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.

What is "AI browsing"?

Seems like what Chrome has with the default built-in Gemini Nano model.

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 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.

Nowhere in the news they say it is offline

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.

conversations aren’t saved on Mozilla’s servers by default, and partners like Mistral agree to zero data retention.

I don't read this as offline ...

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).

[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/smart-window-models

I can't fathom how they'd consider "Private" something that uploads all the sensitive information in readable form to a third party service.

In fact, If I were asked to explain the opposite of private, I might give this kind of design as an example.

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,

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")

Thanks for mentioning the mistake on the link, it's been reported internally.

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.

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/smart-window/

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.

very few people like or use it -> browser loses market share

I very much doubt trying weird things meaningfully changed their market share (aside from UI redesigns)

Here's a crazy idea if you don't want Smart Window to send your data anywhere:

have you tried not using smart window (like you're currently doing)?

This sentence is eye-opening:

  > 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.

Except ... this is not local. It's a remote service. Here is something that is:

    docker run ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:v0.11.3
    docker run mcr.microsoft.com/playwright/mcp:latest

Configure them. Open-webui needs a model (a local qwen3.8 does amazing), and you need to link them up. Playwright will just do stuff.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/smart-window-byom

Also supports Lemonade and Ollama, which are.

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.

Agree, advocating for Firefox developing features only for rich hobbyists(people who can afford large RAM and GPU) is absurd.

advocating for Firefox developing features only for rich hobbyists

?:

marketing pages aren't candid enough to clearly explain

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?

You're talking out of your ass.

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. I hope all of you end up in cells next to SBF.

I do not fundamentally disagree with you but it's also an extremely well known phenomenon that average non tech users, in the aggregate of millions of people, will click almost any "yes/I agree/continue/Next" step on a software installer or new user sign up workflow for anything, without reading the ToS. People blithly sign up for all sorts of cloud based things and services without understanding their full ramifications all the time.

I also wonder at the specific level of aggression and the tone of your comment which does not seem to be an appropriate response to that person's specific comment.

People such as you are describing and rightfully criticizing are knowingly taking advantage of that. Indeed it's how a lot of malware gets installed too.

The person you're responding to is pointing out that a lot of people at the surface level do only appear to care about the results. They put something into google translate, it works, they gets results they are pleased with, they don't put a lot of thought into the fact that the data is going to an external service. That's not an inaccurate description of how a lot of people use their computers these days. Look at how many people signed up for ChatGPT accounts and put the chatgpt app on their phones and talk to it all the time. That's the level of critical thinking a lot of non tech users have about their personal data.

The fact that people will click yes/agree/OK on almost anything is how Windows computers got Bonzi Buddy installed on them back in the day, and now it's continued into the cloud-everything era.

https://geekhack.org/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=21140.0...

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.

"running shoes I looked at last week" / "Here's what I found in your browsing history:"

Does that need an LLM at all?

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. (my figures are Q8, though presumably a good Q4 would be faster)

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.").

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.

This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference

Is it really ? LLM take lot of ram and drain battery. People run Firefox on low end computer.

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.

Anyone else's extensions not work on support.mozilla.org?

Same here. Nice to see the malware company has disabled ublock from working on their site.

JFC, Mozilla is just comically evil at this point.

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.

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.

"Private"

Guess we just using buzzwords for marketing and have no morality or principles anymore. Bad timeline and people you should just not trust.

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.

Glad to use ~~Unmozilled Firefox~~ Librewolf

Waterfox also works well!

I remember using Waterfox in the past, I think because they were keeping an old UI. Is that the draw over Librewolf?

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.

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)

It wouldn't be cool because it would still hand your data to Google.

I assume Google was just a placeholder for a search engine in the example. And you'll surely need some service to search the web.

I don't know about that. When I hear people reference "Google" it seems to me they do mean Google. Similar with "Claude".

People still use “Google” as a synonym for “online search.”

I cannot in a million years imagine using these features. Just be more organised.

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.

It’s not obvious but you can use this with your own local (or any) models.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/smart-window-byom

They misspelled their own company name:

"...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.

Neat, how can I turn it off?

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

These are two companies that seem to be slipping in ethics recently

What makes you say that?