The problem is that the users seem not to ask for it. To the contrary, they seek ways to opt out.

I don't want the AI to be front and center in my browser. I do want the AI, if present, be local, and be distributed among tools: a better reading mode, fuzzy search on the page that searches by meaning, recognizing text on images (and also make it searchable and selectable), creature comforts like that.

If I need to chat with an LLM, I want it to not be bound to my browser.

And yes, I want to never need to start Chromium because a rare specific site refuses to work correctly in Firefox. If AI can help with that, splendid! But I suspect something else may be needed more.

A browser user agent is a string of text that a web browser sends to a web server to identify itself and provide information about the browser's capabilities, such as its type, version, and the operating system it runs on.

This has nothing to do with what an AI “agent” is.

The problem with AI is privacy.

Firefox should be the browser that respects you privacy (the only one...). Integrating AI undermining the efforts of making it the privacy oriented browser.

For now the AI is forced and ridiculously complicated to disable (with new options in about:config poping in each new version). The promise to have an "disable all IA features" is still a promise.

The AI hate is unreasonably strong right now. People are acting like adding one feature they don't like or need to a browser is a borderline critical offense because it is an AI feature. I find it shocking how quickly the public in the US/EU developed this sort of hate towards one of the most interesting technology of the last decades.

> There are a lot of reasons to not like Mozilla

Correct.

> but it's crazy to be against them for AI.

Disagreed.

> A browser is literally a user agent.

In the same way that a car is literally just some wheels. It's overly-reductionist to the point of being adversarial.

> What well-funded org should be entrusted with making an open source agent for the user instead?

What does that have to do with the topic at hand? Maybe if you didn't try to strip the context (Mozilla, it's reputation, it's actions, it's incentives, and how this AI initiative conflicts with the userbase' expectations and references therein) all this would seem a lot less "crazy" even if you still disagree.

Mozilla's users aren't being unreasonable or irrational for voicing criticisms here.

Sure, there's plenty of blind-hate for AI. But even many of us that aren't don't like the way Mozilla is going about this for a number of very valid reasons/concerns well beyond "I don't like AI"

A browser is there for retrieving documents on behalf of the user, not to add its own spin to it. It's already bad with everyone and their dog wanted to abuse the user computation power with "apps" where it should be simple forms and listing.

"A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen."

We've got nowhere to go but up -- 2026 is sure to be the year of Firefox on the desktop

Here comes my favorite scary tale about Google killing Reader because the audience was too small. Sometimes it's not the size what matters.

It looks like that because it's a "stochastic parrot".

Is it though? To me the animal on logos used by Firefox [1] always looked more similar to a red fox [2] than a red panda. Note pointy nose with the bottom colored white. Even the latest logo that shows more of the side of the face lacks the kind of patterns distinctive of the red panda. The -fire part of the name seemed to be represented by the flaming tail, not the animal itself.

[1] https://logos-world.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Firefox-L...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_fox

David Revoy is the artist who made the painting, this is his blog. The "source" link is to be understood in the sense of open source. Unlike most artists, he shares the raw editor files he worked on, not just the final image. So you can learn something about his creative process if you want to.

Pleading in essays hasn't gotten the point across.

It's not exactly a template-meme, or whatever low-effort memes are called now (the ragefaces, the reaction gifs, the deep-fried slop).

I think something like xkcd comics or something similar has always been received well by the community. Given that it's a high-effort piece of content as a digital painting, I think it should be ok - or at least not treated like it's in the same bucket as memes.