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.
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Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features
181–190 of 241 posts
Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features
#182Didn’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.
Not mentioned is the ability to setup custom prompts. [1]
I enjoy reading technical blogs from the global south and the slavic world. I've found that LLMs do a far better job at translation than Google Translate/DeepL, etc. in these niche domains, so I added a translate prompt to my context menu and that converted me over to using it.
[1] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/advanced-configur...
Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features
#183Regardless of what they do on the user's end, their rear end became too ugly for a tool which ostensibly provides anonymity, because it will end up on a 185.220.0.0/16 exit node way too often for any tales of decentralization to hold true.
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Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Tab groups have become incredibly popular and were subsequently copied to Chrome.
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Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features
#185Did you know.. Mozilla get >80% of its revenue from Google, by making Google Search as default search engine on Firefox. While Mozilla pretends to be a non-profit, its CEO makes millions of dollars annually. Mitchell Baker: Stepped down as CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Her salary for 2023 was reported to be $6.9 million. Laura Chambers: Became interim CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Mozilla has not disclosed her…
Welp, here we go again. The CEO pay is slightly more than 1% of their revenue, which sure, I don't love, but they're not like secretly poisoning kittens or something which is how you're making it sound.
Those salaries actually seem pretty normal, and I don't think anything other than ordinary information literacy is necessary to understand they have a non-profit foundation side by side with the corporation, it's not a hidden conspiracy.
Also, on HN I think people are largely familiar with these data, so sharing numbers with an air of dramatic revelation seems tonally inappropriate. Though I love that, of the random accusations thrown at Mozilla, one of them is constantly pingponging back and forth between claiming they're running out of money or that they are awash in profits.
I do think there are real issues: killing Servo was a tragedy, "privacy protecting ads" I think is conceptually fallacious, it seems like with Android forcing developer certification that the world could have used a FirefoxOS right about now which they unfortunately abandoned many years ago. But the community phenomenon of reeling off ordinary pay figures like they're a conspiracy feels more like an inadvertent confession of functional illiteracy when interpreting financial data.
I wish we talked about the real stuff (pushing back on their dabbling in ads) instead of breathlessly sharing misunderstood graphs of browser market share to try and imply that side bets made from 2020-2025 retroactively caused the market share losses of 2010-2015.
Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features
#186I dont know why anyones being defensive about firefox as if they have drawn ire for no reason at all, when in my xp they have done alot of sus stuff, and I hardly know anything about well anything.
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Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features
#187Did you know.. Mozilla get >80% of its revenue from Google, by making Google Search as default search engine on Firefox. While Mozilla pretends to be a non-profit, its CEO makes millions of dollars annually. Mitchell Baker: Stepped down as CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Her salary for 2023 was reported to be $6.9 million. Laura Chambers: Became interim CEO of Mozilla in February 2024. Mozilla has not disclosed her…
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Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
"HD" as a marketing buzzterm for products where "High Definition" technically doesn't make sense. Like adding 2.0 everywhere.
The only example of that I can remember was "HD sunglasses" but I don't recall that ever being a widespread fad. I only saw people ever joke about that. HD as far as I ever saw it used generally referred to 720p and soon after 1080p. Which is a pretty objective, non-marketing definition. And the timeframe of 2015-2020 seems way off. 1080p was pretty standard by like 2010. YouTube started streaming 4K in 2010.
> HD as far as I ever saw it used generally referred to 720p and soon after 1080p.
I remember stuff like "HD" whitening toothpaste, HD flashlights, and HD radio
Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features
#189An 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.
Amazing how MDI is rediscovered every couple of decades.
It becomes popular, then a UX counter-effort declares that it should be the job of the window manager and it dies off for a while.
Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features
#190Mozilla's beginning to lose its way. There are far too many "luminaries" in the tech industry who've had the last 20 years of "must create value!" go to their heads, even in the FLOSS space. When profit motive does not exist (and it shouldn't in FLOSS) then you need to stick to things like the UNIX philosophy and KISS (keep it simple, stupid) in order to create good software. Trends mean nothing when you're in this m…
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