What’s not changing though is that most of their focus will be on integrating AI which most people don’t want.
I agree that AI chatbots are absolutely useless and have no place in a browser, but out of the three ML features in the screenshot, one is great for blind people, and another one is great for making the web more multilingual, so their usefulness is quite self-evident. Regarding ethics, at least for the last one it’s using a local model, and was trained using open-source datasets.[1]
What makes so-called “AI” bad is not the amount of users that can benefit from it, but how useful it is to the people that do use the feature, which usually means having experts tailor machine learning unto a single purpose.
I personally use the translation feature at least once a week when looking at news article that are not in English, and now I’m using a lot to translate Japanese webpages to plan a holiday there, so I’m very happy that Mozilla has invested time abd collaborated with universities to make this feature, I wish other people were less flippant about it just because it has “AI” in its name.
[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/06/training-efficient-neural-network-models-for-firefox-translations/
Of the ones I’ve tried that are fully open-source is the best ons regarding UX functionality.
For example, Matrix is a UX nightmare, with many different clients implementing different features, or having issues if a non-default login mode is used, ending in people getting locked out after the browser logged them out because they forgot to copy a key when they were logged in.
Others like rocketchat are opencore like matter most, which means they can do the switcheroo.
The things I would care the most when checking this kind of service are: