141–150 of 241 posts
Didn’t know Firefox had an “AI sidebar” https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ai-chatbot Seems to be unconnected to any model and off by default.
Didn't know about it either, until it got pushed in my face a few days ago, for whatever reason. Didn't leave a great taste in my mouth.
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I'd love to be able to open up an arbitrary web page in this sidebar. It would be super valuable for research. They can obviously do it, since the AI sidebar also loads a web page, but the functionality is locked for some reason, and vertical splitting extensions are pure jank. I really wish Mozilla would focus on addressing some of the numerous user feature requests, rather than whatever the current trend is.
Yeah, I lived in the Netherlands for five years, so I switched to Chrome because its translation feature is much better. Now that I'm back in my home country, I've gone back to Firefox, which I prefer from a philosophical standpoint. But there's one simple feature keeping me from using it full-time: the ability to rename windows. My workflow relies on having one window per project. I name the windows Project1, Projec…
It makes me a little sad we only ever see FF hit the front page of HN for stuff people are angry about. The FF team building useful features like tab groups that are improving UX. But I guess if it bleeds it leads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if it is a "real emergency," modal dialogs still don't make sense because people are so annoyed by them, they don't read them . If you really, really want the user to read something, don't put it in a modal that pops up over the thing they actually want to do. They're pretty much horrible UX for any conceivable use case.
My favorite mis-feature of these modals are the ones that announce something on page load, but they've also implemented "click outside modal to close it" so when you have any sort of muscle memory kicking in when you go to the website, you see a modal for 0.1s before it disappears as you click where you wanted to go. On the opposite side, I'm also unreasonable frustrated when those modals appear and I cannot close it…
Toasts in Windows are a good example -- often I am trying to use the tray but a toast pops up and I have to wait for the toast to clear or a toast pops up that makes me use the tray icons that it covers up if I want to deal with the situation. Of course on Windows there is the problem that clicking on a toast doesn't seem to ever do anything (like take you to the app that made the toast) and there is not a good mechanism to see the toast once it's past, etc.
In the case of Firefox I was particularly annoyed by little panels that floated above bookmark items on the chrome at the top of the page because, I dunno, there is something new I can do with my bookmarks, I guess. What I do know is that I wanted to click on something that was at the top of the web page and that stupid panel was in the way -- it wouldn't have stopped me from clicking on something else, but it's predictable that you're going to load a web page and frequently click on a link on a navbar at the very top.
Since we're all here to complain about Firefox, I want to add that at this point I'm a firefox user out of principle, but I swear I get so many weird performance issues with firefox on ubuntu that it feels like self-flagellation in service of the gods of the free and open Internet. Unfortunately they're the kinds of problems that are really hard to submit tickets for: gradual degradation of performance over the cours…
I've been a Firefox user since it launched (and a Netscape Navigator user before that). In addition to Desktop, I use Firefox on iOS with my 3-year old iPad Pro, which of late exhibits the same sluggishness that you describe after a while. It goes away if I force restart, but not if I just close tabs. I speculate that it has to do with keeping alive closed pages. Something related that I first started noticing a few…
There is no technical reason that I can figure out that there can't be a commandline top-like for Firefox that keeps up with every worker started up by a tab or extension; or for that matter logs every use of a granted permission by an extension; or of course to manage cookies, local storage, and memory allocations, and allows you to set alerts for them, block them, kill them, etc..
I've been bullying AI into constructing a minimal architecture that would do just that, and not touch much in order to keep it easy to maintain the fork. If anybody else has or knows of an existing solution, I'm all ears. If the browser is supposed to be an OS now, why is the one that claims to be free also a monolith with no process control?
Firefox just decided around the time they got rid of the ability to easily disable js that they wanted the web to be impenetrable magic. I decided that their motive is that they didn't want you touching their bosses' ads, or their strange experiments.
I'm selfish. If firefox has been pinning a core at 100% for the last hour, I'm greedy enough to want to know what tab is doing it (especially if it is a long-closed tab that left behind a little gift, could it be?) I know it's not my place.
As a long-time firefox user (since the very earliest days of phoenix), I have to say: focus on open standards and delivering a faster and more secure browser. Make runtimes like electron out of your engine. DO shit that matters. Forget pocket, AI, and all that other junk. That is not your mission!
The Mission is to make enough money to keep existing.
It makes me a little sad we only ever see FF hit the front page of HN for stuff people are angry about. The FF team building useful features like tab groups that are improving UX. But I guess if it bleeds it leads.
There was a whole experiment with this "Tab Candy" thing a few years ago. And it failed and Mozilla disabled it and it got silently removed, well, almost, because a fair amount of people complained. I wouldn't be surprised if today's tab groups go the same way. Browser innovation is hard and at this point most of the innovation is in forks of Firefox, rather than Firefox itself.
An AI sidebar doesn't bother me. But it should be an extension, not an inescapable part of the browser.
I'd love to be able to open up an arbitrary web page in this sidebar. It would be super valuable for research. They can obviously do it, since the AI sidebar also loads a web page, but the functionality is locked for some reason, and vertical splitting extensions are pure jank. I really wish Mozilla would focus on addressing some of the numerous user feature requests, rather than whatever the current trend is.