Technology

The main use for AI that I've seen in my circles is a search engine replacement. Not because AI is a good search engine, but because search engines have largely become useless.

If Mozilla wants to cement their place, create a better search engine. It's how Google came to control a huge portion of the internet, and there's now a huge vacuum waiting for someone to replace what we lost.

I feel stupid for asking but what is an AI agentic browser even supposed to do? Search things based on your query? Well search bars have been a thing since forever. 🤷

very few who even touch AI for anything aside from docs or stats

Not even translation? That’s probably the biggest browser AI feature.

I think this is just panic from the higher ups at Mozilla who have no idea what in the fuck the company should be doing

It's not panic, it's consequence of networking and a very specific culture having formed for CEOs and such.

A bit like Silicon Valley tech bros, they think they are the chosen ones leading the charge and able to make decisions for all of us, sort of aristocracy.

So in their circles it's fashion now to play this "AI" thing.

And mechanisms to remove those fools from places they don't belong to and make them clean streets have rotten.

Usable and decentralized - well, you'll need some beyond-the-horizon planning for how the development of that will go on. Because 90s Web was kinda normal too, except there were future stages.

You need something that's usable almost from the beginning, but that is also usable for everything you haven't yet thought about. Something that allows any use, but doesn't limit any, even needed only by a handful of people, task.

You need universal open infrastructure. Something allowing to pool public service trackers, storage services, relay services, notification services, key services, search services, but tying them into specific applications on the client. Different applications, over the common high-level medium (of authors and messages and groups, for example ; perhaps subscriptions). And you need that to be untrusted and backed up by DHT and sneakernet as perfectly functional alternative ways for the same system. You need them all.

And you need means of development with higher common, basic level. You need something like Hypercard on the clients, so that development in this "alternative Web" were accessible in its full power. With "cards" shared like messages. That'd be similar to how we fetch different websites.

Messages and people and groups would have global identifiers, tied to cryptography. One could have sort of "permission rule" messages to be interpreted by clients to decide, during "replaying" a group with its messages, which action was valid and which wasn't, and what can this specific user do to the group at this specific moment.

There could be different types of messages, perhaps with references to "interpreter" messages containing scripts.

OK. That's just a pet dream of mine, but I don't yet have a full picture in my mind.

How wide of a margin could it possibly be when their market share is in the single digits?

Edit: I looked it up. Their market share is 2.3%.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

I took it to mean that newer AI browsers were taking mind-share, if not market-share. I think you're right that they're minuscule in terms of actual user numbers, perhaps because there are many of them now.

They just got a new CEO that is likely a tech bro that wants to follow Microsoft into the abyss.

Iirc aren't all iOS browsers just reskinned safari?

Widevine is the defacto standard proprietary technology for DRM-locked content. It's used by all the major streaming services like Netflix and Disney+. Without it, publishers would not make their content available to those platforms for fear of rampant piracy, especially for high quality and 4K content. I guess Widevine requires some sort of vetted relationship with any browser that wants to use their tech.

Their deal with Google for Widevine is separate from Mozilla, basically.