In my opinion, the goal of increasing automation has gone from a useful relief of labor to an obsession that will lead nowhere. Globally, this seems to be reflected only by increasing resource use and increasing ignorance of the natural world by producing purely for the sake of making consumerism more efficient.
AI assistant in a browser...it's getting ridiculous.
The browser will be even less under our control than before, surveillance will go to the next level, and your private data will land in even more obscure places than before.
Ridiculous maybe, but by no means pointless. “AI” will be the end of ad blockers and a whole host of measures to secure a remnant of privacy on the net.
there are several AI features I would absolutely love to see integrated into the browser, primarily, content filtering with my own custom criteria.
for example, I don't want to see yuppie shit on news.ycombinator.com. right now, I have a userscript that filters out links from the worst offenders (e.g. newyorker), but every day, there are many more that shit up the front page and waste my time and attention. this could be solved with a very low parameter LLM by asking it to evaluate whether the text is related to science and technology or not.
hell, even images could be filtered with vision models, including local ones. I'd fucking love to hide a few broad categories of images from my sight, e.g. clickbaity youtube thumbnails (DeArrow helps to a degree)
what is ridiculous about it? I read the gist of the articles I am mildly curious about by summarizing them on the spot. If it sounds more interesting than I thought I read it in full. Saves me time. Sometimes I ask one or two clarifying questions as well. Arc browser has this built in and I find it very useful.
I summarize the transcripts of 20+ min. long youtube videos to get the gist, which is what I am interested in anyways. Saves me time. (this is something I built custom for my use, maybe there are other options for this)
It is not an obsession. I always wanted something, someone that could do this for me, and now we have it.
AI assistant in a browser makes sense if it's acting as an extension of your memory - for example you're browsing some items you're considering buying, and the assistant creates a summary spreadsheet with their comparison, that you can later look at, etc. Could be useful for things like real estate.
Most AI tools I've seen however can't seem to get away from the classic "prompt -> response" chat UI.
Some ai features make a lot of sense. Automatically organizing tabs is amazing for helping me not get lost in a sea of tabs. Longer form auto complete saves me time, at least on mobile. I used to rely on Reddit comments to summarize trashy low quality articles to give me the primary points. Now that I've been reddit sober for a while, it's been helpful to have my browser do that summarization for me, helping me stay away from Reddit.
I can't say I will use every ai feature, but so far they've been helpful. I don't feel more ignorant. What I think makes people ignorant is outsourcing labor tasks like a cleaner for the home, a gardener for the yard, or handyman for basic repairs. I don't think those are necessarily wrong to outsource though.
What’s wrong with AI in a browser? Each SaaS app you use in a browser has or will have AI. Is the AI built by each of those ridiculous? If not, then what is ridiculous about a browser striving to create a general AI than can apply to any site you visit within that browser?
Unrelated but about Brave and interesting to me: I recently found myself having a large upstream project that I need to maintain some custom patches for, and there's a need for deeper customizations and I worry that my rudimentary system of applying .patch files will turn into an unmaintainable nightmare of merge conflicts after every rebase. I was thinking about possible solutions, and it occurred to me that Brave being Chromium-based must have this same challenge but an order of magnitude more difficult, so I looked for their code to see how they solved this issue.
It's pretty interesting! They do basically the same thing for core Chromium, applying a (big) set of patches[1].
Incidentally, I'd be interested to hear any ideas/approaches to this problem. I'm guessing if there was something clearly better, Brave would be doing it, but it seems like there should be a better way even if I can't think of one.
Something I would like to mention, as a dev on Brave, is that patches are considered a last resort. If there are patches, we try to keep them lightweight - like patch to have Chromium create the Brave version of the object (something we can restrict to one line).
What you'll notice more often is a folder we have called `chromium_src`. This directory mirrors the directory structure for Chromium under `src` and the build system will look for matches. If there's a file with the same name under `chromium_src`, it'll prefer that one. That file then does what it needs to differently and then includes the original file.
This approach helps keep things much more lightweight - but it has challenges too. If code fails to apply (file that `chromium_src` is matching gets renamed, etc) it can be hard to detect. This is where you'd want to have a test to catch that.
The first browser to index (locally preferably) my browsing history and help me extract/surface useful information from previous pages I have visited will win me over. So far they all seem to be offering the same kind of AI that will crawl the current page and extract information from it.
I guess this can be done with an extension that would work on all browsers. Like parse each page, save compressed text that supports fast decompressing (maybe even images), build tf/idf + cosine distance for verbantim searches & save in db and maybe add some ai to enhance the search. The next steps would be custom ai searches like "show me pages related to x", it'll quickly decompress the pages & apply the search for each but there are different approaches, like maybe saving history on a server and apply some ai model with huge context or do an initial filtering with tf/idf and apply ai after that.
Isn't Brave supposed to be a security first browser? I thought this was their whole thing? So why are they using a non-local LLM? Forget your thoughts on AI for a second, and just consider what has to be done for these tasks. If you ask it to summarize the page (like the example) it has so send the information elsewhere, off your computer. Same with the PDF. This really undermines security and creates an way that exposes all your data. Their paid service even uses Claude so not entirely controlled by them either if you fully trust them to E2EE that data and then not store it.
So according to Brave, using their AI leaks:
- your searches
- What you're viewing
- What you're typing
Did Brave just turn into the Chrome that it once so hated? I guess it is just orange chrome.
Different topic, but can someone talk about which browser they use now? I’ve used Chrome for the past N years with ublock Origin, but recently I’ve been getting some ads on Youtube. Also some websites just didn’t work in Chrome. I switched to Brave a week ago and things seem ok, but it’s a weird browser with Tor built in, and also Spotify.com always crashes with a Memory problem. Does anyone have any thoughts on browser preference these days?
I use brave exclusively for years - zero problems - seems faster to me than other options. Also use it with Spotify and can't remember ever having an issue (brave on mac if it makes a difference).
Yes it has Tor built-in, but you don't ever need to use it - it's just there in case you do (I have never needed it myself).
I hated Firefox for the longest time, because it was a sub-par browser with a cult following, but since Chrome ruined any competition I went through several chrome-based browsers (never Chrome itself due to severe lack of basic functionality) and am slowly ending up with FF as my primary browser. My standards have lowered substantially, and firefox is just good enough. Always using more browsers and trying something on the side, but while there are some nice features to be found, there is always a major drawback. I had high hopes with Vivaldi, but it's a broken mess that I can't recommend.
I know what you're gonna say, but forgetting everything else there's one important factor you should consider. Chrome has a (near) monopoly and resolving that monopoly requires using non-chromium browsers.
But on top of that, Firefox is fast, secure, has privacy in mind, and a rich set of add-ons. But most of that is true for any browser you pick. There really aren't big differences between browsers and often we're making mountains out of mole hills when we compare. But I'll say, firefox has ad-blocking on mobile (plugins on mobile, like 800 exist)
Been using Brave since I think around 2019? Very happy with it, love the integration of IPFS, ENS, Unstoppable domains, and the removal of all the Google trash present in Chromium. Fully end-to-end encrypted sync as well. Don't use Tor much, but it's great that it's easily accessible if I need it.
Brave or Firefox with UBO a few userscripts, and a lightly tweaked user.js/userChrome for nice-looking tree-style tabs, in no particular order.
Haven't had Chrome installed on any of my machines for ~5 years at this point.
Not the biggest fan of Brave (especially considering this latest AI crap, and all the weird crypto stuff), but I'm satisfied with it overall. FF still remains #1 in my eyes and usage, but has to be tweaked to my liking.
I use Brave for YouTube and things that require Chrome and Safari for everything else. Oh… Firefox for when I want to load Facebook. Like once a quarter.
Firefox on Linux because touch-pad gestures for forward and back navigation don't work on Chromium browsers and also Firefox gives me a nice vertical tab setup with Tab Center Reborn + custom userChrome.css
A tip I found recently in about:config
browser.compact.show=true to bring back the compact layout option, results in very good use of space on laptop along with vertical tabs and also Firefox allows the vertical tabs to be moved to right side which is nice.
If ads, in particular on YouTube, are the problem, anything Chromium-based is probably only going to get worse and worse (see [1] and [2]). So that basically leaves you with Firefox and Safari.
I work for Mozilla (speaking for myself, of course), so I'll leave you to guess which I'd recommend :P
I still use Chrome, mostly because I much prefer Chrome dev tools over any other dev tool options. And I have a bunch of custom browser extensions I've made for Chrome.
I haven't had issues with uBlock Origin - very occasionally an ad will seep through on YouTube, maybe once every 6 months, but when that happens I refresh the page and the ad is gone.
Safari is the new IE and Firefox I've always found to just be alright - for sure not as big of a fan of Firefox dev tools over Chrome dev tools. And Firefox scrolling behavior can be annoying.
I use Chrome for work on all my devices, and avoid any non-work browsing on it. It's an attempt to keep the two halves of my life apart.
For all personal browsing and projects, I generally used Firefox, but switched over a couple years ago to using Brave on the phone, and am kind of half-transitioned from Firefox to Brave on desktop. I've been a Firefox user forever, but it's slowly losing me.
I've been using Brave for a few years now. It's speedy enough, and does a great job of blocking ads and trackers. I've never had issues with Spotify and I like the auto-dismissing of cookie banners too.
Cromite[0] is the best on Android, it's a privacy-oriented open source patchset on top of Chromium.
Cromite has a desktop build, but it's a bit more experimental than the mobile build, so you can use Ungoogled Chromium[1] instead. Ungoogled is also a privacy-oriented open source patchset on top of Chromium. Check the beta flags to enable some more interesting features like getClientRect anti-fingerprinting measures (unfortunately breaks some React-based sites that go into infinite re-render loop).
Both of these browsers selectively include patches from Brave, but they are community-oriented builds so imo more trustworthy than Brave, which continues to package various shady anti-features and always will because it's backed by a for-profit company.
LibreWolf[2] is the nicest Firefox-based one for desktop, I think. It's pretty hardcore, though, I most only use it to visit mainstream social media sites.
I tried a bunch of the Firefox-based ones on mobile and none of them clicked for me. Cromite is just too slick on Android. Put the address bar at the bottom and off you go. Only downside is no online syncing of tabs and bookmarks, but meh. You can save all open tabs to bookmark bar in one hit then export your bookmarks, send the file through whatever E2EE channel you want to your other device, import and reopen them again.
I use Safari for personal browsing, Firefox for work stuff (because my work machine is Windows). Firefox with uBlock Origin works quite well at keeping me mostly safe from ads.
I use Brave. It's a fine browser. The ad-blocking is almost on par with uBlock Origin. And I like its built-in Tor, BTW. I don't have any issues with Spotify.com, and it doesn't crash on me. I'm on a Macbook Pro M2 Max, and I also use it on a Galaxy S21U (Android).
I tried using Firefox on and off, but it's sadly technically inferior to Chromium, and that gap has gotten worse. It still has things that it does better than Chromium browsers, like history sync actually working, or reader view. But those are few and far between. And Multi-Account Containers, one of its apparent advantages, comes with the caveat that Firefox doesn't have usable profiles and the security for its extensions is worse (e.g., no click to activate, no ability to disable extensions in certain containers).
What finally pushed me to Chromium is the poor PWA support in Firefox. On Android, it has bugs that haven't been fixed for years (never mind the poor performance that's well known), and on desktop they've basically dropped the ball.
I use several PWAs. If it's a chat app, I use it as a PWA. Also Spotify, since you mentioned it ... as I like having better sandboxing and ad-blocking in my apps. On Android, too.
Everyone seems to use LLMs the wrong way. Instead of using them to do useful work (for example: static code analysis with automatic fixing of found bugs, writing high-quality documentation), they create useless dumb chatbots. Waiting for someone to integrate a chatbot into a calculator.
The last things I'd want an AI to do is "fixing" bugs, closely followed by writing documentation. It will confidently make things worse and break them.
I tried it, it's fairly good, solves a lot of the issues of not knowing the context that chat is using, but so far the responses are super lengthy. Sometimes they are even longer than the article itself haha
A lot of this new wave of "privacy focused" "we're not Chrome" browsers are A) just Chrome and B) venture capital funded. They're cool and fun now, but their ultimate goal is to burn VC money in a giant advertising pyre in hopes of pulling enough of the market away from Chrome to justify their existence. They'll either fail and burn out, or succeed and promptly enshittify to be even worse than Chrome. Please just use Firefox.
I really don't get this hate Brave gets on HN and other tech forums. It's a de-Googled Chromium fork which retains support for Manifest v2 extensions and has a bunch of neat extra features like first-party ad-blocking, an (underused and probably at this point should be considered a failed experiment) advertising network where users are paid for the ads they consume, Tor-integration, Web3 integrations.
Yes, it defaults to enabling their advertising features, but that's just it, a default setting, it isn't hard to disable if you don't want to "take part of the experiment".
vouaobrasil|2 years ago
AI assistant in a browser...it's getting ridiculous.
tempodox|2 years ago
Ridiculous maybe, but by no means pointless. “AI” will be the end of ad blockers and a whole host of measures to secure a remnant of privacy on the net.
rplnt|2 years ago
If only. This wave of AI integrations is primarily focused on pleasing (potential) investors.
123yawaworht456|2 years ago
for example, I don't want to see yuppie shit on news.ycombinator.com. right now, I have a userscript that filters out links from the worst offenders (e.g. newyorker), but every day, there are many more that shit up the front page and waste my time and attention. this could be solved with a very low parameter LLM by asking it to evaluate whether the text is related to science and technology or not.
hell, even images could be filtered with vision models, including local ones. I'd fucking love to hide a few broad categories of images from my sight, e.g. clickbaity youtube thumbnails (DeArrow helps to a degree)
dkarras|2 years ago
I summarize the transcripts of 20+ min. long youtube videos to get the gist, which is what I am interested in anyways. Saves me time. (this is something I built custom for my use, maybe there are other options for this)
It is not an obsession. I always wanted something, someone that could do this for me, and now we have it.
realharo|2 years ago
Most AI tools I've seen however can't seem to get away from the classic "prompt -> response" chat UI.
Almondsetat|2 years ago
surajrmal|2 years ago
I can't say I will use every ai feature, but so far they've been helpful. I don't feel more ignorant. What I think makes people ignorant is outsourcing labor tasks like a cleaner for the home, a gardener for the yard, or handyman for basic repairs. I don't think those are necessarily wrong to outsource though.
prng2021|2 years ago
dghughes|2 years ago
freedomben|2 years ago
It's pretty interesting! They do basically the same thing for core Chromium, applying a (big) set of patches[1].
Incidentally, I'd be interested to hear any ideas/approaches to this problem. I'm guessing if there was something clearly better, Brave would be doing it, but it seems like there should be a better way even if I can't think of one.
[1] https://github.com/brave/brave-core/tree/master/patches
bsclifton|2 years ago
What you'll notice more often is a folder we have called `chromium_src`. This directory mirrors the directory structure for Chromium under `src` and the build system will look for matches. If there's a file with the same name under `chromium_src`, it'll prefer that one. That file then does what it needs to differently and then includes the original file.
This approach helps keep things much more lightweight - but it has challenges too. If code fails to apply (file that `chromium_src` is matching gets renamed, etc) it can be hard to detect. This is where you'd want to have a test to catch that.
Another person shared - but here's a link to our patching documentation: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Patching-Chromiu...
You'll notice the actual patching itself is introduced with the caveat:
SushiHippie|2 years ago
They document how developers should "rebase" chromium:
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Chromium-rebases...
And it looks like way more work than doing it with git via
_the_special_|2 years ago
Moldoteck|2 years ago
castles|2 years ago
Ollama /JUST/ recently added some (fast) embeddings models: https://ollama.com/library/nomic-embed-text
Sabinus|2 years ago
tiltowait|2 years ago
freediver|2 years ago
andybak|2 years ago
That's when I quit.
(It was a simple sheet. I said "list the names of all items where [column name] is false". There was about 60 rows)
classified|2 years ago
godelski|2 years ago
So according to Brave, using their AI leaks:
- your searches
- What you're viewing
- What you're typing
Did Brave just turn into the Chrome that it once so hated? I guess it is just orange chrome.
lupusreal|2 years ago
beAbU|2 years ago
donkeyboy|2 years ago
polyvisual|2 years ago
The only issue I have is that the sync between my iphone, macbook, windows can sometimes get out of sync.
ejb999|2 years ago
Yes it has Tor built-in, but you don't ever need to use it - it's just there in case you do (I have never needed it myself).
rplnt|2 years ago
godelski|2 years ago
I know what you're gonna say, but forgetting everything else there's one important factor you should consider. Chrome has a (near) monopoly and resolving that monopoly requires using non-chromium browsers.
But on top of that, Firefox is fast, secure, has privacy in mind, and a rich set of add-ons. But most of that is true for any browser you pick. There really aren't big differences between browsers and often we're making mountains out of mole hills when we compare. But I'll say, firefox has ad-blocking on mobile (plugins on mobile, like 800 exist)
rekoil|2 years ago
web3-is-a-scam|2 years ago
nyarlathotep_|2 years ago
Haven't had Chrome installed on any of my machines for ~5 years at this point.
Not the biggest fan of Brave (especially considering this latest AI crap, and all the weird crypto stuff), but I'm satisfied with it overall. FF still remains #1 in my eyes and usage, but has to be tweaked to my liking.
timeon|2 years ago
andyjohnson0|2 years ago
dwighttk|2 years ago
PKop|2 years ago
A tip I found recently in about:config
browser.compact.show=true to bring back the compact layout option, results in very good use of space on laptop along with vertical tabs and also Firefox allows the vertical tabs to be moved to right side which is nice.
Vinnl|2 years ago
I work for Mozilla (speaking for myself, of course), so I'll leave you to guess which I'd recommend :P
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-oppos...
soundnote|2 years ago
65|2 years ago
I haven't had issues with uBlock Origin - very occasionally an ad will seep through on YouTube, maybe once every 6 months, but when that happens I refresh the page and the ad is gone.
Safari is the new IE and Firefox I've always found to just be alright - for sure not as big of a fan of Firefox dev tools over Chrome dev tools. And Firefox scrolling behavior can be annoying.
kbelder|2 years ago
For all personal browsing and projects, I generally used Firefox, but switched over a couple years ago to using Brave on the phone, and am kind of half-transitioned from Firefox to Brave on desktop. I've been a Firefox user forever, but it's slowly losing me.
shever73|2 years ago
alisonatwork|2 years ago
Cromite has a desktop build, but it's a bit more experimental than the mobile build, so you can use Ungoogled Chromium[1] instead. Ungoogled is also a privacy-oriented open source patchset on top of Chromium. Check the beta flags to enable some more interesting features like getClientRect anti-fingerprinting measures (unfortunately breaks some React-based sites that go into infinite re-render loop).
Both of these browsers selectively include patches from Brave, but they are community-oriented builds so imo more trustworthy than Brave, which continues to package various shady anti-features and always will because it's backed by a for-profit company.
LibreWolf[2] is the nicest Firefox-based one for desktop, I think. It's pretty hardcore, though, I most only use it to visit mainstream social media sites.
I tried a bunch of the Firefox-based ones on mobile and none of them clicked for me. Cromite is just too slick on Android. Put the address bar at the bottom and off you go. Only downside is no online syncing of tabs and bookmarks, but meh. You can save all open tabs to bookmark bar in one hit then export your bookmarks, send the file through whatever E2EE channel you want to your other device, import and reopen them again.
[0] https://github.com/uazo/cromite
[1] https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
[2] https://librewolf.net/
alanjdev|2 years ago
AzzyHN|2 years ago
Delumine|2 years ago
bad_user|2 years ago
I tried using Firefox on and off, but it's sadly technically inferior to Chromium, and that gap has gotten worse. It still has things that it does better than Chromium browsers, like history sync actually working, or reader view. But those are few and far between. And Multi-Account Containers, one of its apparent advantages, comes with the caveat that Firefox doesn't have usable profiles and the security for its extensions is worse (e.g., no click to activate, no ability to disable extensions in certain containers).
What finally pushed me to Chromium is the poor PWA support in Firefox. On Android, it has bugs that haven't been fixed for years (never mind the poor performance that's well known), and on desktop they've basically dropped the ball.
I use several PWAs. If it's a chat app, I use it as a PWA. Also Spotify, since you mentioned it ... as I like having better sandboxing and ad-blocking in my apps. On Android, too.
codedokode|2 years ago
zilti|2 years ago
CaffeinatedDev|2 years ago
bzmrgonz|2 years ago
surcap526|2 years ago
bozhark|2 years ago
greymalik|2 years ago
CaffeinatedDev|2 years ago
Also I think they have loads of funding, and are factoring all of this into user acquisition costs
soundnote|2 years ago
temp0826|2 years ago
surcap526|2 years ago
mcpar-land|2 years ago
ss64|2 years ago
rekoil|2 years ago
Yes, it defaults to enabling their advertising features, but that's just it, a default setting, it isn't hard to disable if you don't want to "take part of the experiment".
pcdoodle|2 years ago