Mozilla's pivot to AI first browsing raises fundamental questions about what a browser should be. Waterfox won't include them. The browser's job is to serve you, not think for you.
Mozilla’s new CEO recently announced their vision for the future: positioning Mozilla as “the world’s most trusted software company” with AI at its centre. As someone who has spent nearly 15 years building and maintaining Waterfox, I understand the existential pressure Mozilla faces. Their lunch is being eaten by AI browsers. Alphabet themselves reportedly see the writing on the wall, developing what appears to be a new browser separate from Chrome. The threat is real, and I have genuine sympathy for their position.
But I believe Mozilla is making a fundamental mistake.
The Asterisk Matters
Let’s be clear about what we’re talking about. “AI” has become a catch-all term that to me, obscures more than it reveals. Machine learning technologies like the Bergamot translation project offer real, tangible utility. Bergamot is transparent in what it does (translate text locally, period), auditable (you can inspect the model and its behavior), and has clear, limited scope, even if the internal neural network logic isn’t strictly deterministic.
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.
But it’s important to note I do find LLMs have utility, measurably so. But here I am talking in the context of a web browser and the fundamental scepticism I have toward it in that context.
What Is a Browser For?
A browser is meant to be a user agent, more specifically, your agent on the web. It represents you, acts on your behalf, and executes your instructions. It’s called a user agent for a reason.
When you introduce a potential LLM layer between the user and the web, you create something different: “a user agent user agent” of sorts. The AI becomes the new user agent, mediating and interpreting between you and the browser. It reorganises your tabs. It rewrites your history. It makes decisions about what you see and how you see it, based on logic you cannot examine or understand.
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