So Tree Tabs built in? I’ve used them for so long, I don’t know how other manage without them. Yet I know no one else who uses them, even after I show them. Be interesting see how well the new built in ones work.
If you’re here because of the AI headline, this is important to read.
We’re looking at how we can use local, on-device AI models – i.e., more private – to enhance your browsing experience further. One feature we’re starting with next quarter is AI-generated alt-text for images inserted into PDFs, which makes it more accessible to visually impaired users and people with learning disabilities.
They are implementing AI how it should be. Don’t let all the shitty companies blind you to the fact what we call AI has positive sides.
AI has become truly meaningless term for everything and nothing.
Not to mention all the justified hate it received. It’s probably time to kill it once again and delegate it to the future like usual every 10 years or so starting with Deep Blue
The term is so overused and abused that I’m not clear what they’re even promising. Are they localizing a LLM? Are they providing some kind of very fancy macroing? Are they linking up with ChatGPT somehow or integrating with Co-pilot? There’s no way to tell from the verbage.
And that’s not even really Mozilla’s fault. It’s just how the term AI can mean anything from “overhyped javascript” to “multi-billion dollar datacenter full of fake Scarlett Johansson voice patterns”.
there are language models that are quite feasible to run locally for easier tasks like this. “local” rules out both ChatGPT and Co-pilot since those models are enormous. AI generally means machine learned neural networks these days, even if a pile of if-else used to pass in the past.
not sure how they’re going to handle low-resource machines, but as far as AI integrations go this one is rather tame
AI generally means machine learned neural networks these days
Right, but a neural network traditionally rules out using a single local machine. Hell, we have entire chip architecture that revolves around neural net optimization. I can’t imagine needing that kind of configuration for my internet browser.
not sure how they’re going to handle low-resource machines
One of the perks of Firefox is its relative thinness. Chrome was a shameless resource hog even in its best days, and IE wasn’t any better. Do I really want Firefox chewing hundreds of MB of memory so it can… what? Simulate a 600 processor cluster doing weird finger art?
i mean, i’ve worked in neural networks for embedded systems, and it’s definitely possible. i share you skepticism about overhead, but i’ll eat my shoes if it isn’t opt in
Yeah, everyone is putting AI into their browsers, to some extent Mozilla needs to do this to compete.
I’m very much in favor of them integrating a local FOSS model rather than to partner with OpenAI like everyone else. Even if you’re against AI, you should understand that this is a way better situation.
It is. Unfortunately it does tend to use up a lot of RAM and requires either a fairly fast CPU or better yet, a decent graphics card. This means it’s at least somewhat problematic for use on lower spec or ultraportable laptops, especially while on battery power.
Eh, I don’t particularly care too much either way. It seems to be solving problems with the 80/20 approach: 80% of the benefit for 20% of the effort. However, getting that last 20% is probably way more difficult than just building purpose-built solutions from the start.
So I’m guessing we’ll see a lot more “decent but not quite there” products, and they’ll never “get there.”
So it might be fun to play with, but it’s not something I’m interested in using day-to-day. Then again, maybe I’m completely wrong and it’s the best thing since sliced bread, but as someone who has worked on very basid NLP projects in the past (distantly related to modern LLMs), I just find it hard to look past the limitations.
That’s all fine and good but Firefox on Android is currently in a sorry state. No per-site process isolation, buggy, can’t keep tabs open, slow, choppy, drains battery. Had to uninstall it on my brand new Galaxy S24+ and my Pixel 6 Pro because it was draining so much battery. When are you going to finally stop ignoring Firefox Android, Mozilla?
Idk, it seems to work fine on my old, crappy Moto G, and it also seems to work fine so far on my new Pixel 8 (just bought it recently).
Maybe Chrome is a little faster, idk, I don’t use it much, but Firefox is completely fine.
Then again, maybe my standards are lower. I just want it to browse the web, and it does that pretty well. The ad-blocker is an absolutely killer feature which is why I don’t use Chrome, so maybe I’m willing to put up with worse performance. But it seems plenty smooth to me.
This is the big thing for me. Any speed gains I might get from Chrome are entirely wiped out by how much the web browsing experience is dragged to a crawl by ads and spyware.
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/2953c8dd-d56d-42c0-b0de-53e8f8dfe618.jpegWell here’s the drain I was talking about at least. 18% in less than an hour and thirty minutes of use for a web browser isn’t normal. In an hour of use a Chromium browser only drains 6-7 ish % for me. This has been an issue for I guess the past month or so? It drove me crazy so I had to uninstall. And it’s not just me either, there are tons of posts from people with the same problem on Reddit. If you don’t have problems, good for you I guess.
That’s not what that means. That means out of all the battery drain you’ve had since the last charge, Firefox was only 18% of that. For example if your phone was fully charged 3 hours ago and you dropped 20% then it would’ve been only 18% of that 20% battery drop. It’s really confusing the way Android shows battery usage now.
Maybe. It feels slower than it’s open source forks which feel a bit slower than chromium alternatives. And the group tabbing is so bad and no process isolation.
I heavily use Firefox for Android on multiple devices since many years. It HAS annoying bugs. The most annoying for me is the tab view keeps forgetting the last tab you were on, when for example closing a tab from tab view or moving between tabs by swiping the address bar.
I think every person’s bugs depends on how they use the software.
I do not know why browser makers like Opera or Brave(and now apparently Firefox) is going hey ho over AI. I don’t see a proper benefit of integration of local AI for most people as of now.
As for vertical tabs, Waterfox got it just now. It is basically a fork of Tree Style Tabs and very basically implemented. I am honestly happy with TST on Firefox and while a native integration might be a bit faster(my browser takes just that few extra seconds to load the right TST panel on my slow laptop), it’ll likely be feature incomplete when compared to TST.
It depends. I really liked Mozillas initiative for local translation - much better for data privacy than remote services. But conversational/generative AI, no thank you.
AI-generated alt-text for images inserted into PDFs
Sounds more like classification so far. Things like summarising web-pages would be properly generative, LLMs in general could be useful to interrogate your browsing history. Doing feature extraction on it, sorting it into a graph of categories not by links, but concepts could be useful. And heck if a conversational interface falls out of that I’m not exactly opposed, unlike the stuff you see on the net it’s bound to quote its sources, it’s going to tell you right-away that “a cat licking you is trying to see whether you’re fit for consumption” doesn’t come from the gazillion of cat behaviour sites you’ve visited, but reddit. Firefox doesn’t have an incentive to keep you in the AI interface and out of some random webpage.
They just suck at naming things, and unfortunately it’s not getting much of the necessary dev time it needs to get out of the POC stage.
The biggest thing I want is local only models that use my activity & browsing history as a way for me to recall or contextualize events and information.
There’s AI and there’s AI. I really like that Firefox has local models for translating content. Them adding AI that describes images for visually impaired people is pretty cool.
Yeah people forget that AI isn’t just the garbage generators of late. It’s all machine learning based software. There are lots of perfectly valid applications of AI that have been used for decades. The term has just become tainted recently by LLMs.
I kind of hate how machine learning and LLM and a whole bunch of other things are thrown together into “AI” to leverage the hype cycle but that’s tech life.
Ok that seems like a good idea. But since when did we need “AI” to translate text? I think this is my big problem. It feels like a lot of “Here’s an AI to wake you up at the right time before work!” When shit like that has existed for years with a bunch of “if” and “else” statements. It’s not hard to create a series of conditions to do a lot of the things I’m seeing AI uselessly shoved down our throats.
I want fewer built-in features, not more of them. All of these things should be extensions, not built into the browser core.
I mean, I’d be perfectly happy for said extensions and more to be shipped by default – it would be good for Firefox to come “batteries included” even with adblocking and such, and that’s most likely the way I would use it. But I just want it to be modular and removable as a matter of principle.
I remember how monolithic Mozilla SeaMonkey got too top-heavy and forced Mozilla to start over more-or-less from scratch with Phoenix Firebird Firefox, and I want it to stick close to those roots so they don’t have to do it again.
The default experience when people Google “install Firefox” should absolutely provide as much feature parity with other major browsers as possible. 99% of users will want them or not mind them. And for that last 1%, I guess I’m not sure if it’s worth the development headaches for them to bake in a configuration change that power users could get by forking the codebase anyway.
Yeah, me too. I made once a pacman hook that empties the respective folder in /usr on update/install. I have no use for all of them and picture-in-picture is annoying to me.
Btw, i think it’s mentioned somewhere in about:support too?
We need modular browsers. It is hard for Mozilla to keep the track to the W3C and all the nonstandard stuff that Google, Microsoft and Apple add to their browsers. If those elements were modules, it would be easier for people to collaborate and for Google and Microsoft to be obligated to add support for other browsers.
You’re talking about a modular rendering engine, which is a different thing than what I’m talking about. I’m talking about stripping down the UI until it resembles XUL Runner, then adding the functionality back as extensions.
You’re not wrong that it’s important for the engine’s code to be organized well for developers’ benefit (and ideally for the engine as a whole to be self-contained – it’d be great if Gecko were as easily-embeddable as Blink), but I’m not so sure that users need to be able to add or remove pieces of it in a way similar to what I’m talking about for UI features.
More concretely:
I think Firefox should ship by default with all the functionality it currently has, plus uBlock Origin and some other things. But I want it to be designed such that if you went into the extensions manager and disabled everything, things like tab support, bookmarks, history, and maybe even the address bar and back button would be gone. It would still be capable of fully rendering a web page, though.
If they do that, normies will start yelling that Firefox has removed their beloved features and will immediately download Chrome. I have a strong suspicion that a majority of people don’t use extensions at all.
Okay. Replace core features as extensions. Kind of like the suckless philosophy.
While it’s a good idea, I think extensions are purposefully made weaker, that is, they don’t/can’t have the same capabilities of core features. It will require a huge rework which I just don’t see happening.
This is what Mozilla should have done a LONG time ago - focussed on browser features, ease of use, compatibility and speed. Make a better browser if you want to win a browser war.
Maybe they should, but focusing on adding new features endlessly is how we ended up with this state of internet browsers. The most complex app running on a desktop are too big, it’s basically impossible to create a new one. (Yes you can fork but that’s just adding toppings to ice cream). The browser war ends only one way.
If we break up the do-everything application into significant parts then a healthy “war” can exist. Why does a browser need to play video, you already have an app for that.
I definitely don’t want them to continually add more feature cruft. When I said “focussed on features” I simply meant “make sure what they’ve got is second to none”.
Forcing useless features or features that are useless to most users is more or less what windows is doing. Why the double standars?
Especially when Firefox could have included those features as optional modules (even as preinstalled extensions) that we could simply remove if we dont want them?
They are adding them as features to the browser, making it heavier and slower, instead of adding them as optional extensions so that they are only there for the ones who wish them.
They are adding them as features to the browser, making it heavier and slower, instead of adding them as optional extensions so that they are only there for the ones who wish them.
Whoa, you’ve already seen the features and already know how they are implemented? Tell me, what’s the future like?
My apologies. I definitely wasn’t meaning to come across indignant. I guess it’s just one of those things of things sounding perfectly clear in your head and not perfectly clear in the receiver’s ear. Hope you have a good day going forward.
If that’s what you’re trying to express then I kind of feel like you miswrote your comment. You want them to focus on browser features but not continue to add features? You don’t feel like there’s any room for confusion there?
Tab groups how? Bunched up into 1 tab so you can’t see anything or are they replacing the Simple Tab Groups extension. And what’s different from the current profile manager.
Changes are all well and good until they force me to change my workflows even a little; then technology has gone too far!!!
I wish it was harder to find in Gnome, where its right below “New Private Window” in the right-click context menu. I accidentally open it almost every time I try open a private window. Thankfully I don’t need private windows as much now that I use the Multi-Account Containers extension.
wait, really? For me on Windows 11 the launcher right-click literally just has one entry: Firefox. Nothing for recent/frequent/open tabs. Nothing for opening a new tab or window. Nothing for Private. Just that one entry that does the same thing as just clicking the launcher. There’s a separate start menu item for private browser window, I could pin that on the taskbar next to the regular launcher.
Might be a Linux thing because I have the same function under KDE as he describes it, which I wasn't even aware of (I don't really use that right click launcher functionality, like ever). Either way, I think opening it should be part of the main menu of the browser and the actual profile manager (not the profile manager page) should also have proper functionalities.
Or better yet not have that functionality installed?
Unlikely. Firefox has long been gone down the way of “everything included”. They started bundling extensions and peripheral features into the core of the browser long ago, and despite backlash kept going that way. We’re already in the “I have to disable a lot of stuff when I install Firefox” territory.
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