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Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements

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Re: Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements

#261
post #253
post #243

Please let whoever steers Thunderbird development and road map also steer Firefox. Thunderbird is at the moment the pinnacle of user-centered, focused and down-to-earth development of open-source software.

That’s because Thunderbird is no longer part of Mozilla but an independent, community-developed project.

Thunderbird has been re-added to the products steered by the Mozilla Foundation. https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/11/the-untold-history-of-t...

Re: Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is, there's a large (or at least certainly vocal) contingent of users (and mostly techies, to boot) that view "AI" as the Devil, and transformer models as the original sin, and they want to refuse to partake, wholesale. This feature seems to be a nod to people with this worldview. EDIT: See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47133786 liking AI features to defecating on your food. It's not a technical obj…

More like excuse to add more of the features. "See, we gave you kill switch"

Exactly, what Mozilla is doing is malicious compliance.

Re: Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements

#264
post #225

What an absolute dystopia when disabling AI is considered a "feature". Obviously the _enabling_ of it should be the "feature" if anything, and considering popular opinion there is absolutely no reason to enable it by default.

> considering popular opinion there is absolutely no reason to enable it by default

You need to update your priors. The popular opinion is there is a reason to enable it by default. ChatGPT is the #5 most popular website in the world, more popular than Wikipedia, Reddit or Twitter. The vast majority of users want to use AI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites

Re: Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements

#265
post #131
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox mentions the following ones: "- Translations, which help you browse the web in your preferred language. - Alt text in PDFs, which add accessibility descriptions to images in PDF pages. - AI-enhanced tab grouping, which suggests related tabs and group names. - Link previews, which show key points before you open a link. - AI chatbot in the sidebar, which lets you use your chosen chatbot as you browse, includin…

I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar. Isn't a chat bot in a tab good enough? And calling translation "AI" seems like deceitful retroactive rebranding. Why is machine translation suddenly "AI" now ? It was never branded as such before. Is "AI" here just used to mean machine learning?

I've run an AI translation tool under a debugger just to see what it did.

It tokenized your input, fed it into a model, then ran the model. Literally the same thing as any other local AI software. Except the model was for translation.

Re: Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements

#268
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.

Mozilla did plant the tree 20 years ago, then decided few years after to abandon it

They push millions of lines of code every year, thousands of patches and all kinds of measurable performance improvements so not sure what you're talking about.

Re: Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements

#269

Great, let's see how it works out. Firefox for Android has been killing it for me with the latest ux updates, I didn't expect major improvements there and was pleasantly surprised.

Agreed, was pleasantly surprised and didn't know how much I didn't like the old one until seeing the new one by comparison.

Re: Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements

#270
post #85

Great, let's see how it works out. Firefox for Android has been killing it for me with the latest ux updates, I didn't expect major improvements there and was pleasantly surprised.

This UI is great but do you get this horrible thing where sometimes the browser is shows a white screen and you have to force stop the app? Happens all the time on the latest version for my Pixel 9a. And did on my Pixel 7 too before. It's really horrible and I can't pin down any rhythm or reason other than loosely seeming to happen more often when I'm in battery saver mode.

Not yet for me on a pixel 6a
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