Same here. I find it useful, and it doesn't feel like it took several engineering years to build, diluting Mozilla's focus from "just building a browser".

Actually, whenever I hear people argue that that's all Mozilla should ever be doing, I wonder if they really mean a HTML and Javascript engine? While that's important, browsers are more than that; the chrome matters too.

I think a lot of folks feel that Firefox has outstanding features and issues that prevent more widespread adoption and current user happiness, as opposed to spending effort on AI features.

The average person doesn't care about an AI pane and that won't cause them to change browsers. Mozilla adding tab group support actively got non-tech people I know to switch, in addition to uBlock Origin and generally better privacy.

> The average person doesn't care about an AI pane and that won't cause them to change browsers.

Are you sure? "Summarize this website" seems pretty useful to the average person. It's the type of thing that will probably only make very few people switch to the only browser that supports it, but quite a few more would switch away from the only one that does not supprt it.

> Mozilla adding tab group support actively got non-tech people I know to switch [...]

And tab group autosuggestions and auto-naming are powered by on-device LLMs, as far as I remember. I personally don't use tab groups, but having them automatically arranged seems pretty useful.

> I wonder if they really mean a HTML and Javascript engine?

When I say that I mean investment into features in the browsers chrome, directly working on the website.

I also liked Pocket integration.

But the naive purists seem determined to team up with the genuinely evil in every walk of life, so Chrome monoculture seems inevitable.

And it's not like Google or Microsoft is going to do anything with AI that is worse than this, right?

Nobody would have an issue with those features being add-ons. In fact the Pocket integration is actually an add-on, silently downloaded on first run based on some online check.

If they’re gonna be bundling add-ons, I’d rather have them bundle something universally useful like uBlock Origin, but obviously they won’t do that because publishing a browser with an actually unique and useful selling point is not in their best interests.

I recall the original interface of Firefox was abandoned in favor of copying Chrome's with the rationale being that "it could be implemented as a third-party add-on" or some such.

"Why does the default interface get relegated to an extension when things like pocket and hello and AI chat are opt-out?" I ask, rhetorically.