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.
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 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.
I mean encryption is a real thing (Edward Snowden sometimes would simply say "Encryption works" in online Q and As) and there are ways to do zero knowledge data crunching Eleven while interacting with servers. Kim DotCom famously launched Mega as a zero knowledge file host after his legal issues with with megaupload, and lots of apps and services across the internet have been doing the version of this even with online services in the ensuing decade and a half. For instance I use StandardNotes which is online but encrypted.
I have no idea the extent to which any of that speaks to the Mozilla thing in this context, and local is preferable if that's achievable. And of course you should always do due diligence on what exactly is and isn't being promised when it comes to sending your data to the cloud, it certainly is possible to do that in privacy preserving ways. It's not a doubt about the technology so much as a question of institutional credibility.
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).
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/
You cannot ship on device inference with a real LLM still. Average people freak the hell out if it's even 10% slower than whatever google ships. At least thats the claim for how Firefox lost all their marketshare in the first place (Which was not the case. When everyone was claiming firefox was "slow", it simply was not, as long as you used an ad blocker. Normal people like my dad didn't switch to Chrome. It was installed through a sketchy mechanism and they never noticed)
Meanwhile, if you CAN run these models locally, using your own hardware for inference is supported. It's a setting option.
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.
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 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".
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.
This is the confidently incorrect narrative that gets repeated in the comment sections practically every time Mozilla is mentioned but it's every bit as incorrect now as it's been all the previous times.
So here we go again for the millionth time: the big losses of Mozilla market share were approximately during the 2010s. The era of side bets on unique features is approximately the 2020s. The unique features didn't retroactively cause the market share losses of the 2010s.
Moreover, telling the market share story in terms of specific browser features misses the elephant in the room, which is that Google, with the world's most visited page, and a browser that's the installed default on over a billion devices, grew it's market share with a combination of web visability and dominance over the most used mobile platform. Mozilla could triple their budget and have the world's best browser experience, but it wouldn't make much of a dent against distribution defaults.
I would wager that the impact on market share is driven about 97% by Googles distribution advantage and 3% by aligning with user preferences on features and performance. If being a perfect browser led to market dominance, Opera would have already conquered the world back in 2012, but the economics of building a browser aren't always friendly to the good guys.
I never said that Chrome and Edge don't have a huge distribution advantage due to being installed by default on peoples' devices. That's also certainly a huge factor in the mass adoption of Chrome as what people consider "the web browser. Or Safari as default browser in MacOS of course.
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
> 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 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.
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.
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. 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.
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 would put a lot of that down to learned helplessness.
A lot of non-tech people tell me that "they already know" and that it is impossible to avoid. I have been told I am naive to think its possible to keep data private.
That's a lot of words and assumptions, when a single check of my posting history would show that I despise the HN bros as well. Jumping on a tangent about libertarianism when you could have simply called them retarded and saved a lot of time.
Anyways, no, I'm talking about the average person, the public worker, the person that thinks the internet is the funnily named Safari app, the elderly: they give zero fucks about it going to some service online. They used to search for Google translate before, whether or not it goes on someone's server, they do. not. care. You're not going to win them over with "it runs on your device". Their device is a crappy laptop that barely runs excel, and if they can offload computing, they will.
You realize that people that don't care won't even know what Firefox is? Being a niche player and scaring away niche people is the most stupid strategy possible.
Being a small player and throwing away any hope of expanding your user base by building for people who will complain no matter what you do is, well, something!
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.
Not really, but it's probably easier to make it on top of LLM than to make specially-purposed tool for it, if we talking in terms of time-to-market effort.
SQLite FTS could have done this a decade ago. We've had good local search capabilities for two decades and they either been underused or abandoned (e.g. Google Desktop, Yahoo! Search). This may be a reasonable projection of where AI is headed. You can do a lot locally but there is too much incentive to centralize around cloud infrastructure, then the privacy concerns make that prohibitive and we end up with what feels like a false choice of cloud or bust.
Maybe it's LLM hype that will bring more powerful capabilities to the desktop?
Let's say the goal is doing something for work, so accuracy is important, and you prefer for it to be a nice reading experience, like a good translation.
As long as cloud model are somewhat better in these things, it's good that users would have the option to use cloud models.
You’re taking their shoe example way too literally. It’s just showing they’re catering to the average user, not an engineer. And tons of average Joe users now have very high expectations of how intelligent a LLM is because they’ve interacted with ChatGPT and the like. If there’s a super tiny model that is too dumb to do anything beyond shoe searching and they have to switch to Gemini and google AI search for anything more complex, this whole launch would be an immediate failure.
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.").
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?
it's an extremely sparse MOE, so there is some odds of acceptable performance using a smaller in-memory cache and the rest on flash. ... I don't have a setup to test that right now.
(Of course, if translation is all you want much smaller models will work. Ling-tiny can do summarization, dom manipulation, scripting, etc. too).
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.
Remember how in like 1999/2000 Sun was trying to predict that everyone's computer would be some form of thin terminal in the future? Turns out they were very wrong on the part about it running on Sun server back-end infrastructure, but that same general purpose has now been accomplished through other methods where a lot of people do basically EVERYTHING inside a web browser tab to some external cloud service.
Now add the need for external inference because very few random consumers are going to buy a $3000 laptop when they can get the $600 laptop at Best Buy, and that trend further escalates.
This has always been the case, forever. You have to pay for a product or service. How you do so can be with cash or your data/body/vote/eyeballs/indirect discretionary purchases.
The amount of work that can be done funded by foundations and free work is nowhere close to what people want.
But apple said their AI only falls back to the private cloud when it has to? Just kidding, near every request needs to fallback, because a phone can't actually run a real LLM, no matter how many "neural cores" it has..
that it's not some big American cloud company but a relatively small startup in France
How it's any better? Small companies can be bought by big companies. French government is as capable of trampling over their citizen's privacy the moment they feel they need it as US government is. And putting a squeeze on a small startup is way easier than on a major cloud company (not that either is particularly hard). Also, OpenAI used to be an idealistic non-profit one day too, then it started to smell trillions and all that went of of the window.
is not going to be nearly as capable as an off-device inference system.
I rarely need PhD-level research into my browsing history. I'm not going to solve millennium problems on my bookmarks. The tasks that I will realistically need are well within capacity of most very basic local models. Maybe they'd be a bit slower, who cares.
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.
Then just allow it to be enabled on high end devices? But it must be local only. As hardware advances and people upgrade, more people will be able to turn on the feature.
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.
But I do, especially when the choice is either having it locally, remotely, or not at all. I also indeed do nit my CPU used for such, but GPU. I could even run a 8 GB model on a remote (but still local network, on-prem) NPU.
There's one caveat though: if you are gaming and browsing.
I wish they had just done this with a very clear up front opt in
If a local model is not realistic, then this should not have even been an in-your-face opt-in, but at most some add-on.
Of course, their telemetry isn't even opt-out, so even the opt-out for the Mistral thing is kind of disingenuous on their part, since they get a bunch of information from us in other ways.
(sigh) Ah, Mozilla has gone down such a dark path over the years. Too bad.
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, 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.
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.
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 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.
This has always been the case for years, for every browser. No idea why you say "now".
Any browser providing extensions, not just Firefox, will at least won't allow extensions to modify their own extensions providing page. Otherwise, any malicious extension can infiltrate and trick users to download modified extensions from the browser's own extension page.
You can disable this in about:config by modifying extensions.webextensions.restrictedDomains. It's probably there to help prevent malicious extensions from hijacking official browser support. I reckon many people here don't need it.
This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference
I remember using a small model for autocomplete, I think it was Qwen 2.5 Coder 3B way back, on a laptop with 32 GB of RAM and a 13th Gen Intel i7 CPU. It made the fans spin up and loaded things so much (Ollama back then) that it was largely unusable for doing software development at the same time. I don't want inference anywhere near my personal computing devices (same in regards to phones, really, I don't want the power usage that'll just help degrade the battery faster). Also most small models just really suck, unless you have trained them on a very specific task, but then they suck at everything that is not that task.
Then again sending browser history online also sucks, unless you're into that kind of thing.
Not everyone uses laptops. I can run Qwen 3.8 27B (which is a REALLY capable model) in the background coding for me while I'm simultaneously browsing the web and playing VALORANT without any performance impact, and that's on a 6 year old GPU.
I suppose some clarity would have been nice but I try to err on the side of charitable interpretation with these things, especially with how much MDS there tends to be in the hn comment sections. This does just seem to be like a high level announcement of the overall partnership, though some clarity over local versus cloud would have been nice.
But they do link to a page describing the "smart window" which goes into a bit more detail:
Yes, that's one of the pages I wrote my comment about. I did try to interpret it charitably, but there's nothing on that page (everyone read it! It's short!) that simply communicates to users, "we're uploading your browsing history to the cloud".
It has a number of words circling around the topic, words relating to privacy and local storage; and all of them avoid communicating the main point. Some seem to mislead about it. How, for example, can you say
"They’re stored on your device, not on Mozilla’s servers,"
And never explain in plain English "...but also we need to upload them to Mozilla's (& Mistral's) servers" at any point in the advert?
The first time I read this page, I myself couldn't figure out if it was about local inference or not; and I was actively looking for the answer. That's how opaque this is.
Come on, man, I’m going to choose you’re just Posting saying shit like this.
Because it’s useful. Because almost nobody has the hardware to run a local model with nearly reasonable performance (in intelligence + speed + RAM usage).
Not everything is perfect. At least they’re building things.
The strategies of Google and Apple, regarding how to provide a LLM, seam to disagree with you.
Gemini run on a potato and Apple is local first.
So, you may actually have very good performance with local model. Just not yet on *every* device. So the Mozilla strategy here feel very reasonable. A Cloud provider specialised in local models, to be able to switch once local models will be quick enough on most devices.
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
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?
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!
These comments are so annoying and they pop up on literally any news Mozilla releases. Like… ever.
No, Firefox is not malware because it includes an OPTIONAL feature. Yes, chrome is 100x worse than Firefox when it comes to data privacy. Yes, Firefox works in 99.9999% of websites. Yes, the performance of Firefox is about the same as chrome.
Nobody who seriously gives even a single fuck about privacy is going to be dropping Firefox because of this. Because that’s stupid.
The only conclusion, then, is that people who are dropping Firefox because of this don’t care about privacy at all, and just want an excuse to use chrome. But I guess saying “well I like chrome” is too much, so we just lie instead.
It’s fine to use chrome. It IS NOT fine to lie through your teeth and claim you use chrome because Firefox is just as bad for privacy.
Because it’s not, and not a single person would drop Firefox for that reason. You just want to use chrome. So do that, and stop shitting on Firefox as if Mozilla implementing 0.01% of the malware chrome has is the end of the world.
Why would it not be private? Yes data is sent to the servers but the trust that you must have that they don't keep the data is not different from the trust you must have in your password manager or encrypted email or backup storage provider.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I tried adding my own endpoint, but the save button was still greyed out so it did not work. Maybe the feature is not fully implemented yet? In about:config, I could add the endpoint and api key, but not the model 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.
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 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
I remember the days when people justified Google Chrome's maximalist RAM usage by saying it was a good thing because it was allocating what the program actually needed to run quickly and efficiently, and it was better to grab what it actually needed then to operate inefficiently while using fewer system resources.
For a while that was even the majority view, but it never quite made sense to me.
So now mistral has partnership with browser + user logs from Mozilla.
Does it means that they are trying to build their own search index?
Because it’s kinda huge inference investment in exchange for what?
Any other ideas why they need this?
What is Mistral bringing to the table for Firefox? There is nothing "open" about this in any way.
FF needs to either profile itself as the no-ai-by-default browser, or it needs to just have OpenAI/Anthropic/Mistral/DeepSeek bid for the default spot - like they do with Google search.
Maybe FF believes there is a group of users who are still on the fence about using FF - until they can pitch them a first-class build-in AI story that goes with the anti-establishment vibe?
I somehow doubt that's the pitch & potential userbase they should be focussing on.
Remember when it was the fastest thing around and simple?
Now it's an also ran. AI doesn't help here. Focus on what made it great in the beginning, make it the most performant browser around. Put Fable on the case if need be. Do the browser thing well!
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.
What is "AI browsing"?
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.
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.
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.
The outrage about Gemini Nano in Chrome was the surprise extra 4GB download plus their attempt to expose it as a non-standard browser API, IIRC.
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 ...
People only read the headline, and the headline lies.
Pretty ironic then that here, Mozilla is specifically labeling their "we send it all to the cloud" service as "private."
Private here means "trust me, bro".
Reading this as “Private Cloud Compute“ (PCC)
(Not iCloud Private Relay, the VPN)
I mean encryption is a real thing (Edward Snowden sometimes would simply say "Encryption works" in online Q and As) and there are ways to do zero knowledge data crunching Eleven while interacting with servers. Kim DotCom famously launched Mega as a zero knowledge file host after his legal issues with with megaupload, and lots of apps and services across the internet have been doing the version of this even with online services in the ensuing decade and a half. For instance I use StandardNotes which is online but encrypted.
I have no idea the extent to which any of that speaks to the Mozilla thing in this context, and local is preferable if that's achievable. And of course you should always do due diligence on what exactly is and isn't being promised when it comes to sending your data to the cloud, it certainly is possible to do that in privacy preserving ways. It's not a doubt about the technology so much as a question of institutional credibility.
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:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/local-translation-add-on... ("Mozilla releases local machine translation tools as part of Project Bergamot")
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/
They're still 100% cognizant! And yet.
You cannot ship on device inference with a real LLM still. Average people freak the hell out if it's even 10% slower than whatever google ships. At least thats the claim for how Firefox lost all their marketshare in the first place (Which was not the case. When everyone was claiming firefox was "slow", it simply was not, as long as you used an ad blocker. Normal people like my dad didn't switch to Chrome. It was installed through a sketchy mechanism and they never noticed)
Meanwhile, if you CAN run these models locally, using your own hardware for inference is supported. It's a setting option.
Thanks for mentioning the mistake on the link, it's been reported internally.
The "Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite" also points incorrectly (?) to https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/Model-Cards/Ge...
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.
Where they do use an on-device model is for the initial query classification:
[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)
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".
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.
Why do they keep trying weird things? That makes no sense. People just want a browser.
This is the confidently incorrect narrative that gets repeated in the comment sections practically every time Mozilla is mentioned but it's every bit as incorrect now as it's been all the previous times.
So here we go again for the millionth time: the big losses of Mozilla market share were approximately during the 2010s. The era of side bets on unique features is approximately the 2020s. The unique features didn't retroactively cause the market share losses of the 2010s.
Moreover, telling the market share story in terms of specific browser features misses the elephant in the room, which is that Google, with the world's most visited page, and a browser that's the installed default on over a billion devices, grew it's market share with a combination of web visability and dominance over the most used mobile platform. Mozilla could triple their budget and have the world's best browser experience, but it wouldn't make much of a dent against distribution defaults.
I would wager that the impact on market share is driven about 97% by Googles distribution advantage and 3% by aligning with user preferences on features and performance. If being a perfect browser led to market dominance, Opera would have already conquered the world back in 2012, but the economics of building a browser aren't always friendly to the good guys.
I never said that Chrome and Edge don't have a huge distribution advantage due to being installed by default on peoples' devices. That's also certainly a huge factor in the mass adoption of Chrome as what people consider "the web browser. Or Safari as default browser in MacOS of course.
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)?
Those people complain about everything. It's exhausting.
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
They are and Mozilla is basically malicious org
This sentence is eye-opening:
Privacy-minded users who want to try this feature would need to create a totally separate browser profile to avoid data leaks.
You can control this in the settings:
Except ... this is not local. It's a remote service. Here is something that is:
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.
Oohohohohoohohohoho Merry Christmas!!!
But Mozilla is bad and stupid! CEO pockets in a lot of money!!1!
its up to us to make extensions that are so famous that they can be integrated into the browser functionality i guess
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.
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.
?:
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...
I would put a lot of that down to learned helplessness.
A lot of non-tech people tell me that "they already know" and that it is impossible to avoid. I have been told I am naive to think its possible to keep data private.
PREACH
I think youre right. The least techy people I know where the first to ditch Mozilla when they started to see ads in Firefox.
That's a lot of words and assumptions, when a single check of my posting history would show that I despise the HN bros as well. Jumping on a tangent about libertarianism when you could have simply called them retarded and saved a lot of time.
Anyways, no, I'm talking about the average person, the public worker, the person that thinks the internet is the funnily named Safari app, the elderly: they give zero fucks about it going to some service online. They used to search for Google translate before, whether or not it goes on someone's server, they do. not. care. You're not going to win them over with "it runs on your device". Their device is a crappy laptop that barely runs excel, and if they can offload computing, they will.
You realize that people that don't care won't even know what Firefox is? Being a niche player and scaring away niche people is the most stupid strategy possible.
Being a small player and throwing away any hope of expanding your user base by building for people who will complain no matter what you do is, well, something!
neglecting existing customers in an attempt to gain larger market share is certainly a play
This is an untested assumption in Silicon Valley. I suspect Apple is going to eat a lot of folks’ lunches.
They're advocating for a CHOICE and for the difference to be explained.
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'll ding Mozilla directly then - Since your "we can't do this yet" approach is actually the literal thing Chrome is shipping...
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in/overview?_gl=1...
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.
Does that need an LLM at all?
Not really, but it's probably easier to make it on top of LLM than to make specially-purposed tool for it, if we talking in terms of time-to-market effort.
SQLite FTS could have done this a decade ago. We've had good local search capabilities for two decades and they either been underused or abandoned (e.g. Google Desktop, Yahoo! Search). This may be a reasonable projection of where AI is headed. You can do a lot locally but there is too much incentive to centralize around cloud infrastructure, then the privacy concerns make that prohibitive and we end up with what feels like a false choice of cloud or bust.
Maybe it's LLM hype that will bring more powerful capabilities to the desktop?
Let's say the goal is doing something for work, so accuracy is important, and you prefer for it to be a nice reading experience, like a good translation.
As long as cloud model are somewhat better in these things, it's good that users would have the option to use cloud models.
You’re taking their shoe example way too literally. It’s just showing they’re catering to the average user, not an engineer. And tons of average Joe users now have very high expectations of how intelligent a LLM is because they’ve interacted with ChatGPT and the like. If there’s a super tiny model that is too dumb to do anything beyond shoe searching and they have to switch to Gemini and google AI search for anything more complex, this whole launch would be an immediate failure.
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.").
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?
https://huggingface.co/bartowski/Ling-3.0-tiny-GGUF
That sounds about right for Q4.
it's an extremely sparse MOE, so there is some odds of acceptable performance using a smaller in-memory cache and the rest on flash. ... I don't have a setup to test that right now.
(Of course, if translation is all you want much smaller models will work. Ling-tiny can do summarization, dom manipulation, scripting, etc. too).
Andreessen Horowitz led Mistral's €385M Series A in December 2023.
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.
Remember how in like 1999/2000 Sun was trying to predict that everyone's computer would be some form of thin terminal in the future? Turns out they were very wrong on the part about it running on Sun server back-end infrastructure, but that same general purpose has now been accomplished through other methods where a lot of people do basically EVERYTHING inside a web browser tab to some external cloud service.
Now add the need for external inference because very few random consumers are going to buy a $3000 laptop when they can get the $600 laptop at Best Buy, and that trend further escalates.
This has always been the case, forever. You have to pay for a product or service. How you do so can be with cash or your data/body/vote/eyeballs/indirect discretionary purchases.
The amount of work that can be done funded by foundations and free work is nowhere close to what people want.
But apple said their AI only falls back to the private cloud when it has to? Just kidding, near every request needs to fallback, because a phone can't actually run a real LLM, no matter how many "neural cores" it has..
How it's any better? Small companies can be bought by big companies. French government is as capable of trampling over their citizen's privacy the moment they feel they need it as US government is. And putting a squeeze on a small startup is way easier than on a major cloud company (not that either is particularly hard). Also, OpenAI used to be an idealistic non-profit one day too, then it started to smell trillions and all that went of of the window.
I rarely need PhD-level research into my browsing history. I'm not going to solve millennium problems on my bookmarks. The tasks that I will realistically need are well within capacity of most very basic local models. Maybe they'd be a bit slower, who cares.
Then just allow it to be enabled on high end devices? But it must be local only. As hardware advances and people upgrade, more people will be able to turn on the feature.
Every ounce of RAM and spare cycle should be used.
Read this again, slowly.
But I do, especially when the choice is either having it locally, remotely, or not at all. I also indeed do nit my CPU used for such, but GPU. I could even run a 8 GB model on a remote (but still local network, on-prem) NPU.
There's one caveat though: if you are gaming and browsing.
Well, you kind of are though.
If a local model is not realistic, then this should not have even been an in-your-face opt-in, but at most some add-on.
Of course, their telemetry isn't even opt-out, so even the opt-out for the Mistral thing is kind of disingenuous on their part, since they get a bunch of information from us in other ways.
(sigh) Ah, Mozilla has gone down such a dark path over the years. Too bad.
Is it really ? LLM take lot of ram and drain battery. People run Firefox on low end computer.
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.
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.
Just gonna go ahead and adopt the phrase "spin up my fans" to describe pissing me off.
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.
two high quality companies: near.ai tinfoil.sh
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.
the average user has nowhere near enough the capability to run a model fast enough to do useful things
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.
Wheb the company is hellbent on shoving ads in their products and also blocks my adblocker from working on their site, I'd call that comically evil.
This has always been the case for years, for every browser. No idea why you say "now".
Any browser providing extensions, not just Firefox, will at least won't allow extensions to modify their own extensions providing page. Otherwise, any malicious extension can infiltrate and trick users to download modified extensions from the browser's own extension page.
Comically ignorant.
support.mozilla.org and addons.mozilla.org are distinct sites.
You can disable this in about:config by modifying extensions.webextensions.restrictedDomains. It's probably there to help prevent malicious extensions from hijacking official browser support. I reckon many people here don't need it.
I remember using a small model for autocomplete, I think it was Qwen 2.5 Coder 3B way back, on a laptop with 32 GB of RAM and a 13th Gen Intel i7 CPU. It made the fans spin up and loaded things so much (Ollama back then) that it was largely unusable for doing software development at the same time. I don't want inference anywhere near my personal computing devices (same in regards to phones, really, I don't want the power usage that'll just help degrade the battery faster). Also most small models just really suck, unless you have trained them on a very specific task, but then they suck at everything that is not that task.
Then again sending browser history online also sucks, unless you're into that kind of thing.
Not everyone uses laptops. I can run Qwen 3.8 27B (which is a REALLY capable model) in the background coding for me while I'm simultaneously browsing the web and playing VALORANT without any performance impact, and that's on a 6 year old GPU.
Mozilla does a great job of doing all sorts of things that help Google, these days…
I suppose some clarity would have been nice but I try to err on the side of charitable interpretation with these things, especially with how much MDS there tends to be in the hn comment sections. This does just seem to be like a high level announcement of the overall partnership, though some clarity over local versus cloud would have been nice.
But they do link to a page describing the "smart window" which goes into a bit more detail:
https://www.firefox.com/en-US/smart-window/?view=update
Yes, that's one of the pages I wrote my comment about. I did try to interpret it charitably, but there's nothing on that page (everyone read it! It's short!) that simply communicates to users, "we're uploading your browsing history to the cloud".
It has a number of words circling around the topic, words relating to privacy and local storage; and all of them avoid communicating the main point. Some seem to mislead about it. How, for example, can you say
And never explain in plain English "...but also we need to upload them to Mozilla's (& Mistral's) servers" at any point in the advert?
The first time I read this page, I myself couldn't figure out if it was about local inference or not; and I was actively looking for the answer. That's how opaque this is.
Come on, man, I’m going to choose you’re just Posting saying shit like this.
Because it’s useful. Because almost nobody has the hardware to run a local model with nearly reasonable performance (in intelligence + speed + RAM usage).
Not everything is perfect. At least they’re building things.
The strategies of Google and Apple, regarding how to provide a LLM, seam to disagree with you. Gemini run on a potato and Apple is local first.
So, you may actually have very good performance with local model. Just not yet on *every* device. So the Mozilla strategy here feel very reasonable. A Cloud provider specialised in local models, to be able to switch once local models will be quick enough on most devices.
That is a great phrase.
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
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?
Related, but hardly activity:
"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
"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.
This announcement pushed me over that edge.
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!
These comments are so annoying and they pop up on literally any news Mozilla releases. Like… ever.
No, Firefox is not malware because it includes an OPTIONAL feature. Yes, chrome is 100x worse than Firefox when it comes to data privacy. Yes, Firefox works in 99.9999% of websites. Yes, the performance of Firefox is about the same as chrome.
Nobody who seriously gives even a single fuck about privacy is going to be dropping Firefox because of this. Because that’s stupid.
The only conclusion, then, is that people who are dropping Firefox because of this don’t care about privacy at all, and just want an excuse to use chrome. But I guess saying “well I like chrome” is too much, so we just lie instead.
It’s fine to use chrome. It IS NOT fine to lie through your teeth and claim you use chrome because Firefox is just as bad for privacy.
Because it’s not, and not a single person would drop Firefox for that reason. You just want to use chrome. So do that, and stop shitting on Firefox as if Mozilla implementing 0.01% of the malware chrome has is the end of the world.
Why would it not be private? Yes data is sent to the servers but the trust that you must have that they don't keep the data is not different from the trust you must have in your password manager or encrypted email or backup storage provider.
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.
waterfox is downstream of firefox and can't meaningfully match mozilla's maintenance of the core browser
librewolf devs are just more honest about it
Has WF said as much?
Palemoon doesn't embed clankers as far as I know.
SeaMonkey exists. But, I'm sure Mozilla will fuck it up if they ever remember it exists.
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.
I don't understand this negativity. It seems to be a fully optional separate service. No one is losing anything.
Please don't.
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.
It could anonymize the data, at least.
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.”
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.
We’ve got the whole post to parse, though.
The idea is obviously applicable to other search engines.
That’s a great idea, and would be a much better feature than the unimaginative things Mozilla has been implementing. It’s so disappointing.
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.
There's no such thing as an advanced google search query anymore. The second will give you worse results than the first (without quotes.)
I’m fine with cloud features, but I’d like to know what stays on my device and what gets sent out. “Private” is a bit vague.
I cannot in a million years imagine using these features. Just be more organised.
I understand why they built this. They probably should and this is probably the right way to do it.
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…
yeah ?
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.
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.
Fuck off with this AI bullshit.
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.
Both are true, a lot of people are multilingual but a lot are also not.
I know a lot of foreigner for which the feature is really useful (local department store, booking a doctor appointment etc.)
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.
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
This should BE front and centre and what is sold, not ads for a 3rd party.
I tried adding my own endpoint, but the save button was still greyed out so it did not work. Maybe the feature is not fully implemented yet? In about:config, I could add the endpoint and api key, but not the model name.
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.
On the bright side, at least we know it was typed by human hands!
Neat, how can I turn it off?
Uninstall Mozilla's spyware "browser" and install LibreWolf would do it.
https://librewolf.net/
Try this: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/smart-window#w_turn-off...
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.
Late thought: consider what telegram went through over just end to end encryption...
And practically every country has lower privacy standards for data that crosses borders.
No amount of pixel art will convince me to give up on the freedom to choose.
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
What makes you say that?
This comment thread is one example and not out of recent character
I get that for Mozilla. But what has Mistral done?
Hold the AI, just give me a zen/Vivaldi like autohiding vertical tab stack and we're good.
Nobody asked. Give me back my RAM.
I remember the days when people justified Google Chrome's maximalist RAM usage by saying it was a good thing because it was allocating what the program actually needed to run quickly and efficiently, and it was better to grab what it actually needed then to operate inefficiently while using fewer system resources.
For a while that was even the majority view, but it never quite made sense to me.
So now mistral has partnership with browser + user logs from Mozilla. Does it means that they are trying to build their own search index? Because it’s kinda huge inference investment in exchange for what? Any other ideas why they need this?
This will put duo lingus out of business.
"Mozilla" and "private" are two phrases that don't go well together, these days.
What the fuck is the point of this?
What is Mistral bringing to the table for Firefox? There is nothing "open" about this in any way.
FF needs to either profile itself as the no-ai-by-default browser, or it needs to just have OpenAI/Anthropic/Mistral/DeepSeek bid for the default spot - like they do with Google search.
I'm happy Mistral exists. I'm happy Firefox exists.
None of this shows any synergy i'm excited about.
Maybe FF believes there is a group of users who are still on the fence about using FF - until they can pitch them a first-class build-in AI story that goes with the anti-establishment vibe?
I somehow doubt that's the pitch & potential userbase they should be focussing on.
Firefox/Mozilla really lost the plot.
Remember when it was the fastest thing around and simple?
Now it's an also ran. AI doesn't help here. Focus on what made it great in the beginning, make it the most performant browser around. Put Fable on the case if need be. Do the browser thing well!