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?
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
Board of directors, I guess.
Me.
The chatbots, presumably.
Can’t wait for vertical tabs
Vertical slabs
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
No need to wait, Sidebery (add-on) exists and is pretty great
Floorp also exists :)
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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.
“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.
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.
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
Same but for tab groups. I can’t believe it took this long and every extension-based alternative is busted in some fundamental way.
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
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?
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.
So - I don’t think Firefox would be generating captions for PDFs on PDF creation.
But of the major ways that PDF’s do get created - converted from text editors or design software, I know that Microsoft Word automatically suggests captions when the document creator adds an image (but does not automatically apply captions), and I believe that some design software does, as well.
I think that, functionally, both suggesting captions at time of document creation, or at time of document read are prone to the same issues - that the software may not be smart enough to properly identify the object, and if it is, that it is not necessarily smart enough to explain it in context.
By way of example, a screenshot of a computer program will have the automatic suggestion of “A graphical user interface” (or similar), but depending on the context and usage, it could be “A virus installer disguised as ___ video game installer.” Or “The ___ video game installer.” Between the document creator and the creation software or screen reader, only the document creator would really know the context for the image.Which is all to say that I think that Mozilla has the right idea with auto-tagging, but it will always fail on context. The only way to actually address the issue is to deal with it within the document creation software.
But I wouldn’t be opposed to ML on those that can auto-suggest things or even critique how content authors write their descriptions.So - I don’t think Firefox would be generating captions for PDFs on PDF creation.
I’m not sure. The blog post is not entirely clear on that.
Between the document creator and the creation software or screen reader, only the document creator would really know the context for the image.
Agreed. Context is usually very important for images. But with an auto-generated caption embedded in the document itself, you already lose some context. Because if the automatic caption is incorrectly stored as “The ___ video game installer” you cannot decide anymore if this was written by the author with the context in mind or just generated. Which I would argue is worse than no caption, as it lowers your trust in all captions.
But I wouldn’t be opposed to ML on those that can auto-suggest things or even critique how content authors write their descriptions.
Absolutely, I think that will be by far the best solution. It could massively encourage users to write their own captions if in most cases you only need to accept the suggestion. But so far, that seems unlikely to be the way forward. Why do that when you can just throw even more “AI” at the problem?
Totally agree, that would be even better.
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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?
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.
Finally, the only two features I’ve been missing - tab groups and profiles. With all the modern internet browser stones, we’ll be unstoppable!
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…
Reading pages out loud has been an unexpected hit for me on the latest iOS. I’d love this in Firefox too.
You can do that already, I’m doing it very often.
On the Desktop go to reader mode and click the play button.
On Android I use https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hyperionics.avar just share any website with it and it starts reading it.
Ooh will try thanks for the heads up!
Great silent AI captioning. I can’t see this going wrong.
Honestly I think Mozilla has it all wrong
