MrAlex94 (u/MrAlex94)

MrAlex94 commented on Putting Gemini to Work in Chrome blog.google/products-and-... · Posted by u/diwank

MrAlex94 · 15 days ago

Am I being too cynical, or does anyone else envision a future where you ask Chrome to buy you something, anything, online and instead of it actually buying you the “best” item, you end up with items it “prefers” where Google make money from suggestions and/or completion of sale?

I know it calls out that there’ll need to be user confirmation before the final purchase, but if you’re already not expending the effort to find the product or service yourself, are you really going to sit and research what it’s given you? If you are, then what’s the point of using the agent?

Just seems like the next evolution in Google’s ad revenue generation.

MrAlex94 commented on Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself? infosec.press/brunomiguel... · Posted by u/pabs3

TurboSkyline · 2 months ago

I'm not familiar with Zen, but how do you reconcile that Waterfox frequently lags behind upstream Firefox in terms of security fixes? Yes, you get a perceived gain in privacy, but is that worth potentially exposing yourself to additional vulnerabilities?

MrAlex94 · 2 months ago

> lags behind upstream Firefox in terms of security fixes

I’m not sure why this has become a thing - usually I either release Waterfox the week before ESR releases (the week the code freeze happens and new version gets tagged) or, if I’m actively working on features and they need to coincide with the next update I push, I will release on the same Tuesday the ESR releases.

You can check the GitHub tag history for Waterfox to see it’s been that way for a good while :)

MrAlex94 commented on No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter waterfox.com/blog/no-ai-h... · Posted by u/MrAlex94

yunohn · 2 months ago

I still don’t understand what you mean by “what they do with your data” - because it sounds like exfiltration fear mongering, whereas LLMs are a static series of weights. If you don’t explicitly call your “send_data_to_bad_actor” function with the user’s I/O, nothing can happen.

MrAlex94 · 2 months ago

I disagree that it’s fear mongering. Have we not had numerous articles on HN about data exfiltration in recent memory? Why would an LLM that is in the drivers seat of a browser (not talking about current feature status in Firefox wrt to sanitised data being interacted with) not have the same pitfalls?

Seems as if we’d be 3 for 3 in the “agents rule of 2” in the context of the web and a browser?

> [A] An agent can process untrustworthy inputs

> [B] An agent can have access to sensitive systems or private data

> [C] An agent can change state or communicate externally

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/2/new-prompt-injection-pa...

Even if we weren’t talking about such malicious hypotheticals, hallucinations are a common occurrence as are CLI agents doing things it thinks best, sometimes to the detriment of the data it interacts with. I personally wouldn’t want my history being modified or deleted, same goes with passwords and the like.

It is a bit doomerist, I doubt it’ll have such broad permissions but it just doesn’t sit well which I suppose is the spirit of the article and the stance Waterfox takes.

MrAlex94 commented on No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter waterfox.com/blog/no-ai-h... · Posted by u/MrAlex94

inkysigma · 2 months ago

> Large language models are something else entirely*. They are black boxes. You cannot audit them. You cannot truly understand what they do with your data. You cannot verify their behaviour. And Mozilla wants to put them at the heart of the browser and that doesn't sit well.

Am I being overly critical here or is this kind of a silly position to have right after talking about how neural machine translation is okay? Many of Firefox's LLM features like summarization afaik are powered by local models (hell even Chrome has local model options). It's weird to say neural translation is not a black box but LLMs are somehow black boxes that we cannot hope to understand what they do with the data, especially when viewed a bit fuzzily LLMs are scaled up versions of an architecture that was originally used for neural translation. Neural translation also has unverifiable behavior in the same sense.

I could interpret some of the data talk as talking about non local models but this very much seems like a more general criticism of LLMs as a whole when talking about Firefox features. Moreover, some of the critiques like verifiability of outputs and unlimited scope still don't make sense in this context. Browser LLM features except for explicitly AI browsers like Comet have so far had some scoping to their behavior, either in very narrow scopes like translation or summarization. The broadest scope I can think of is the side panels that show up which allow you to ask about a web page with context. Even then, I do not see what is inherently problematic about such scoping since the output behavior is confined to the side panel.

MrAlex94 · 2 months ago

Looking back with fresh eyes, I definitely think I could’ve presented what I’m trying to say better.

On a purely technical play, you’re right that I’m drawing a distinction that may not hold up purely on technical grounds. Maybe the better framing is: I trust constrained, single purpose models with somewhat verifiable outputs (seeing text go in, translated text go out, compare its consistency) more than I trust general purpose models with broad access to my browsing context, regardless of whether they’re both neural networks under the hood.

WRT to the “scope”, maybe I have picked up the wrong end of the stick with what Mozilla are planning to do - but they’ve already picked all the low hanging fruit with AI integration with the features you’ve mentioned and the fact they seem to want to dig their heels in further, at least to me, signals that they want deeper integration? Although who knows, the post from the new CEO may also be a litmus test to see what the response to that post elicits, and then go from there.

MrAlex94 commented on No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter waterfox.com/blog/no-ai-h... · Posted by u/MrAlex94

almosthere · 2 months ago

I do think dipping your toes into the future is worth it. If it turns out the LLM is trying to kill us by cancelling our meetings and emailing people that we're crazy that would suck. But I don't think this is any more dangerous than giving people a browser in the first place. They have already done enough to shoot themselves in the foot enough.

MrAlex94 · 2 months ago

I am more of a sceptic of AI in the context of a browser, than its general use. I think LLMs have great utility and have really helped push things along - but it’s not as if they’re completely risk free.

MrAlex94 commented on Constructing the Word's First JPEG XL MD5 Hash Quine stackchk.fail/blog/jxl_ha... · Posted by u/luispa

embedding-shape · 2 months ago

Firefox (with minor changes + addons) is what I use today, works well for what I care about. Thanks for the recommendation though!

While you're here, last time I came across your website (and it seems like it looks the same currently), I noticed that your browser comparison is not including Firefox, which is what you've forked from (as far as I can tell at least, it isn't made clear by the landing page actually, but the UI and name makes it obvious), which feels like it's a bit misleading almost intentionally.

MrAlex94 · 2 months ago

Not intended to be misleading in a way, but it is on purpose as Mozilla don’t like it when there’s mention of Firefox on the website so I make any references sparingly.

MrAlex94 commented on Constructing the Word's First JPEG XL MD5 Hash Quine stackchk.fail/blog/jxl_ha... · Posted by u/luispa

embedding-shape · 2 months ago

> And also at the same time a good reminder for everyone to find a browser that supports JPEG XL

That's probably furthest down on my list of features I look for in browser, where the top two are "Not run by a for-profit company living on extracting data from users" and "Can have tabs vertically in sidebar in a tree-based structured format".

MrAlex94 · 2 months ago

Waterfox might be what you’re after?

- Supports JXL out of the box (including support for alpha transparency and animations)

- Vertical tabs with optional tree tabs (hired the original tree style tab developer to implement the feature)

- For profit, but I don’t want your data, collect it or use it to earn a living (telemetry/analytics/experiments disabled at build time and alongside a fair few patches on top to make sure external connections are limited to what’s necessary)

Sidebar, I’m the developer of Waterfox

MrAlex94 commented on Ecosia: The greenest AI is here blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-ai... · Posted by u/doener

josefritzishere · 2 months ago

Is there no browser I can use without this AI trash jammed into it?

MrAlex94 · 2 months ago

Waterfox, I’ve spent a good amount of time on scouring through the code looking at what to remove and the next release I’ve found some last remaining remnants to disable

MrAlex94 commented on Orion 1.0 blog.kagi.com/orion... · Posted by u/STRiDEX

MrAlex94 · 3 months ago

I hope I don't come across too harsh in my criticism here, but this is in my wheelhouse and I like to keep tabs on the privacy browser market in comparison to Waterfox.

> A bold technical choice: WebKit, not another Chromium clone

I don't find this a bold technical choice at all for a macOS only browser? I think this would be more impressive if it was Windows as well, as back (maybe ~5 or so years ago) when I was investigating WebKit on Windows, builds were not on an equal playing field[1]. So the engineering to get that up and running would be impressive.

> Speed by nature

Unfortunately, as of 16:40 UTC, I am unable to run the browser (installer?) to benchmark it due to "An error occurred while parsing the update feed.", but I recall 2 years ago when I tested Orion it was the slowest of all the browsers on macOS and Safari had quite a lead. I'd also be curious, being based on WebKit, how much faster it will actually be on macOS vs Safari?

I dropped speed as a focus point on Waterfox after compilation flags started making less of a difference compared to the actual architectural changes Mozilla were making for Firefox.

> Privacy etc

I think comparing to other major browsers such as Chrome the points are valid, but against Safari I'm not convinced it holds up as much. I know there is some telemetry related to Safari, but privacy is a big selling point for Safari as well and I'd be curious to see actual comparisons to that?

Safari includes iCloud Privacy Relay (MPR based on MASQUE[2]) and Oblivious DNS[3] - arguably two very valuable features that a company at a scale like Apple can subsidise.

The entire AI section also feels like trying to have it both ways as well. They criticise other browsers for rushing AI features, position themselves as the "secure" alternative, then immediately say they'll integrate AI "as it matures." This reads more like "we're behind on AI features" than a principled stance. If security is the concern, explain your threat model and what specific architectural decisions you're making differently? Currently Firefox has kept AI out of the "browser core" as it's been put, and I don't see them ever changing that.

Kudos that they have >2000 people paying for the browser directly, but I will say it doesn't excite me to see another closed source browser entering the market (I don't see any mention here of open-source apart from mention of WebKit being open source).

I do realise this is more a marketing post than an actual technical deep dive, but so much is just a rehash of every feature almost every modern web browser has?

I'll keep updating this comment as and when I can explore the browser itself a bit more.

[1] https://fujii.github.io/2019/07/05/webkit-on-windows/

[2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/masque/about/

[3] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3340301.3341128