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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

#321

Post by HWR_14 »

franga2000 wrote: post #172
mort96 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is there a chat bot sidebar??? And even if there aren't that many bad AI features now, they've signalled their intent for Firefox to become an "AI browser". I don't know what they mean by that, but I know I don't want it. The chat bot sidebar is surely just the beginning. It's primarily in response to the backlash from people who don't want an "AI browser" that they're promising a kill switch. But I don't want to…

Why is there a search bar? A browser is more than a URL bar and a rendering engine. Search is a common operation for many people and having a unified entrypoint for different search providers in the browser makes sense. Chatbots are also quite common now and having a single chat box that users can use with any chatbot provider (even local ones!) is a good feature. If anything it helps break the big players' chances a…

Google didn't pay billions to Mozilla for a search bar because it increased the visibility of their competitors. A default LLM in the browser is likely to be retained. After all, there is more stickiness to that choice than typing a different URL when you had to choose one.

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

#322

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

mort96 wrote: post #131
mrklol wrote: 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?

It is annoying. LLMs are not AI, and on-device translations are one of the few genuinely useful features Firefox has shipped in the past few years.

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

#323

Post by thesuitonym »

godelski wrote: post #101
themafia wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> will also be users who have disabled Firefox metrics collection and so will not have their opinion counted. Gee. If only there was a way to collect users opinions on things. Welp.. guess we have to live with subtly spying on everything they do with our software.

Most people aren't vocal. Most people who are vocal aren't representative of users. Many vocal people aren't even users. Don't get me wrong, I turn off telemetry, but you're acting like it's easy to get that information. You act like people don't scream when Firefox prompts people with surveys. You act like there isn't bias in survey takers. If you just pretend everything is easy we'll just end up reinventing the sam…

People who aren't vocal tend not to care very much. People aren't vocal tend to just accept whatever happens to them. So why not cater to the people who are vocal?

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

#324

Post by HWR_14 »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #313
godelski wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well "everybody else" is Google. I'm not sure that bar is even high enough to trip over.

Google doesn't sell my data. Mozilla does.

What data did you let Mozilla have?

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

#325

Post by HWR_14 »

gkbrk wrote: post #264
hnarn wrote: 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

And there is no YouTube, Facebook or Instagram (#2, #3, #4) default integration for Mozilla

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

#326

Post by sigmar »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #322
mort96 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It is annoying. LLMs are not AI, and on-device translations are one of the few genuinely useful features Firefox has shipped in the past few years.

LLMs are definitely AI. All neural networks are a subset of AI. LLMs use transformer architecture within a neural network.

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

#327

Post by acheron »

sethops1 wrote: post #272
cl0ckt0wer wrote: post #267

Firefox already captured the developer audience, and it wasn't enough. So they pivoted to whatever they thought of to increase mainstream adoption. That is really alienating that developer audience though.

Firefox had mainstream adoption in the Firefox 2 era, before Chrome launched. What drew people to Chrome was that it was fast, efficient, and did I mention fast? Unfortunately all browsers today seem to have forgotten how important that is.

What drew people to Chrome is that Google leveraged their search monopoly to push it, and paid other software to sneak it into installers.

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

#328

Post by deltoidmaximus »

pamcake wrote: post #242
gpvos wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Page translation is mentioned in TFA. It appears in the address bar on pages detected to be in a foreign language, and is also in the main hamburger menu.

Recently I also discovered about:translations. Dunno why it's hidden from about:about.

Wow, didn't know about this thanks.

The translation feature should be entirely offline and actually predates the AI everything push. I think it's a great feature.

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

#329

Post by franga2000 »

HWR_14 wrote: post #321
franga2000 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is there a search bar? A browser is more than a URL bar and a rendering engine. Search is a common operation for many people and having a unified entrypoint for different search providers in the browser makes sense. Chatbots are also quite common now and having a single chat box that users can use with any chatbot provider (even local ones!) is a good feature. If anything it helps break the big players' chances a…

Google didn't pay billions to Mozilla for a search bar because it increased the visibility of their competitors. A default LLM in the browser is likely to be retained. After all, there is more stickiness to that choice than typing a different URL when you had to choose one.

Google didn't pay Mozilla to add a search bar. Mozilla added a search bar because that's a sensible feature, Google just paid to be the default.

If the search bar didn't exist and Google paid to be the home page, fewer people would find out about alternative search engines and id switching was more effor that changing one setting, fewer people would do it.

I just opened the AI sidebar for the first time and it gave me a list of 5 options, along with a link to a help page that compares them and links to each one's privacy policy. This is 1000x better than the current way people use AI, which is to bookmark ChatGPT and never try anything else (well, unless Gemini is shoved down their throat).

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

#330

Post by setopt »

reedciccio wrote: post #261
setopt wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I didn’t know that. Thanks for the update!
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