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Mozilla launches voice search, file-sharing and note-taking tools for Firefox

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Re: Mozilla launches voice search, file-sharing and note-taking tools for Firefox

#2
I just wish it was .. faster.

Lately I've been moving away from Google everywhere I can. I moved everything but Google Voice. Yes, even Google Search - I've moved to DuckDuckGo. On windows however, I had to fall back to Chrome, because I was just shocked at how slow Firefox was.

Opening pages like Twitch.tv proved to be shockingly slow. Furthermore, my habit of opening many tabs in the background like I do in Chrome/Safari was massively slower in Firefox because while Chrome doesn't autoplay new-hidden tabs, Firefox does - I imagine Chrome feels faster there because it's not running nearly as much stuff at once.

Pretty much everything of Firefox felt slower for me. And this is from someone that really wants to get away from Chrome! On OS X, I've long switched to Safari and DuckDuckGo, and been quite happy. I've had zero complaints about performance with Safari.

So.. I don't know what they need to do, but I'm really hoping they do something.

Re: Mozilla launches voice search, file-sharing and note-taking tools for Firefox

#3

I just wish it was .. faster. Lately I've been moving away from Google everywhere I can. I moved everything but Google Voice. Yes, even Google Search - I've moved to DuckDuckGo. On windows however, I had to fall back to Chrome, because I was just shocked at how slow Firefox was. Opening pages like Twitch.tv proved to be shockingly slow. Furthermore, my habit of opening many tabs in the background like I do in Chrome/…

> I just wish it was .. faster.

They're working on it, to see the progress, install nightly (which is already a huge improvement) and turn on servo CSS for an extra boost. It feels much faster.

Re: Mozilla launches voice search, file-sharing and note-taking tools for Firefox

#4

I just wish it was .. faster. Lately I've been moving away from Google everywhere I can. I moved everything but Google Voice. Yes, even Google Search - I've moved to DuckDuckGo. On windows however, I had to fall back to Chrome, because I was just shocked at how slow Firefox was. Opening pages like Twitch.tv proved to be shockingly slow. Furthermore, my habit of opening many tabs in the background like I do in Chrome/…

Personally I've found the recent Nightly with the new Rust CSS engine to be pretty snappy. I'd say anecdotally faster than Chrome.

There was also a recent post regarding having large numbers of tabs open in Firefox (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14823807) and it did pretty well.

Re: Mozilla launches voice search, file-sharing and note-taking tools for Firefox

#5

I just wish it was .. faster. Lately I've been moving away from Google everywhere I can. I moved everything but Google Voice. Yes, even Google Search - I've moved to DuckDuckGo. On windows however, I had to fall back to Chrome, because I was just shocked at how slow Firefox was. Opening pages like Twitch.tv proved to be shockingly slow. Furthermore, my habit of opening many tabs in the background like I do in Chrome/…

The auto playing issue is fixed and making its way down towards general release.

Re: Mozilla launches voice search, file-sharing and note-taking tools for Firefox

#6

I just wish it was .. faster. Lately I've been moving away from Google everywhere I can. I moved everything but Google Voice. Yes, even Google Search - I've moved to DuckDuckGo. On windows however, I had to fall back to Chrome, because I was just shocked at how slow Firefox was. Opening pages like Twitch.tv proved to be shockingly slow. Furthermore, my habit of opening many tabs in the background like I do in Chrome/…

It doesn't help that they keep cramming features into Firefox. Chrome feels pretty bare in comparison.

Re: Mozilla launches voice search, file-sharing and note-taking tools for Firefox

#7

I just wish it was .. faster. Lately I've been moving away from Google everywhere I can. I moved everything but Google Voice. Yes, even Google Search - I've moved to DuckDuckGo. On windows however, I had to fall back to Chrome, because I was just shocked at how slow Firefox was. Opening pages like Twitch.tv proved to be shockingly slow. Furthermore, my habit of opening many tabs in the background like I do in Chrome/…

I have Chrome as reference to my FF here and since their beginning, it never was faster again. As in every FF post, there will be people saying that and the opposite. I guess the difference depends on other factors like Addons or Plugins as well as the probably narrow difference between both.

I never really came upon a reason to leave FF behind. It works good, has all the addons, and I can still make it look like a real window with options and things where they should be. I also have a "special" relationship to Chrome due to this "bundling to freeware" they use to push the browser onto people who don't want it.

@your tab problem: I just googled this up https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/load-tab-on-sele... No idea how good it is though since I never felt I'd need that.

There is a solution/addon for everything ;)

Re: Mozilla launches voice search, file-sharing and note-taking tools for Firefox

#8

I just wish it was .. faster. Lately I've been moving away from Google everywhere I can. I moved everything but Google Voice. Yes, even Google Search - I've moved to DuckDuckGo. On windows however, I had to fall back to Chrome, because I was just shocked at how slow Firefox was. Opening pages like Twitch.tv proved to be shockingly slow. Furthermore, my habit of opening many tabs in the background like I do in Chrome/…

It doesn't help that they keep cramming features into Firefox. Chrome feels pretty bare in comparison.

The features they're 'cramming' into Firefox don't slow down the browser.

Re: Mozilla launches voice search, file-sharing and note-taking tools for Firefox

#9
I've seen all the promo videos, and some questions remain unanswered:

1. What's Send encrypting with? It doesn't show anything related to setting up a password during the video.

2. What's Notes syncing with?

3. What's Voice using to analyze the voice commands?

Re: Mozilla launches voice search, file-sharing and note-taking tools for Firefox

#10
Some more information in the official blog post: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/08/01/new-test-pilot-expe...

I was especially interested in the Voice Fill (speech recognition) technology. Landing page: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/voice-fill

It seems the project is here: https://github.com/mozilla/speaktome/

This seems as if it actually is a webservice. From the code (https://github.com/mozilla/speaktome/blob/master/extension/c...), I see: const STT_SERVER_URL = "https://speaktome.services.mozilla.com";

Actually, I think this can be very easily done fully client-side, with good accuracy. Even on Android, the voice recognition can run client-side / offline.

I wonder if the project is in any way related to their DeepSpeech project (https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech). Maybe they use DeepSpeech on the server-side? At some other place they call it Pipsqueak, not sure if this is yet something else.

And maybe also related is their common voice project (https://voice.mozilla.org/). Recent discussion here on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14794654).

Some more information also here: https://research.mozilla.org/machine-learning/

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