The pathological need to find something to use LLMs for is so bizzare.
It’s like the opposite of classic ML, relatively tiny special purpose models trained for something critical, out of desperation, because it just can’t be done well conventionally.
But this:
AI-enhanced tab groups. Powered by a local AI model, these groups identify related tabs and suggest names for them. There is even a “Suggest more tabs for group” button that users can click to get recommendations.
Take out the word AI.
Enhanced tab groups. Powered by a local algorithm, these groups identify related tabs and suggest names for them. There is even a “Suggest more tabs for group” button that users can click to get recommendations.
If this feature took, say, a gigabyte of RAM and a bunch of CPU, it would be laughed out. But somehow it ships because it has the word AI in it? That makes no sense.
I am a massive local LLM advocate. I like “generative” ML, within reason and ethics. But this is just stupid.
When I’m browsing around with multiple tabs open, the last thing I want is something to start moving them around and messing my flow up. This is a solution looking for a problem.
Yup
Auto naming functionality is neat in some cases, like the AI chat UI itself
- It’s convenient to have names when toggling between a few recent chats or searching through 10s or 100s of chats later on
- I spawn new chats often and it’s tedious to name them all
- I don’t have a strong preference for what the title is as long as it’s clear what the chat was about
Tab groups don’t hit those points at all
- I’ll have a handful of tab groups
- I don’t make them often
- I have a strong preference for what it’s called, and the AI will have trouble figuring out exactly what I’m using those sites for
The pathological need to find something to use LLMs for is so bizzare.
Venture capital dumped so much money into the tech without understanding the full scope of what it was capable of. Now they’re so in so deep that they desperately NEED to find something profitable it can do, otherwise they’ll lose the farm.
Firefox has little financial motivation for this, though?
Other than getting “AI” investor money, if that’s the plan… But otherwise it just feels like they’re following a meme.
It makes a lot more sense when you realize that the Mozilla corporation is a for profit run by the same techno-fascist aggrandizing bait-and-switch narcissists as the rest of SV.
I’ve been saying it for years, but I will never donate to Firefox until it is freed from the shackles of a for profit corporation that can use your donation for any profit motive it sees fit; not even related to Firefox.
Isn’t the “for-profit” Mozilla Corporation owned by the “non-profit” Mozilla Foundation though?
I don’t care. It’s a corrosive force that causes them to pay for over priced CEO’s and integrate services that nobody cares about into Firefox (like pocket) or that runs against their principles (container VPN’s exclusive to Mozillas for-profit VPN).
90% of their cash flow comes from google to be the default search engine - they are probably trying to open up alternative routes of funding to reduce the risk, since it’s not guaranteed that the money will keep coming due to the current lawsuit.
Right, I sympathize with that.
…But also it’s ridiculous. Like why should including a feature with “AI” in it get them VC money? Even if that’s kinda reality?
TBH they should just become a contributor to llama.cpp and market that somehow.
even without AI, to me tab groups are already feature creep bloat in browsers. do people really put that much effort into organizing tabs?
I like the tab groups. I use them often at work to group an issue with related tabs and my attempts at solving it. Also makes it easier to pause work on one problem and work on something else because I have the tabs grouper and know exactly where to go back.
I like the tab groups.
And nobody should stop you installing an extension that provides tab groups. I agree with the other commentator that some features can be left to extensions and don’t need to be part of the core web browser, though.
True, but I’m not sure that an extension would have the necessary access to manipulate the browser like that. I don’t think it should. A malicious extension could do horrible things.
I’m not sure that an extension would have the necessary access to manipulate the browser like that.
I don’t know if they still do but they used to have. That, however, is something to discuss with the genius decision makers at Mozilla who decide to break extension APIs every couple of years. Firefox on Android still hasn’t recovered from last time.
Firefox really does seem to have lost the plot… they don’t seem to go five minutes without slamming their dick in another drawer. It starts to look like they’re in to it.
I never trusted them. Who would ever set up a nonprofit owned by a for profit company if not to decieve people?
I do appreciate the Open Sourced GECKO engine, though. I like Waterfox.
a nonprofit owned by a for profit company
It’s the other way around, the foundation owns the corporation.
Still feels like the corporation is the one making decisions though.
i think they may be referencing the fact that huge amounts of money have been given to them by google?
TBH despite I don’t like this specific idea, nor use Firefox directly, I do like the usage of local inference vs sending your data to thirdparty to do AI.
They just needed to do it OPT IN, not OPT OUT.
It is though.
then why the fuck is this newsworthy? ugh. Why is there such a huge hateboner for firefox lately?
A lot of people would rather sit around and tear down the progress being made around them for being imperfect, than pitch in to help change things for the better.
I really don’t get it either.
It’s not like it’s a paid product either.
Because they keep betraying their supposed values for short-term gains.
What is the gain? What is a single gain you think they have milked from their users?
Money for their executives
But nobody pays for Firefox? Do you mean the “recommended pages”? Because yeah that is a revenue source I guess, but as long as I can turn it off I can let it slide
They get money from Google, advertisements, and selling data. Did you think Mozilla made it without paying their employees and executives?
Literally no one on this green earth asked for this shit. In fact, we’ve been pretty direct about how much we don’t want it.
It’s exhausting.
Well, stupid people want it and they do use it when its shoved in their face. Like how samsung updated and BLATANTLY made their peice of shit AI button TAKE OVER THR POWER BUTTON so when you try to turn off your phone little old granny gets confused that an ai agent pops up and starts recording you. Absolutely infuriating and I wish torture on whoever implemented that shit.
It’s not a new updated it’s been that way for years.
Bixby was not llm based, originally, and sometimes updates will rewrite a user’s custom settings. For instance, I had a galaxy on which I made pushing the power button three times turn on the flashlight. An update occurred that overrode that setting by deleting it and turned on five presses to call 911. I ended up accidently calling 911 at 3am (accompanied by a blasting alarm sound) trying not to wake someone by turning on the light.
Bixby was not llm based
I’m not really sure how that really makes any difference though. I’m not defending their decision I’m just saying that it’s been around for a while now.
I’ve just pressed my power button five times and it does call, what I’m assuming is, emergency number. It’s the wrong one for my country (genius Samsung) so God knows what that would actually do, but it doesn’t auto call I have to actually press the call button. Maybe they received some user feedback?
Seems a bit pointless given the fact that I have to press the button five times to call the emergency services but their phone number is only three digits long.
That’s goofy as hell that the emergency number isn’t localized. I think the idea that pressing a physical button 5 times quickly is faster than having to look at the phone and select options. Idk, though, I don’t use it.
Holy shit I had no idea until I read your comment. I thought “surely they will have respected all of my opt outs”. I guess this is my last samsung phone lol
You can rebind it
The kinds of people who want that switched to Google Chrome years ago. Only people who care more about software freedom than convenience are still using Firefox today.
Like how samsung updated and BLATANTLY made their peice of shit AI button TAKE OVER THR POWER BUTTON
Was that part of OneUI 7? I’m so glad I never installed that downgrade.
It’s not their AI (Bixby). It’s Gemini. But yes.
Pretty sure this goes back to the second to last Note. It’s been a thing for years now
Power button became the bixby or google assistant button. It’s annoying as hell
Mozilla has stopped working on developing and improving their products, and is now entirely focused on adding trendy terms and garbage, to feed money to their C*Os.
They in the last year or so added built in vertical tabs , much better hardware support for decoding video on Linux, continue to support manifest v2 and high quality ad blocking. Have increased performance and memory usage.
In the last 7 years performance is night and day different as is multiple process performance and switched away from unmaintainable old broken addon system.
They also created one of the premiere programming languages which is making in roads in the Linux kernel.
browser.ml.chat.enabled falseYou only disable the chat. Overall setting seems to be
browser.ml.enable.I also see an extensions.ml.enable. Anyone with actual knowledge of the source code know what those are doing?
browser.ml.enable
Thanks!
I went for it and noticed it had the Reset button available, clicking which it switched to “false”. I am on Zen Browser and I never turned anything like that on.
Any idea why it appeared like that?
I hate how many of these you have to do on any new installation of Firefox.
A space for vanilla ff experience extension, sort of like sanemacs?
That’s basically what librewolf, waterfox, and a whole bunch of others are. In the same way manjaro and endeavor etc. are opinionated arch installs with spackling, those browsers are opinionated settings-already-selected versions of firefox.
about:config
in your address barMy hero
Mozilla is no longer about making a great browser. Mozilla is about making sure their Google bucks come in each year without fail. They don’t work for consumers anymore – they work for Google.
Throughout the years, the market share of Firefox has shank and shank and their C-Suite has continued giving themselves raises.
Mozilla Inc. has been very sick for a long time. It’s a shame that one of the last pieces of honest competition for web browsers belongs to them, because I’m not sure how much longer they will be able to shamble on like this.
Do you have to enable the feature first? Because I’m on v141 and I don’t see this feature. Complaining about a useless and draining feature that you yourself enabled is a special kind of stupid tbh.
Bro, several users have taken to the Firefox subreddit, this is definitely worthy of being the most upvoted post on Lemmy rn
Because people seem to have a special hate boner for Firefox on here.
And please don’t call me bro.
Edit: hate not hat
I just wish one could donate to firefox development specifically. Then they could rid it of all the advertisement and tracking stuff.
Bless your heart.
They will do whatever they believe will maximize profit.
I thought mozilla was a non profit?
Mozilla is a bizarre Matryoshka doll with a for profit company inside of the nonprofit. If anything, I believe this structure is responsible for Mozilla’s problems
So the profit from the for-profit is passed up to the non-profit.
This is a really common organisational structure and not bizarre.
There’s loads of worthy criticisms to make of mozilla but this is not one of them.
Sure, whereupon the CEO alone can receive an 8 figure compensation package. That is not at all an issue to the viability of a non-profit.
It’s not as simple as just deciding to hire people at lower rates of pay.
Cost cutting is a tricky game. When an organisation is not on a positive trajectory, cost cutting has a very high risk of re-enforcing the underlying problems.
That’s not to say cost cutting isn’t a worthy objective, but it needs to be carefully considered.
If you want a CEO with the right skills and connections you need to pay.
But they have a strong history of paying a lot for CEOs that don’t have the right skills and connections. It’s not just this one, it’s a systemic issue for them.
where is this AI bloat exactly? I use Firefox every day and see no difference
There is none, this is all AI=bad knee-jerk reaction. From what I can tell, so far Firefox has 3 ML-based systems implemented:
- Site / text translation - fully local, small model, requires manual action from user
- Tab grouping suggestions - fully local, small model, requires manual action from user
- Image alt text generation (when adding images to a PDF) - fully local, small model, looks like it’s enabled by default but can be turned off directly in the modal that appears when adding alt text
All of these models are small enough to be quickly run locally on mobile devices with minimal wait time. The CPU spikes appear to be a bug in the inference module implementation - not an intended behavior.
Firefox also provides UI for connecting to cloud-based chatbots on a sidebar, but they need to be manually enabled to be used. The sidebar is also customizable so anyone who doesn’t want this button there can just remove it. There’s also a setting in about:config that removes it harder.
I actually really like the way Mozilla is introducing these features. I recently had to visit another country’s post office site and having the ability to just instantly translate it directly on my device is great.
You meant to tell me the general public has kneejerk reactions and don’t know how a computer works?
What a shock that lemmy bashes Mozilla for doing their job.
Still waiting for this bloat to show up, and I’m on the latest update.
You can just …turn it off tho.
In
about:config. Not very obvious or user-friendly tbh.You can literally do it through the menu. Go to settings, hit labs or search “ai” and untick it
no AI
/edit: There’s a setting under General -> Tabs for the tab group naming suggestions.
The article only talked about
about:config.
Firefox does run better when you disable all “ml.chat” settings.
Firefox is a good example of “either you die a hero or live long enoigh to see yourself become the villian”
It’s also an example of a smaller company trying fight a mega Corp with infinite money, gained via unethical means.
People are shitting on Firefox while ignoring what they are up against.
I have no solution for their funding issue, what are they supposed to do? Charge for the browser or ads? There’s literally no other alternative and I don’t know what the solution is.
What I do know is that once FF dies and chrome fully owns the web we are well and truly fucked.
Honesty it might already be too late.
I could not disagree more.
Mozilla has used the most powerful cheat code in history: infinite money for free.
Google cannot let Mozilla go under or they would become an actual monopolist, triggering a lot of laws that would force them to diversifying/selling the browser.
They don’t want any of that headache so they’re pumping Mozilla full of money, making sure that they can always operate as “the other browser engine”.
The issue is that Mozilla’s management seems to be completely incapable of doing anything interesting. Instead of ensuring that Firefox is the lightest, most optimised browser on the market while also being packed full of features (or at least full-fledged add-ons, not this crap they have), they do… mostly nothing.
Their last major update was “vertical tabs”, something that Chromium-based browsers had for around a decade.
Their previous major update was integrating Pocket…
Meanwhile, PWAs still barely work, add-ons are still dependent on the website being loaded instead of working on the browser level, the whole thing still feels bulky.
Mozilla management needs to be replaced and then we might see some movement on the market.
You’re forgetting the fact that laws are currently only being triggered if said company slanders dear leader.
If Google kisses ass you best believe they would completely allow them to be a monopoly and would ignore any laws being violated
Hinging their entire future on the bet that their country gets an easily manipulated dictator, when said dictator is 80 years old already, would be extremely short-sighted from Google.
Mark my words: It will be Vance, not Trump who gets to be the first King of America.
The future is bleak.
I don’t know if Vance has a strong enough following. Trump is effectively worshipped by MAGAts, not sure Vance is capable of taking over like that.
How does adding AI help their funding?
Are we pretending that lots and lots of people aren’t incredibly horny for AI right now?
Actual users hate AI. Shareholders love it. It’s a bubble and the business world is trying to force it everywhere they can to create a dependency.
Correction: power users, such as the type on Lemmy, trend towards hating ai. That is by no means “all users” by any stretch of the term.
Nah, they’ve done studies and most people find it fucking annoying, worse, and don’t want to pay any extra for it.
The whole thing is an obvious supply side economics push.
It’s really annoying when it’s pushed in our faces everywhere. For getting a quick image of something you specify, or help with some boilerplate text it can be pretty neat.
deleted by creator
Exactly.
People seem to think “if I don’t do X, that means nobody does X”
Yep. Make the normies depend on the shitty Ai and kill the real internet. Makes me so fucking mad.
