Hopefully I don’t get many downvotes for this, but it isns’t necessary to deny anything related to AI and bombard Mozilla for this. Sure, Copilot is a disaster, because it is a service and will call home to M$ and collect your data. But all of what Mozilla offers us is on-device AI, which is exceptional. I’ve been waiting so long for on-device AI-based webpage translation, so people don’t need to rely on external services like Google or Bing to translate any more.
Same, their local translation tech is absolutely great! If they keep working “AI” features that are pretty much quality of life ML stuff I’m all in for it.
It’s fun playing with local AI stuff. I’ve been playing with piper-tts and it’s fast on a modern system.
didnt mozilla recently introduce on-device translation?
Can’t wait for vertical tabs
I’ve heard a lot of people talk about vertical tabs but personally I don’t see the appeal. Can you explain to me what is desirable about vertical tabs?
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You can have tons of tabs open while still being able to read what they are
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Moving the tabs to the side of your browser window frees up more vertical real estate which better matches the webpage layout of most websites, which otherwise have wasted space on the left and right sides of the page when viewing them on a computer
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But only if it results in reclaimed vertical real estate! Vertical tabs in edge is a a net loss in screen space, which makes it pointless in my opinion
No need to wait, Sidebery (add-on) exists and is pretty great
Is it tab groups?
Holy shit, it is. I’m really hoping that includes mobile, since it’s the only thing keeping me using a Chromium browser
So they say. I’ll believe it when I see it.
does that mean workspaces?
It’s not gonna fix my 5900x taking off like a jet engine when I launch 100 JavaScript heavy web apps.
Tab Grouping would be great if implented well.
kinda excited to see what their native vertical tabs will look like. i’ve been using sidebery for the past ~3 years and i’m extremely satisfied with it, i somehow doubt their native version will look as good
Pretty please, fuck off with the AI. It’s really not something I need from a browser, don’t inflate your download size for a screen reader, just MAKE IT OPTIONAL in every way.
I totally agree regarding making it optional, but I have to say the idea of auto generating alt texts sounds like a really useful application of AI - no one really likes to do that manually yet a significant number of beautiful people rely on it.
I do agree with your point about auto-generated captions being better than no captions. But isn’t it bad to insert them automatically on creation? If we use these models to caption images shouldn’t it be done by the screen reader instead? That way people can benefit from future advancements of the tech and customize the captioning system for themselves. With the current system there is no way to tell if you got a crappy AI caption that you may want to replace with a better auto-generated caption or a human written caption.
Totally agree, that would be even better.
I’m looking forward to a local ai-powered translator so I don’t have to send data to google or bing
Afaik nearly every feature/product Mozilla has shipped with Firefox in the past has been optional. So surely these will be as well.
You sound like you have no disabilities that make it hard for you to use the Internet. Good for you.
If AI can add usability features that help people use the Internet easier then that’s a good thing. You don’t need to use it. Why complain about software being capable of helping others?
There’s a lot of doom and gloom online about this, but to me these seem like welcome changes 🤷
Any good Lemmy plugins for FF?
To do what, exactly?
I don’t know. Maybe make Lemmy more intuitive
There are a bunch of alternative front-ends at least, like photon
Fix freezing/crashing bugs on android first ! I don’t need nor want AI. I need and want a stable browser.
The way that profiles works today is the reason I don’t use it. Chrome just handles it all so gracefully between profiles and opening links from other applications.
JMINS (just make it not suck). Fix the existing brokeness before adding more useless stuff. E.g. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749612 open for 2+ years and marked “enhancement” even though it’s a bug that makes the feature unusable a lot of the time.
We are approaching the use of AI in Firefox — which many, many of you have been asking about — in the same way. We’re focused on giving you AI features that solve tangible problems, respect your privacy, and give you real choice.
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.
NO! I don’t want AI in my Firefox. If Mozilla really adds AI, I will consider switching my main browser since Firefox 1 came out.
Just use librewolf or something, or if they incorporate ai, I’d be surprised if an ai-free fork doesn’t pop up quickly
I’ve looked at alternative forks of Firefox before, but there were two problems for me: a) most are not up to date or slow to update, and b) hard to trust my browser to any community or other company. You see, I actually trust Mozilla, specifically Firefox and Thunderbird. At least the AI is local only, but it would add another attack vector and bloat for no reason to me. We’ll see if it can be disabled.
Librewolf is quick to update, it’s just a hardened fork of firefox
Accessibility is “no reason”?! I never called someone ableist before, but… gosh, you’re coming close.
You misunderstand me. “bloat for no reason to me” means it is no reason to use to me. I don’t care about alt-text in PDFs.
Are you aware that Firefox Translate uses AI models[1] to translate text and it’s already included in current versions of Firefox?
[1]: not a completion/instruction LLM, but still very much a “language” model
I don’t want AI in my Firefox. If Mozilla really adds AI, I will consider switching my main browser
Don’t know why you anti-AI so much. An on-device AI is absolutely fine to me, and it’s not like Mozilla will force you to use it. Remember the world is not about only you but also people having disabilities.
Remember the world is not about only you but also people having disabilities.
Remember the world is not about only for people with disabilities. Secondly, this is a nonsense argument, because this does not “require” Ai. Especially not for every user. If its integrated into Firefox and I cannot remove it, then its very much forced. Why not make an extension for people who need or want it? (nobody needs this)
I think there is only one thing worth answering in your reply:
Why not make an extension for people who need or want it?
For web page translation, it is considered a very basic feature that should be there by default in all mainstream browsers (e.g. Chrome), but Firefox hadn’t provided this feature for a very long time.
For any AI-assisted accessibility feature such as image tagging, my opinion is that it is even more important to make it easily turn on, rather than requiring user to search and download some extensions, which might be a too hard task for a disabled person.
You missed my point entirely. If it is an extension that is installed by default, because a minority needs it, then at least the majority who don’t want it can remove the extension. This is especially more important because it is AI and not a regular program. AI is always a black box that cannot be verified.
And if its too hard for a disabled person to install extension, then its probably too hard to use Firefox in the first place. That’s nonsense argumentation. But that’s not even my actual argumentation and I think you guys try to misunderstand me, just because I don’t like what you like. AI in the browser is bullshit idea, it does not matter if its disabled or not person. And not something “required” as the base minimum, that cannot be removed.
Here’s what we’re working on in Firefox… spyware.
FUCK AI
Maybe you could get your shit to work properly on Linux
Linux user here running FF, no real dealbreaker issues at my end.
