Mozilla's Opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

^ didnt realize who posted the opposition - this is Jake Archibald, a longtime googler on the Chrome team, now joining Mozilla and posting opposition to the Chrome API. no wonder the criticism is so well argued. most be a relief to not have to toe the party line on this one.

We start by not shipping Chrome with "native" applications instead of learning the platform APIs.

Followed by creating Web applications based on Web standards, instead of whatever Chrome does, and then complain about Firefox and Safari not being up to the game.

> How do we solve this? How do we make the browser ours, by the people, and for the people?

Simple. Break up all the big tech corporations via anti-trust legislation. They are the robber barons of our time.

It's somehow even worse when you compile your own browser. Want Spotify or Netflix? You need Widevine with attestation. Go pay Google.

Your Browser Agent string isn't Chrome or Firefox? Enjoy endless Cloudflare captchas or just a 403 error.

You have a decent browser. The average person has Chrome. Those who do care switch to the former. What needs to be solved?

> voice out there for the average person and a project that connects with the masses

> they rather engage and connect with things that are "fun" and want less friction rather than freedom and control

Do you see the contradiction? The average person "connects with" less friction rather than control.

> How do we solve this? How do we make the browser ours, by the people, and for the people?

Unfortunately, the answer is pretty much always "real public funding"

This isn’t Mozilla taking a stance against AI.

It’s them articulating clear and logical reasons why the proposed API, in its current state, is bad for web interoperability.

I think the objection here is unrelated to the love or hate of LLMs. It's about the viability of this particular proposed open web API.

I personally use LLMs for coding assistance, and some home automation stuff, but I do not think this particular API is good for the web.

IME young people mostly hate AI.

> that don’t want to require a super computer just to run a web browser that violates all their privacy.

That shipped sailed in 2008.

I think this is the wrong way. I don’t want my OS or browser to have access to an LLM, but I do want my LLM to have access to a browser or OS (and they already have).

So they should provide an interface to LLMs, disabled by default, enabled when users want it, and that’s it imho.

That also gives me the choice of which LLM provider to use, rather than being locked in whatever LLM Apple decided to do put in their OS.

I want to give Claude access to the stuff Apple Intelligence has access to, for example.

Sure. macOS, iOS and Windows have local model APIs for third-party devs. Chrome is trialing it. Firefox uses models to generate alt-text, but no API.

In theory it's useful. If devs can rely on local models, it's more private and decentralized, they don't need to funnel money to AWS or Anthropic. There are low-stakes use cases that only make sense if they're local (available offline) and free.

But in practice I've seen zero adoption of Apple Foundation Models in native apps. I wonder if any Mac/iOS devs have anything to share on this.

Those exact words are the positioning statement (start the second paragraph) of the document you linked.

What are you trying to say?

It's the typical "cart before the horse" kind of corporate tech talk. It's pretty standard if Silicon Valley wants to sell shit that nobody actually wants; they just assume that people will want it, regardless whether or not they actually want it. Most of the tech press is too obsessed with retaining their "access" to actually be critical of this sort of thing, and most of the regular press doesn't care enough to actually investigate.

We've seen this sort of song and dance before, crypto jumps to mind. Remember when social media sites suddenly were all about those hexagonal avatars? Most of this stuff is really in that same vein.

(Which to be clear, users don't want this. AI pushes by pretty much all recent user feedback metrics are largely tiring out users and reek of corporate desperation to sell shit. It's only a very specific subsection of Silicon Valley that wants to stuff AI in everything like this.)

Browsers: Chrome (proposed this Prompt API)

Operating Systems: Windows (built-in Copilot), MacOS, iOS (Apple Intelligence)

So it's >90% desktop browser and OS, plus >30% mobile OS.

Yes, I think it's very safe to say "browsers and operating systems are increasingly expected to gain access to language models."

did the marquee prove to be a bad idea?

I think it was subsumed by later developments (javascript), but the issue with it AFAIR was just that it wasn't useable in all browsers, not that the tag per se was a bad idea (as much as scrolling text can be).

The situation with the model api seems different, more like the AMP spec.

Agreed. Maybe Google will propose a CSS text formatting property that cannot be used on paragraphs that are critical of the US administration.

Like, that sounds daft, but it's not really far from what they're doing here.

Why is Google doing this? They would need to moderate the use of the API, right? What they could gain having to moderate use of a browser's API?

Archibald is anti-AI. 70+% of his public statements have demonstrated that.

He is more or less aligned with the current most common sentiment in the west which is largely publicly against AI.

But realistically it's just slow adaptation, network effects, etc.

To give an example, before the MLB rolled out the Automated Ball Strike system this year, last year maybe 65+% of the sentiment in discussions about it was negative or in some cases just neutral.

Now that it has rolled out, 95% of the sentiment online about ABS is positive. The main comment by far is, why didn't they do this before, and why don't they do it automatically on all pitches now.

There are certain cognitive and informational flow limitations in society that will cause this to be delayed, just like all major technological advancements.

But once it rolls out, the perspective you hear online will be about digital sovereignty, now we aren't required to send our data to an external provider for AI, why wasn't this available before. People will probably assume it was blocked because it reduced a major source of data for advertising or something.

28th of april 2025, isn't this before mozilla added lots of AI feature in their browser?

It doesn't make sense at all. So as a user how do you choose which model to use? There could be 3824 models to choose from. The browser might as well set one as default, and we all know how that goes (see: search engine).

Not to mention many other UX questions the come with this, most importantly, how unusable these local models are on regular 3-year old laptops that are constrained in RAM, GPU/CPU capability and likely disk space despite what enthusiasts say here. (They have a Macbook Pro with 32+GB of RAM, reports it works great with xyz model -- fine -- but somehow thinks it works for everyone and local models are the future.)

The rate of model development is an issue here. Once there are many cross-origin models, it becomes a fingerprinting vector. Also even the small models are many GBs.

Browsers do not need to force LLMs on their users.

> We really need to change this. I don't have a good solution here, but it can not continue that way.

Advocacy (against chromium and its forks) is one way.

Chrome is not that good anymore compared to other browsers. I switched long time ago and if the doesn't work with basic features I just leave the site out instead of letting it use chrome to control me

Lina Khan's FTC sought to break Google into multiple companies, leaving Chrome alone. Alas, Google escaped unscathed.

Only have yourselves to blame. Chrome made the internet better but everyone put their fingers in their ears about it getting worse at the same time.

It's exhausting having such reflexive thoughtless ragging anytime Chrome is mentioned.

Oh no! Chrome is trying to enhance user agency again! Oh no! Chrome is trying to make the web better for end users!

Mozilla's concerns aren't totally bogus, I'm not going to try to laugh them out of the room. But their pearl clutching & belly-aching about "oh no what if not all implementations of ai prompts work exactly the same" feels fucking tired and weak sauce to me.

This post really doesn't deserve our attention, my my view. But I'd challenge the haters to at least try to connect their reflexive hate meaningfully to what the topic at hand actually is, to provide something worth considering in some way. But that I think asks too much, for what posts like this seek: merely to inflame the world.