Mozilla is acting unethically by obfuscating what's on offer here and overstating the privacy and security properties that can be achieved.
It's doubly unfortunate because simple translations are completely reasonable to do with cpu inference.
And practically every country has lower privacy standards for data that crosses borders.
People here can be privacy aware and well informed and avoid these data slurps-- perhaps go dig up the hidden settings to completely disable it or add firewalls so an errant keypress won't upload your browsing history. That's good.
But anything I share with another person or put on some webpage for another-- perhaps highly trusted person like a doctor or lawyer-- is exposed to them uploading it perhaps completely unwittingly (e.g. they fell for the exaggerated privacy claims) or due to an innocent misclick.
Normalizing privacy fails like this undermines the ability of even the most informed and aware people to opt-out.
For a while that was even the majority view, but it never quite made sense to me.
What is Mistral bringing to the table for Firefox? There is nothing "open" about this in any way.
FF needs to either profile itself as the no-ai-by-default browser, or it needs to just have OpenAI/Anthropic/Mistral/DeepSeek bid for the default spot - like they do with Google search.
I'm happy Mistral exists. I'm happy Firefox exists.
None of this shows any synergy i'm excited about.
Maybe FF believes there is a group of users who are still on the fence about using FF - until they can pitch them a first-class build-in AI story that goes with the anti-establishment vibe?
I somehow doubt that's the pitch & potential userbase they should be focussing on.
yeah ?
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
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.
I feel it's wrong to tell users that it's important and normal to relinquish all control of their—extremely personal—life history, in bulk, in plaintext, to strangers.
I agree wholeheartedly that remote server inference is super useful, and that local inference falls far short on many tasks. (I have no objection at all to Mozilla providing a cloud inference feature).
What I don't buy is that we must ask users to redraw their personal boundaries so that their most intimate life details, and remote frontier-model inference, overlap. They do not need to overlap.
You can accomplish a lot with private local inference with the smallest of models; and you can accomplish a lot on remote servers which aren't privy to everything. If some convenience is lost by not combining the two, well, so be it. I'm sure most people would agree, if all of this was laid out plainly.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in/overview?_gl=1...
How it's any better? Small companies can be bought by big companies. French government is as capable of trampling over their citizen's privacy the moment they feel they need it as US government is. And putting a squeeze on a small startup is way easier than on a major cloud company (not that either is particularly hard). Also, OpenAI used to be an idealistic non-profit one day too, then it started to smell trillions and all that went of of the window.
> is not going to be nearly as capable as an off-device inference system.
I rarely need PhD-level research into my browsing history. I'm not going to solve millennium problems on my bookmarks. The tasks that I will realistically need are well within capacity of most very basic local models. Maybe they'd be a bit slower, who cares.
so then don't add it in as highly advertised feature until it is. doing things right and living up to your core values is a lot to expect from businesses these days but, at minimum, a non-profit foundation should be able to live up to these goals, yes?
It's certainly not as capable as something that needs a high memory gpu for quick performance, but I was quite impressed with it for what it is.
(and fwiw, I had it translate your last paragraph to German, then used google translate back to english: "I wish they had handled this clearly and transparently via an opt-in mechanism—not enabled by default—that explains what Mistral is (not a major American cloud company, but a relatively small French startup) and that your prompts and LLM activities are sent to their servers. I also wish there were documentation explaining how the data is handled and stored in a way that inspires trust.").
Read this again, slowly.
> 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.
But I do, especially when the choice is either having it locally, remotely, or not at all. I also indeed do nit my CPU used for such, but GPU. I could even run a 8 GB model on a remote (but still local network, on-prem) NPU.
There's one caveat though: if you are gaming and browsing.
Then just allow it to be enabled on high end devices? But it must be local only. As hardware advances and people upgrade, more people will be able to turn on the feature.
Well, you kind of are though.
> I wish they had just done this with a very clear up front opt in
If a local model is not realistic, then this should not have even been an in-your-face opt-in, but at most some add-on.
Of course, their telemetry isn't even opt-out, so even the opt-out for the Mistral thing is kind of disingenuous on their part, since they get a bunch of information from us in other ways.
(sigh) Ah, Mozilla has gone down such a dark path over the years. Too bad.
I acknowledge that this is already the case, to some extent. The cheapest laptops at Best Buy are crammed with the most preinstalled malware. That's been the case for, what, 25 years? But you've always been able to wipe that cheap laptop and make it into a much more capable, trustworthy machine.
Well, assuming LLMs do become a pervasive part of the computing experience, what happens to the cheap laptops? Do all computers get more expensive to accommodate local inference? Does the rift between the everyday user's experience and the savvy user's experience grow even wider than it already is? Neither outcome seems good for the average joe who just needs to check his email.
> 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.
> 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.
> Smart Window infers information about you based on your interactions with the assistant and your Firefox browsing activity, including websites you have visited. This may include activity outside of Smart Window (such as in classic windows)...
In fact, If I were asked to explain the opposite of private, I might give this kind of design as an example.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33792447 ("Firefox Translations: Translate websites in your browser without using the cloud (addons.mozilla.org)")
And look: they were 100% cognizant, then, of how vital local processing is to privacy:
> "...called Project Bergamot. The ultimate goal of this consortium was to build a set of neural machine translation tools that would enable Mozilla to develop a website translation add-on that operates locally, i.e. the engines, language models and in-page translation algorithms would need to reside and be executed entirely in the user’s computer, so none of the data would be sent to the cloud, making it entirely private."
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/local-translation-add-on... ("Mozilla releases local machine translation tools as part of Project Bergamot")
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.
Is it really ? LLM take lot of ram and drain battery. People run Firefox on low end computer.
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.
But they do link to a page describing the "smart window" which goes into a bit more detail:
It has a number of words circling around the topic, words relating to privacy and local storage; and all of them avoid communicating the main point. Some seem to mislead about it. How, for example, can you say
> "They’re stored on your device, not on Mozilla’s servers,"
And never explain in plain English "...but also we need to upload them to Mozilla's (& Mistral's) servers" at any point in the advert?
The first time I read this page, I myself couldn't figure out if it was about local inference or not; and I was actively looking for the answer. That's how opaque this is.
I remember using a small model for autocomplete, I think it was Qwen 2.5 Coder 3B way back, on a laptop with 32 GB of RAM and a 13th Gen Intel i7 CPU. It made the fans spin up and loaded things so much (Ollama back then) that it was largely unusable for doing software development at the same time. I don't want inference anywhere near my personal computing devices (same in regards to phones, really, I don't want the power usage that'll just help degrade the battery faster). Also most small models just really suck, unless you have trained them on a very specific task, but then they suck at everything that is not that task.
Then again sending browser history online also sucks, unless you're into that kind of thing.
Mozilla does a great job of doing all sorts of things that help Google, these days…
That is a great phrase.
Imagine for a moment the complaints that would arise the very next day because their browser is now revving up their laptop fans and hoarding precious RAM.
Local models aren't yet light enough to handle the required processing at the lowest end, so Mozilla chose the most responsible stewards they could find. There is no news here.
there are good providers available, i think it should become the standard.
two high quality companies: near.ai tinfoil.sh
docker run ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:v0.11.3
docker run mcr.microsoft.com/playwright/mcp:latest
Also supports Lemonade and Ollama, which are.
Come on, man, I’m going to choose you’re just Posting saying shit like this.
Because it’s useful. Because almost nobody has the hardware to run a local model with nearly reasonable performance (in intelligence + speed + RAM usage).
Not everything is perfect. At least they’re building things.
So, you may actually have very good performance with local model. Just not yet on *every* device. So the Mozilla strategy here feel very reasonable. A Cloud provider specialised in local models, to be able to switch once local models will be quick enough on most devices.
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)
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.
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.
Reading HN, I 100% understood “private” to be marketing copy for “local inference”.
How else could the information be kept private?
I begrudgingly suppose that there is precedent for the usage, like Apple’s Private Relay, but I really don’t think they are comparable.
- browser.smartwindow.apiKey
- browser.smartwindow.customEndpoint
- browser.smartwindow.model
Adding my http endpoint (using LAN IP) seems to work, getting around the check in the regular settings.
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.
"...working together to bring Mistal’s scientific innovations to consumers around the world"
A quick proof-read wouldn't have gone amiss here.
I also fail to see how privacy is enhanced by sending private browsing data to a cloud service which then forwards it to an LLM, in addition to storing 'memories' and dredging through my browser history.
Guess we just using buzzwords for marketing and have no morality or principles anymore. Bad timeline and people you should just not trust.
SeaMonkey exists. But, I'm sure Mozilla will fuck it up if they ever remember it exists.
I don't care what their data retention policies are, I don't want my data to be sent to others full stop.
Private means it's mine, it's under my control. Handing it to third parties is not private.
I agree on the privacy concerns but this could be useful with a local model, I think.
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.
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.
I know a lot of foreigner for which the feature is really useful (local department store, booking a doctor appointment etc.)
"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
Remember when it was the fastest thing around and simple?
Now it's an also ran. AI doesn't help here. Focus on what made it great in the beginning, make it the most performant browser around. Put Fable on the case if need be. Do the browser thing well!
And also yes, I’ve tried Dia and OpenAI’s thing and I can’t for the life of me figure out what to do with the feature.
And then it dawns on me what I really want is a modernized bookmarks system…
Now add the need for external inference because very few random consumers are going to buy a $3000 laptop when they can get the $600 laptop at Best Buy, and that trend further escalates.
The amount of work that can be done funded by foundations and free work is nowhere close to what people want.
"If the product is free then you are the product" is supposed to be a cautionary observation, not an axiomatic proscription.
Does anyone actually trust companies that offer paid services to not harvest their data? Whenever I see this trope I think to myself that whatever lack of regulation, oversight and enforcement lead to that being okay would equally allow for them to both take my money and harvest all my of data anyways.
This is akin to people who criticise socialised medicine or services and pejoratively characterize supporters as just wanting "free stuff", as if the concept of collective payment is naive or something
librewolf devs are just more honest about it
it's an extremely sparse MOE, so there is some odds of acceptable performance using a smaller in-memory cache and the rest on flash. ... I don't have a setup to test that right now.
(Of course, if translation is all you want much smaller models will work. Ling-tiny can do summarization, dom manipulation, scripting, etc. too).
On a 8GB system with a SSD it might be a bit slow due to having to keep experts on disk, but perfectly usable. On fast systems it may well be faster than the network round trip for many tasks.
What specific LLM and how much RAM does it take up to load? How does it run on somebody's 8GB RAM $600 laptop they bought from Best Buy? What pp/s and token/s rate on that hardware?
How much ram has a fair amount of flexibility since MoE can be kept on flash and swapped in at a performance cost, and depending on how small a context you can use.
?:
>marketing pages aren't candid enough to clearly explain
Begging the purists to run away from Firefox at this point so they can stop wasting everyone's time. Your demands for examplarity and whining about money not going ONLY to firefox and jerking yourselves on Servo was not enough, now you want to restrict the browser to owners of an RTX5080 if they want to use it?
This is an untested assumption in Silicon Valley. I suspect Apple is going to eat a lot of folks’ lunches.
The idea is obviously applicable to other search engines.
They're still 100% cognizant! And yet.
Meanwhile, if you CAN run these models locally, using your own hardware for inference is supported. It's a setting option.
I don't read this as offline ...
Pretty ironic then that here, Mozilla is specifically labeling their "we send it all to the cloud" service as "private."
I have no idea the extent to which any of that speaks to the Mozilla thing in this context, and local is preferable if that's achievable. And of course you should always do due diligence on what exactly is and isn't being promised when it comes to sending your data to the cloud, it certainly is possible to do that in privacy preserving ways. It's not a doubt about the technology so much as a question of institutional credibility.
Reading this as “Private Cloud Compute“ (PCC)
(Not iCloud Private Relay, the VPN)
It's better for Europeans because the company in question is European and so will not export their data to New Jersey. And because any success it has will presumably better benefit France and Europe.
There aren't many government institutions in New Jersey that would take a lot of interest in anything Frenchmen are doing. There are a lot of institutions in France that would be interested in anything Frenchmen are doing, if it contradicts what the French government wants to be happening. The main threat to citizen's privacy always comes from the government closest to them, the government overseas has its own citizens to worry about and pays much less attention to foreign citizens on foreign land. There could be exceptions, true, but as a rule, if you look into New Jersey, you'd sooner find mass surveillance of American citizens than mass surveillance of the French.
Same goes for commercial interests. If I want to run targeted ads in New Jersey, I want to have profiles of New Jersey people, not French people. So buying data from France in New Jersey would not be a routine occurrence, but buying local data would be.
Also, some shady TOS is also not enough to override the law in the EU, you have much more protection as a user here.
Nothing in GDPR prevents transfer or selling of personal data. True, there are hoops to be jumped to do that, both in terms of consent and documentation, but let's not pretend a lot of people would read the welcome banner and refuse to interact with a service because its legalese says "we'll sell you data and if you don't want us to, go away". Yes, selling the data becomes more expensive because you need to hire the lawyers to produce those welcome pages and regulatory compliance paperwork, but large corps have enough money for lawyers.
> Also, some shady TOS is also not enough to override the law in the EU
It doesn't need to override anything, as the law does not prohibit data collection or transfer. It only describes the hoops that need to be jumped to achieve it.
The DPA’s are short on capacity, sure, and large corps will try to fight the fines in court. But to describe it as “just hoops whilst allowing everything” is unfair.
This. I've come to view a startup as a company without a business model, doing everything to get acquired by a mega corp that will finally squeeze the juice out of the userbase
(The lack of a viable business model applies to some mega corps too)
If mozilla is doing things to send users down the path of doing this externally, they need to be much more upfront and transparent with the users about where their data is going, and not bury it in some terms/conditions that only nerds will hunt for.
Does that need an LLM at all?
Maybe it's LLM hype that will bring more powerful capabilities to the desktop?
Which I immediately disabled alongside their "improved" Nova design, cause it doesn't improve productivity. These are all distractions from web browsing. If they want to improve anything, they should work on their abysmal spell checker, but that's not shiny enough.
As long as cloud model are somewhat better in these things, it's good that users would have the option to use cloud models.
Who said anything about putting them aside? There would be a process and highly paid lawyers confirming that selling user data is only for the user's ultimate benefit, as it allows to provide awesome services to the users, and it all will be outlined in a 100-page privacy policy which you will be sure to read on each site you use, wouldn't you?
> But to describe it as “just hoops whilst allowing everything” is unfair.
Can you quote me the place where GDPR prohibits this? Not says something like "weigh user privacy" and "take adequate measures" and so on - which can always be resolved as "we weighed carefully and we took measures and we decided selling the data was awesome and users love it" - but explicitly and unambiguously prohibits the practice? If you don't find it - that description is exactly what it is.
Beside its mentioned 5 or 6 gb of ram.
People run Firefox on pentium with less than 8gb of ram, just 4 or 5 years ago 4gb computer were still extremely common. Even Microsoft sold its surface devices with 4gb of ram, I was dumb enough to buy one.
To give a counterpoint, you could disable it on those low end devices.
But then people would complain about the size, like what happened with Google Chrome embedded llm.
I think there wasn’t any bad choice, mistral was the safest.
Though low memory devices like 4-8gb probably does need specialized inference to give fair numbers.
> you could disable it on those low end devices
it's not like it does anything if you don't ask for it-- and good thing, because the privacy invasion would be all the worse if it did!
> mistral was the safest
Sending the user's confidential information to third parties while falsely suggesting that it is private can cause them irrecoverable harm.
An alternative is that a feature is slow for some users on slow hardware, and there is a setting to make it faster at the expense of privacy and security that they can switch on. The large body of users that find the default config fast enough have no reason to flip the switch.
> But then people would complain about the size, like what happened with Google Chrome embedded llm.
People or astroturf accounts? :P but having read some of the commentary on it there was some pretty weird takes, like generalized complaints about AI and people thinking google was using their computer to serve other people. Google's business model generally prevents correctly marketing the functionality in any case: it's not like they're going to make a proper pitch for how important it is for your privacy when the rest of their business is centered on hoovering everything up. Mozilla is not so constrained :P
Get over it gramps, things are changing. Mozilla spent ten years trying to mostly appeal to these people by staying very conservative, and it got them nothing but abuse and harassment from people not realising that staying stuck in the past is a death sentence for Mozilla.
You want to save Mozilla, burn down Google first. The ecosystem in which they are evolving isn't driven by them.
I say this as a person that uses firefox with ublock origin 99.5% of the time. It's better in my opinion than Chrome. I can at least easily turn off the enabled by default crap features. Like the advertising and sponsored news links on the default new tab page.
So here we go again for the millionth time: the big losses of Mozilla market share were approximately during the 2010s. The era of side bets on unique features is approximately the 2020s. The unique features didn't retroactively cause the market share losses of the 2010s.
Moreover, telling the market share story in terms of specific browser features misses the elephant in the room, which is that Google, with the world's most visited page, and a browser that's the installed default on over a billion devices, grew it's market share with a combination of web visability and dominance over the most used mobile platform. Mozilla could triple their budget and have the world's best browser experience, but it wouldn't make much of a dent against distribution defaults.
I would wager that the impact on market share is driven about 97% by Googles distribution advantage and 3% by aligning with user preferences on features and performance. If being a perfect browser led to market dominance, Opera would have already conquered the world back in 2012, but the economics of building a browser aren't always friendly to the good guys.
Firefox is frankly quite good right now, yet they still are losing or not gaining users.
I very much doubt trying weird things meaningfully changed their market share (aside from UI redesigns)
Now I still occasionaly install it along with ublock origin because there is no alternative, but I don't praise it anymore (or bother to install it for someone in the first place) - but rather bitch about how they also sneak in advertisement and spyware.
I think they get a lot of credit because they aren't Google and not enough push back
have you tried not using smart window (like you're currently doing)?
the rest of your post seems to hinge on some judgement you think I made about that
Uhhh... 85% of mozilla's revenue comes from Google via the search deal. In a theoretical scenario where a genie waved a magic wand tomorrow and google went "poof", disappearing, mozilla would be in a dire emergency for lack of revenue.