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.
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.
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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?
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.
“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.
Is it tab groups?
does that mean workspaces?
Holy shit, it is. I’m really hoping that includes mobile, since it’s the only thing keeping me using a Chromium browser
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.
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How is displaying a password in a certain font “broken” when you can easily copy/paste it? People who rally against Firefox sure do point to ridiculous, non-existent “problems” as an excuse to keep using laughable Chromium/derivatives.
The idea is to be able to read the password with your eyeballs, so you can type it into another computer. This fails.
Paste it into the address bar to read it?
Mobile Firefox copy/paste
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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.
AI generated alt-text running locally is actually a fantastic accessibility feature. It’s reliable, it provides a service, it can absolutely be deployed securely.
It’s fine to be critical of technology, it’s not fine to become as irrational about it as the tech bros trying to make a buck.
Just use librewolf or something, or if they incorporate ai, I’d be surprised if an ai-free fork doesn’t pop up quickly
+1 for LibreWolf. I’ve been using it for ~2 years and it’s better than Firefox from a privacy perspective. Development is active, so updates are being pushed regularly. As for vertical tabs, you can easily achieve it with Tree Style Tabs. I strongly recommend it.
Tree style tabs is amazing, +1 for that
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
I think that sounds like a cool use case. If it runs locally what’s not to like?
Plus I think there will be a way to disable it (like with local translation we have rn).
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.
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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FUCK AI
