Apple’s regulations, is just a Safari with a different skin on top of it) comes with a feature that’s not available on the main Android build unless you jump through hoops.
Gross.
