> The user agent is the proper channel for the agency Jake is seeking here. Theres nothing preventing the user & their user agent from negotiating what model they use.
This isn't how it works. As the developer, you use the system prompt to set a particular personality for the chat bot. Eg, when you use an LLM in VSCode, it comes with a system prompt to make it an effective code assistant.
Now, in VSCode, you can select a different model, which is maybe where your misconception comes from. But when you select a different model, it will also use a different system prompt, designed to achieve the same personality, but tailored for that particular model.
Once you figure out why they do that, you'll understand why your position here doesn't make sense.
On interoperability, time will tell I guess. I've only been working on Firefox for a few months, but general interop issues are way worse than I realised when we worked together at Chrome. Firefox frequently gets bug reports for not behaving like Chrome, even when Firefox is complying with the spec, and Chrome is not. We end up having to just behave like Chrome.
On developer signals… I'm sure there's better evidence of positive sentiment than Chrome provided, but there's a lot of negative sentiment too. I think it would be fair to call the developer signal "mixed", or maybe even "polarised".
Aww thanks for saying that! I've been doing little videos on https://www.youtube.com/@FirefoxWebDevs (and accounts of the same name, pretty much everywhere). Although they're designed to be short, so they're pretty different to HTTP203.
Aww thanks! To be fair I didn't toe the party line when I was at Google (imo). Although, that caused me increasing amount of grief internally, until I left. From what I hear, things have gotten exponentially worse in that regard for folks still on the team.
When I posted this, I linked to the latest statement https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1213#i..., which is the content relevant to the title (the details of our opposition to the API). Unfortunately someone removed the link to the specific post.
The Chrome model requires either "16 GB of RAM or more and 4 CPU cores or more" or "Strictly more than 4 GB of VRAM", and "22 GB of free space" (it uses around 4.4GB but it doesn't want to use the remaining free space).
The model is pretty slow on my M4 Pro mac.
The API allows the browser to use a cloud service instead, but then privacy is lower. So, more privacy for the rich.
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.
I know this isn't quite what you mean, but when you first hit the page, the list is in a random order, but it's then stable across reloads.
I considered the 'vs' approach, but I worried that there might be a lot of iterations where one or two of the options would be things that the person didn't understand, or didn't care about.
How do you feel about something like this: The user goes through the long list, picking what they understand and don't dislike, then the 'vs' system is there for helping determine the order of those items. Then the user gets the ranking which they can tweak.
Author of the app here. This was quickly thrown together, and something we'd like to improve on next year. Any & all feedback is welcome.
We've already been looking at the results, and it has influenced the direction of multiple vendors in the process, but of course it isn't the only thing we look at.
We're going to continue to look at this throughout the process, so it's still worth getting a list together.
Whether we can release the raw results of this (and to what degree), will involve discussion between browser vendors, so it isn't something we can commit to right now. I know that's not… great… but it's a delicate process (one that I'm still personally getting used to - it's my first year 'on the inside').
No, Chrome doesn't allow this.
Here's a simple demo: https://output.jsbin.com/kekekac/quiet - note that you can't select root, Downloads etc.