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Orbit by Mozilla

orbitbymozilla.com

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Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#191

Post by KORraN »

bayindirh wrote: post #180
silisili wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 12 times or so shame on me. /s, kinda. The OP claimed it got better in 2017, and it didn't meet my standards. But I'm honest that I haven't tried it in 2 years. If some news or person came out to suggest something big changed and I should try it again, I will. Otherwise I'm just wasting time for no reason.

As a person who never used Chrome in a capacity to replace Firefox (I just refused to give up), I'll just share this [0]. As I understand, no amount of words can convince you because I neither know what your standards are, nor I have the right words to convince you to try Firefox again. So, you have to give it a try and see it for yourself. As a matter of principle, I'd never use a browser which is funded by an adver…

I just checked these benchmarks results few days ago - am I reading this wrong or (apart from Assorted DOM) Firefox loses in most of the tests?

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#192

Post by kome »

mentalgear wrote: post #181

I'm reading a lot of criticism here, some I understand, but honestly, this sounds pretty good for a free LLM service: "Orbit doesn't require account creation or save your session data." Maybe we shouldn't be too critical of Mozilla for providing a privacy-first LLM service - for free. The other big privacy-first LLM provider is Apple, which requires users to have their devices/subscriptions to use, and definitely use…

[flagged]

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#193

Post by rtpg »

mentalgear wrote: post #181

I'm reading a lot of criticism here, some I understand, but honestly, this sounds pretty good for a free LLM service: "Orbit doesn't require account creation or save your session data." Maybe we shouldn't be too critical of Mozilla for providing a privacy-first LLM service - for free. The other big privacy-first LLM provider is Apple, which requires users to have their devices/subscriptions to use, and definitely use…

> Maybe we shouldn't be too critical of Mozilla for providing a privacy-first LLM service - for free. The other big privacy-first LLM provider is Apple, which requires users to have their devices/subscriptions to use, and definitely uses advanced telemetry by default.

There is a very fundamental critique here: a service being offered for free like this is being subsidized, messing with the general market dynamics that really should be making all of these tools cost way more money to begin with.

Of course Apple is also doing similar things, but for Mozilla to be doing it is quite frustrating.

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#194

Post by mentalgear »

mattvr wrote: post #175

If you're interested in this, you might like https://nuggetize.com/ which works without installing anything and with any browser.

It looks like a nice marketing product, but nowhere it acknowledges how bad LLMs are in general for summarization, or what techniques, if any, the devs use to counteract this. (also, their dev page https://orgsoft.org/ claim "NO BS", but again does not provide details, proof, not even an about page or a business address which is a red flag.

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#195

Post by cdata »

mentalgear wrote: post #181

I'm reading a lot of criticism here, some I understand, but honestly, this sounds pretty good for a free LLM service: "Orbit doesn't require account creation or save your session data." Maybe we shouldn't be too critical of Mozilla for providing a privacy-first LLM service - for free. The other big privacy-first LLM provider is Apple, which requires users to have their devices/subscriptions to use, and definitely use…

It is overly generous to describe this as "privacy first." This looks like it's one ToS change away from being a privacy violating service.

In Apple's case, they are putting some amount of work into making their privacy claims verifiable. Good will is no longer good enough. Verifiability should be the bar for trust in 3P privacy claims.

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#196

Post by dageshi »

silisili wrote: post #168

Mozilla will spend any amount it takes to do anything but build a better browser.

Firefox is genuinely fine, great even, I've used it for years and have no complaints.

But you notice in all these threads, everyone who theoretically ought to use Firefox comes up with their own little list of nitpicks that justify them not using it.

"I can't use it because I was disgusted when they dropped feature x"

"I won't use it because they spent their money on feature y instead of just doing z"

Meanwhile Chrome doesn't give a fuck what you think and does whatever it wants and people keep using it regardless.

Firefox is doomed to be left with the niche audience of people who ignore the 95% of what it does right to focus on the 5% that it does wrong.

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#197

Post by mentalgear »

rtpg wrote: post #193
mentalgear wrote: post #181

I'm reading a lot of criticism here, some I understand, but honestly, this sounds pretty good for a free LLM service: "Orbit doesn't require account creation or save your session data." Maybe we shouldn't be too critical of Mozilla for providing a privacy-first LLM service - for free. The other big privacy-first LLM provider is Apple, which requires users to have their devices/subscriptions to use, and definitely use…

> Maybe we shouldn't be too critical of Mozilla for providing a privacy-first LLM service - for free. The other big privacy-first LLM provider is Apple, which requires users to have their devices/subscriptions to use, and definitely uses advanced telemetry by default. There is a very fundamental critique here: a service being offered for free like this is being subsidized, messing with the general market dynamics tha…

I do agree with your sentiment on cost, especially regarding exploding co2 emissions for LLMs, but it sounds like you're putting the blame mostly on Mozilla for what is market dynamics in capitalism, with most of the contenders being heavily VC-funded, and where Mozilla maybe just tries to signal that "AI" can be done responsibly also. If they don't try, people will blame them for "being late to the game/out of touch/ irrelevant" - so better to do it according to your principles and in-time I think.

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#198

Post by bayindirh »

KORraN wrote: post #191
bayindirh wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a person who never used Chrome in a capacity to replace Firefox (I just refused to give up), I'll just share this [0]. As I understand, no amount of words can convince you because I neither know what your standards are, nor I have the right words to convince you to try Firefox again. So, you have to give it a try and see it for yourself. As a matter of principle, I'd never use a browser which is funded by an adver…

I just checked these benchmarks results few days ago - am I reading this wrong or (apart from Assorted DOM) Firefox loses in most of the tests?

The problem is, benchmarks are never a fair game. It's the nature of the benchmark as a genre. You can always bias a benchmark towards some code path to show that you're superior.

Also, there are other factors to consider:

- Some of the benchmarks are "lower is better", so reading Y axis is important.

- Some results are very close (e.g. speedometer), but the zoom makes difference bigger, so reading the Y numbers again is important.

So, Firefox beats Chrome on WebAudio, StyleBench, AssortedDOM. However, this is still "benchmarks", The real world performance is very, very close.

The bigger picture is, when you look at longer histories, the performance is still being tuned and improved. So, Firefox people are not sitting on what they have.

Lastly, Firefox is way more sensitive to DNS response time when compared to Chrome, and a crowded site makes tons of requests. A fast DNS makes a ton of difference, which is way overlooked.

I used to run a DNSMasq instance when my ISP DNS was very slow. Now, my routers have their own tuned DNSMasq instances, so DNS is instant, so Firefox is as well.

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#199

Post by Dalewyn »

askvictor wrote: post #99
sitkack wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox needs to be forked and owned by the people. I'd pay $1 a month for a browser run by the people. Management and extension options could be rolled out for government, business, education, etc. There are so many models where the browser thrives, the org that shepherds the browser thrives, and the people thrive. Firefox is like the shitty best option that camps out in its niche, it sucks but it is really hard to…

And who are 'the people'? It's an open source product, developed by a non-profit organisation. You want the government to release a browser? I can tell you how popular that will be...

>developed by a non-profit organisation.

Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

>The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Firefox web browser,

>Unlike the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla open source project, ... the Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity.

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#200

Post by mentalgear »

cdata wrote: post #195
mentalgear wrote: post #181

I'm reading a lot of criticism here, some I understand, but honestly, this sounds pretty good for a free LLM service: "Orbit doesn't require account creation or save your session data." Maybe we shouldn't be too critical of Mozilla for providing a privacy-first LLM service - for free. The other big privacy-first LLM provider is Apple, which requires users to have their devices/subscriptions to use, and definitely use…

It is overly generous to describe this as "privacy first." This looks like it's one ToS change away from being a privacy violating service. In Apple's case, they are putting some amount of work into making their privacy claims verifiable. Good will is no longer good enough. Verifiability should be the bar for trust in 3P privacy claims.

This might be true for any run-of-the-mill service, but I do give Mozilla upfront credit as an entity and Firefox's privacy-leading track record. I haven't read the fine print, but I would be very surprised if there wasn't a robust layer of privacy/anonymisation involved. (Side note: I think the future is in-browser LLM (a la Gemini Nano), so I suspect they will eventually move there.)

Also consider that Apple has the big pockets to build their own server hardware, to claim multiple layers of privacy - but also remember that when they first introduced "differential privacy" and claimed it would be totally anonymous, privacy researchers soon found out that Apple set the epsilon so low that even after a few requests to their service, the user could be de-anonymized.

source: "Apple has boasted of its use of a cutting-edge data science known as "differential privacy." Researchers say they're doing it wrong." https://www.wired.com/story/apple-differential-privacy-short...

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