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A comment on I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla. Parent comment

Re:I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla by pwg on Friday November 14, 2025 @12:50PM (#45929463)
> I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to “help me write” or whatever.

Sounds like a return to "Clippy the paperclip" or the dog from the ill fated Microsoft Bob [1] that insisted on always popping up every five to ten minutes with something like: "I see you may be entering a ????, would you like to make it a ??? ???".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla by mschuster91 on Friday November 14, 2025 @12:52PM (#45929487)
Clippy at least was funny, not creepy.

And I 'member that you could program it from VBA somehow. Think via OLE, but I was a kid back in the Clippy era.

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Re:I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla by jerf on Friday November 14, 2025 @01:06PM (#45929696)
The Microsoft Agent, available through ActiveX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Agent

Which meant you could use it in Internet Explorer but not anywhere else. But it did make for some interesting web pages. I built a custom one with the mascot of the university I was attending at the time. It was, let's say, some peak 1990s internet. (Never shipped it to anyone, just had it internally.)

That took some non-trivial web searching. "Microsoft" "Agent" and most of the other keywords are pretty well covered by a few million other web pages by now.

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Re:I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla by mschuster91 on Friday November 14, 2025 @01:16PM (#45929869)
Damn I do love the collective brain of HN. That was exactly what I used!

ActiveX and OLE... technologies ahead of their time, eh. VB, VBA, Internet Explorer, standalone VBScript, C/C++ - didn't matter, it all was (trivially) interoperable.

[ Parent | on HN ]