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tab grouping
Sure, okay.
vertical tabs
To each their own.
profile management
Whatever, it's fine.
and local AI features
HOLLUP
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. The alt text is then processed on your device and saved locally instead of cloud services, ensuring that enhancements like these are done with your privacy in mind.
IMO if everything’s going to have AI ham fisted into it, this is probably the least shitty way to do so. With Firefox being open source, the code can also be audited to ensure they’re actually keeping their word about it being local-only.
Don't you need specific CPUs for these AI features? If so, how is this going to work on the machines that don't support it?
With it being local it’s probably a small and limited model. I took a couple courses on machine learning years ago (before it got rebranded as “AI”), and you’d be surprised at how well a basic image recognition model can run on the lowest-spec macbook from 2012.
Tbh the inversion of typical intuition that is LLMs taking orders of magnitudes more memory than computer vision can mess people unfamiliar up on estimates of the hardware required
Yeah that’s very true.
You only need lots of precessing power to train the models. Using the models can be done on regular hardware.
The feature will obviously just be disabled on machines that don't support it.
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While I dislike corporate ai as much as the next guy I am quite interested in open source, local models. If i can run it on my machine, with the absolute certainty that it is my llm, working for my benefit, that's pretty cool. And not feeding every miniscule detail about me to corporate.
I mean that's that thing. They're kind of black boxes so it can be hard to tell what they're doing, but yeah local hardware is the absolute minimum. I guess places like huggingface are at least working to try and apply some sort of standard measures to the LLM space at least through testing...
I mean, as long as you can tell it's not opening up any network connections (e.g. by not giving the process network permission), it's fine.
'Course, being built into a web browser might not make that easy...
Sums up my thoughts nicely. I am by no means able to make sense of the inner workings of an llm anyway, even if I can look at its code. At best i would be able to learn how to tweak its results to my needs or maybe provide it with additional datasets over time.
I simply trust that an open source model that is able to run offline, and doesnt call home somewhere with telemetry, has been vetted for trustworthiness by far more qualified people than me.
I tried one of their test builds. Seems like the AI part just means the browser can integrate with llamafile (Mozilla’s open source solution for running open source llm’s with just one file on any platform)
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People that wanted vertical tabs must be really excited
Anything to fill all that absolute wasted space from every website formatting things to fit phones and not desktops. Ultra wide really sucks ass for a lot of things.
IMO that's mostly a window-management problem, not an app layout problem. The point of an ultra wide monitor setup (other than flight sims or something) is to be able to view a bunch of different things side-by-side.
Edit: speaking of which, now that we've come almost full-circle from no tab support, to multiple tabs in the same process, to one process per tab, it seems to me that tabs themselves ought to be part of the window decoration, not the app. I mean, they're useful for almost everything you might want to have multiples of (editors, file managers, terminals, etc.) so why force every app maker to implement them over and over again?
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To be honest, it's not just for phones. The wider the monitor, the more I'd need to move my head if a website uses the whole space, instead of keeping it centered. Obviously it shouldn't be too slim but you can't really just fill an entire monitor or align your content to the left of the screen anymore nowadays.
Its honestly the only reason i use brave and edge over Firefox. Can fully commit to FF now.
The TreeStyleTab extension for Firefox has added vertical tabs for a decade
The way tree style tabs worked after they broke it was never very good. Floorp is what to use if you wanted side tabs on Firefox.
That said I still went back to Vivaldi after trying to use Floorp because of stupid little ux issues like pinned tabs not being protected from closing, and broken session saving.
Yes, but you have to have a custom user.js file or whatever to remove the tabs on top.
I admit, this news has made me add a note to re-download firefox on my work machine...
Anyone who really cared was already using an extension that did these things.
That's unnecessarily dismissive. Unfortunately, even the best extensions have their downsides. Some used a browser that suited their preferences better instead, which is a shame for both Firefox and the user, in my opinion.
Mozilla recognizes this and is finally taking action to integrate highly requested features into Firefox. Many "who really care" are glad for this, because it is a good thing.
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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”.
Agreed, really hoping they stick to refocusing on the browser.
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?
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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.
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.
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They are probably extensions, just like pip, pocket, screenshot upload, languages, search engines, themes, etc.
Shipped by default, handled like extensions internally but not exposed to the user. You see it in the extension*.json files in your profile folder.
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Profile management
Fucking finally!
The fact that you had to use external applications or manually go to an internal Firefox menu to change from to another sucked!
All great updates. Looking forward to these
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.
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Awesome news! Really miss the tab groups from Chrome, really the only thing haha
Can I disable all local AI features? Or better yet not have that functionality installed?
AI BAD!
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All great changes! I've been using Floorp to have vertical tabs, but I'd gladly switch back to Firefox when its implemented. Profiles have always been a great feature, but had a bad user experience, glad to see its being improved.
Really interested in the local AI. Firefox has been doing interesting work with that recently.
Sidebery is a great FF extension that provides vertical tabs, trees, and groups.
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this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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