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Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features

blog.torproject.org

191–200 of 241 posts

Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features

#191
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Related: You can already do this on any platform that has a window manager.

Nobody can tell me how MDI is a good design... what if I want to show two documents from different apps side by side?

Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features

#193
post #57

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…

I've definitely noticed this on desktop. Discarding all tabs doesn't really fix the issue, I have to go to `about:profiles` every couple of days and restart firefox to get the navigation sluggishness to go away.

Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features

#194
post #122
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The tab group work Firefox has done has been mostly great. The idea that Mozilla doesn't focus on user feature requests seems unfounded? [1] [1] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/idb-p/ideas/tab/most-ku...

The way they handled JPEG XL support has, in my opinion, provided a solid foundation for said idea.

Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features

#195

They removed privacy.resistFingerprinting.spoofOsInUserAgentHeader a while back as well. I find that suspicious.

Tor Browser? Perhaps, but their stated justification is that they were always leaking that via JavaScript and other ways, that Cloudflare was detecting the discrepancy and blocking you a lot more, that they're still spoofing just one of three values (Windows, Mac, Linux) which now matches the JS property, and that they'd like to redo it properly in the future. Seems reasonable to me.

Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm waiting for the day we get microwaves with an AI that turns them off once the timer reaches zero.

Actually it already exists. My microwave have a button labeled “AI” which suppose to run the microwave until it determines the food is ready.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiS27feX8o0 (it's Technology Connections about a really old microwave that does this well)

Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features

#197
post #171

Did 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…

Lots of nonprofits have CEO comp in the millions. Firefox is a large company with lots of employees and tens of millions of users. They have to offer compensation that is somewhat close to market rates to be able to hire people capable of managing that kind of scale. Mozilla isn't funded by individual donations and doesn't charge its users for Firefox, so what does it matter what the execs get paid?

The difference is that Mozilla is directly and significantly funded by its biggest competitor, yet its venerated Firefox browser barely has a 2% market share.

(Which leads me to a ponderous question: if I had the wherewithal to pour hundreds of millions of dollars of my money into a non-Chromium FOSS browser, supported by 1700+ staff and 1000+ volunteers, would that browser have merely a ~2.17% market share? Hmmm... As a comparative analogy, Samsung Internet browser has barely had any improvements in years and it is surviving due to it being the default browser on the millions of Samsung smartphones & tablets worldwide, but its market share is ~1.86%. I don't think Samsung is spending half a billion a year keeping this browser alive, nor paying its browser departmental heads millions of dollars to keep the browsing chugging along.)

Since it is evident that Mozilla is a for-profit organisation funded by its biggest competitor, then we must wonder: do the Mozilla volunteers get their fair share of all that profit? If not, why not?

But since we all know Mozilla is always crying for more money, then where are the hundreds of millions of revenue going every year? I suspect it is neither going deep for improvements to the Firefox browser (I mean, come on! "tab groups" are relatively new feature in Firefox, but Firefox users have been demanding this feature for years, and Firefox's major rivals have had tab grouping feature for years, so what took Firefox so long to to do this bare needful?!), or to the many hardworking volunteers doing their best for a supposedly good (but losing) cause (Firefox's market share is eroding, and I assume Google is not sad about that trend).

Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features

#198
post #31

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.

I’ve found it super nice. Similar to the “AI should be an assistant programmer, not an independent dev”, having Claude there and being able to ask questions about specific topics while I read is fantastic. Especially for scientific papers that are outside my specialty (i.e. all of them.)

Have you heard of tabs?

Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features

#199

Did 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…

OK, Let's talk basics and real stuff..

Why is a company getting millions of dollars (from its biggest competitor) for doing the bare minimum (or is that a quid pro quo deal between them)? "Too little, too late" seems to be the norm at Firefox and Mozilla in past few years.

Firefox users have been demanding Tab Grouping for years (and the other major browsers have had Tab Grouping feature for years), but it was only in April 2025 that Mozilla finally gave that basic feature in Firefox: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/tab-groups-community/

I rest my case.

Re: Tor browser removing various Firefox AI features

#200

I hope Orion (from Kagi) gains more traction and follows through w/ open-sourcing everything. Privacy-first, 0-telemetry, performant, capable... just not OSS (yet).

Any info about planned open sourcing? I have not heard about it.

https://kagi.com/orion/faq.html#oss
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