There are browsers that have been flirting with AI for a long time or have already started to do so. For example, Brave relies on Leo, its assistant, and since Firefox 130 you can activate the option to interact with ChatGPT and other chatbots from a context menu. Vivaldi Technologies does not think the same, and at the beginning of 2024 he made his position clear. Spoiler: they are not good for privacy, they are not precise and implementing them costs little, even on the part of the user.
«LLMs are essentially self-confident sounding lying machines that have a tendency to occasionally reveal private data or plagiarize existing work. While doing this, they also use huge amounts of power and are happy to use all the GPUs you can throw at them, which is a problem we've seen before in the cryptocurrency field."explained Julien Picalausa, software developer at Vivaldi. In addition, it also They asked the community if they wanted AI or not, and the answer was clearly no..
Vivaldi without AI, but adding it is easy
The CEO of Vivaldi Technologies He admits in an interview that the use of artificial intelligence can be useful in some situations, such as when we need to perform translations or voice recognition. But when it has to be implemented in the browser, it becomes another way of seeing what we are doing and a profile has to be created, either locally or in the cloud. They think that It is a very big security flaw, and browser users with the composer name refused.
But of course, as Jon says, sometimes AI can be useful, and there are also users who do want it in their browser. How can this be solved in Vivaldi? Simple: by adding one or more search engines. It has recently become possible to access ChatGPT without account, and if this is the model we want to use, we will only have to do the following:
- Let's go to Settings/Search.
- We press the plus symbol to add one.
- Depending on what we want to do, we fill in the fields with this data:
- Name: ChatGPT.
- Nickname: chatgpt.
- URL: https://chatgpt.com/?q=%C2%BFMe%20explain%20this?:%20%s&temporary-chat=true
The above would be to select a text and make a query about it in ChatGPT from the “Search in” option. The query contains at the beginning the question “Can you explain this to me?:” so that it gives you an input. In addition, by including the text in our language, you will already know in which language to respond. The part &temporary-chat=true It can be deleted, but I have it added so that these queries are not saved in my history, since I have an account and otherwise they would be saved.
Adding more searches
More searches can be added and leave it as it is in Firefox. The only thing you would have to do is change the question. For example, if the question is “Can you summarize this for me?”, ChatGPT will summarize it; if we ask it “Can you write it in clearer text?”, that is what it will do.
Also note that you need to change the name and nickname so that they don't match. And for other models, it would be the URL that would need to be changed. For DuckDuckGo AI Chat it would be https://duckduckgo.com/?q=¿Me explicas esto?: %s&ia=chat&bang=true, which will prepare the query and all that remains is to press Enter.
And this would be the way to have more or less the same thing that Firefox 130 offers in Firefox Labs. To do the same as Leo in Brave, you would have to add many more searches, but the result would be more or less the same. Maybe better, because since we are the ones who add the text we want, we can create the queries we want, and it will also respond in our language.
Possible in Vivaldi, but it is up to us
It can be done, but It is up to us to add something like that or not.. Brave refuses other things, also for privacy reasons, such as creating links with selected textThey decide for us, and here there is room for debate about whether we prefer to have all the options and decide for ourselves or to be protected. Vivaldi Technologies consulted with its community, and has decided to listen to them, as it always does. Whether it is the best decision for each person is something that will depend on each case.