that doesn't matter, grandma isn't a beta tester. I can tell you first-hand a lot of people are installing these ai browsers, even in enterprise environments. You get ahead of it or get left behind.

Statistics disagrees with you to such a degree that this statement ignores reality. If you poll 52 people, and you get 52 identical results, even with population bias, you're done. If there was a mix of "yes" and "no", less so, but 100% "no" after 50+ samples is statistically damning. Because remember: the bias is towards people who care about Firefox enough to post in an official forum, so that's the core audience, representing the existing user base that you're going to piss off if their poll result is a unanimous "no".

So unless Mozilla thinks losing part of their existing user base over this is fine because they can attracting enough new users with AI to compensate then this result should be all the evidence they need that this is the wrong direction.

Firefox hasn't been relevant in the larger browser space for years now, it's a "nice that it exists" for a niche audience. It used to be the poweruser's browser, but that got axed. It used to be the privacy browser but insanely Safari now fills that roll. So what's left? Either you play to what strengths Firefox still has, or you have a management layer composed entirely of ex-Facebookers that are coming up with nonsense ideas that are just going to make Firefox fall off the map completely.

They didn't poll 52 people, the 52 are comments

If you ask for feedback, and then you receive feedback, that is literally polled data: polling is the act of soliciting and then recording opinion-based data.

(Polls don't need to be former-twitter "you get four options to choose from" forms, polls are "what is your opinion on X?" and then if you want to restrict the answers to a fixed set for easy binning, perfectly valid. But if you don't, and you let your demographic opine in free-form, that's still a perfectly valid poll. It just means you're going to have to spend time binning those comments yourself)

> grandma isn't a beta tester

Grandma doesn't know what a gosh darn fire fox is, and probably doesn't even know what a web browser is, either. And she most definitely doesn't know what an "AI browser" is.

If this is their target audience, they are guaranteed to lose to the "defaults" aka Chrome and Edge.

yeah, but grandma likes typing whatever question she has in that fancy box and things just magically happen. But this "foxfire" thing requires too much tinkering and clicking around.

Who exactly are those closed-beta testers, and what makes you think they are representative of the average user?

Before accusing people of not having read TFA maybe you should do some critical thinking yourself.

I'm fairly sure the article was either badly written or misleading about this. They mention closed beta testing and in the next paragraph mention 52 responses to the announcement at the time of writing. So 52 comments, from anyone. Very different thing.

I thought the 52 were just forum randos?

how is 52 users representative??

It was 52 OF 52, 100% of them. That's what makes it significant. Literally not a single dissenting voice. is 52 definitive? No, but that early it's unusual that 100% said no.

I'm fairly sure the 52 are comments to their announcement and not beta testers. There may be some overlap but not enough data to say 100%

If they are purely random, it's damning. Flip a coin until you get heads 52 times in a row.

I can't imagine a quality random sample could come from 52 users who self-selected to participate in a browser beta, then self-selected to post about it in a thread on the Mozilla Connect forum.

The reactions to Firefox's AI features likely range from moderately positive to extremely negative. People who feel moderately about something don't usually bother posting. It doesn't matter how many people feel that way.