We are approaching the use of AI in Firefox — which many, many of you have been asking about
Which one of you was it, who asked for AI in Firefox???
It looks like they are riding the AI wave to bring more features that are just good, local ML-based, and I’m all in for it. Firefox Translation is a great recent example, it’s good.
AI actually can be very good at translating things locally while keeping tone and intent, and thats what mozilla mentions here. I’m fully down with AI powered local translation tools native to firefox, it’ll put it way above the competition
Some LLMs are low enough in resource usage to do this on weak and older PCs
when used to enhance accessibility? me. especially in this case where it’s used for better alt text and descriptive text in pdfs, a tech that has long struggled with that.
It’s a useful technology. Would be stupid to ignore it
Me.
Board of directors, I guess.
The chatbots, presumably.
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.
Yeah, Mozilla is doing good work, and AI is here to stay. It’s all about making and using AI ethically.
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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Im a simple man, less browser UI = good. I only want to see what I need to see. I’d hide the address bar if it wasn’t cumbersome to use with hover (as in hover at the top of the browser window to show the address bar).
It’s more efficient to stack wide elements on top of each other than next to each other.
Especially with websites that are optimised for mobile which means they use only the middle 60% of the whole 16:9 screen, not to mention ultrawide. So vertical space is needed more than horizontal space.
In addition, you can have the vertical tabs hide the text, so you can only see the favicon, unless hovered over. I basically have a 50px bar on the left and top. So this (without the right sidebar, I’m not at my PC so I stole the photo from Reddit :P) :
Thanks for the response! I guess it’s still not for me. I often have several tabs from the same site or tabs from websites who’s favicon I don’t recognize so the text is relevant to me.
When I want more real estate I just go full screen with F11.
As for focusing a hidden address bar, doesn’t ctrl-L do the trick?
It does, but… it’s sounds cool to do everything with the keyboard and all, but in everyday use sometimes you have the mouse in your hand, or only one hand available. I don’t want to be thinking „oh yeah I need to do that instead”, it’s not comfortable anymore, even if it’s not as efficient
But don’t you need both hands on the keyboard when you type an address?
You can type it with one hand. Also, you have other buttons on the top bar, like extensions, settings, arrows, home etc
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
Vertical slabs
No need to wait, Sidebery (add-on) exists and is pretty great
Floorp also exists :)
deleted by creator
Fun fact, even if you delete the comment I can still read it in the notification lmao. And they only KINDA did
Yeah, that’s why I deleted it. They temporarily made it closed-source to switch to another license, because someone’s fork was abusing their license. I think it’s open-sourced again.
Tab Grouping would be great if implented well.
I only need Firefox to load pages faster than Chrome
Good luck convincing people to switch to it based only on “it loads pages faster than Chrome” though. It’s a good goal to have, but getting tunnel-visioned on it when their current speed in real world use is pretty comparable is definitely not a good long-term plan.
Soon, Firefox can block ads better than Chrome. Ads are annoying. I see Chrome losing at least a 5% of the market, if not more, to Firefox, just because they’re going to break uBlock Origin, and Firefox isn’t.
You really overestimate how many people use an ad blocker. I wish it was that many.
And all of them will jump ship.
Hopefully.
I’m not talking about pulling more people. I’m talking about my issue as an existing and looooong term user of Firefox. I started using a very low end phone recently, and Firefox vs Chrome on it is night and day difference. I don’t notice it on my galaxy phone, but on low end devices it’s torturous.
Oh, you mean FF for Android? Yeah, on that front it really needs a ton of work. On the desktop side things are pretty much fast to a point where in real world use the difference is minimal.
I still use it all the time exept when a page crash. Wich unfortunately happened too often with Firefox lately. I have a Pixel 8 and it crashes/freeze when scrolling heavy pages or PDF.
It’s annoying that the browser I want to use is crashing so often. But I won’t use Chrome unless I’m forced to, wich the only reasons I was forced to was Firefox freezing.
The only thing Mozilla should be doing instead of working on useless stuff and wasting resources, as usual.
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.
It’s not gonna fix my 5900x taking off like a jet engine when I launch 100 JavaScript heavy web apps.
does that mean workspaces?
Finally, the only two features I’ve been missing - tab groups and profiles. With all the modern internet browser stones, we’ll be unstoppable!
“At Mozilla, we work hard to make Firefox the best browser for you. That’s why we’re always focused on building a browser…”
You don’t need to lie to us. We are just happy you are finally working on browser features.
I’m looking forward to reducing ui clutter and profile improvements.
Where would the lying be?
The lie is that they are always focused on making the best browser. The last few years they have focused on everything but the browser.
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
Even if it doesn’t look as good, it’ll hopefully include some better APIs that extensions can utilise to improve their experience. E.g. hide the native tabs.
hide the native tabs
YES! i currently have to use custom css to achieve this, would be so much more convenient if it was an extension
Same but for tab groups. I can’t believe it took this long and every extension-based alternative is busted in some fundamental way.
I just want HDR video support
This and the “Cast youtube video to TV” without an external bridging software
Literally the only reason I ever fire up a different browser. Come on guys.
Noo, you want ai!!! 😞😞😞
There’s a lot of doom and gloom online about this, but to me these seem like welcome changes 🤷
This has actually been the most positive reaction to a Firefox announcement I’ve seen in a long time. I’ve yet to find a piece of open source software users act more toxic towards than Firefox. It is impossible to find any Firefox-related announcement in recent years that’s received broadly positive feedback. For a long time, the top voted comment would always be someone demanding tab groups or vertical tabs. Now they’re adding those, which is probably why the reaction has been a bit more positive. But of course, AI and UI changes have become the new things to complain about.
The top comment is usually someone saying nothing should ever change and every feature is bloat and should be an extension.
Great silent AI captioning. I can’t see this going wrong.
Honestly I think Mozilla has it all wrong
More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker.
So make things even harder to find? A classic menu bar is not clutter!
At least in firefox it’s not hard to change toolbars…
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
