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  • Hacker News
  • 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

    by HelloUsername
  • 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.
    by SophiaVela
  • What is "AI browsing"?
    by pluc
  • 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.
    by Kuinox
  • Glad to use ~~Unmozilled Firefox~~ Librewolf
    by hollow-moe
  • Waterfox also works well!
    by herrherrmann
  • 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.

    by nosioptar
  • 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.
    by sajithdilshan
  • 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.

    by ulimn
  • 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.

    by poulpy123
  • 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.

    by RicDan
  • 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.
    by mugul
  • 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.

    by estebarb
  • 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.)

    by allan_s
  • 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)

    by mixcocam
  • It wouldn't be cool because it would still hand your data to Google.
    by amelius
  • 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.
    by Vinnl
  • That’s a great idea, and would be a much better feature than the unimaginative things Mozilla has been implementing. It’s so disappointing.
    by layer8
  • 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.

    > Powers context-aware search, page summaries, and memory retrieval across browser tabs.

    > Live in France and North America, with launches in the UK and Germany planned for later this year.

    > Built on a zero data retention policy; conversations are not saved on Mozilla’s servers by default.

    > Models are fine-tuned on regional languages, dialects, and local nuances to provide native-feeling responses.

    > Extends Mistral’s open-weight AI models directly to consumer web browsing alongside its enterprise offerings.

    by sourcecodeplz
  • 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.

    by karussell
  • 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.
    by mattstir
  • 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

    by peri-cl
  • Anyone else's extensions not work on support.mozilla.org?
    by nhinck3
  • the average user has nowhere near enough the capability to run a model fast enough to do useful things
    by yeoyeo42
  • > 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.

    by forgotaccount3
  • > This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference

    Is it really ? LLM take lot of ram and drain battery. People run Firefox on low end computer.

    by aucisson_masque
  • > 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.

    by JeremyNT
  • 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.

    by WhyNotHugo
  • 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.
    [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/smart-window/
    by julenx
  • 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.

    by walrus01