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Orbit by Mozilla

orbitbymozilla.com

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Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#271

Post by bowsamic »

bayindirh wrote: post #256
bowsamic wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah they’re all funded by Google, so by your explicitly stated principle you can’t use any of them

At least, I’m not feeding Google directly with my every keystroke, so that’s a plus. At least in my eyes. Sometimes we have to be pragmatic, especially if being pedantic is detrimental to our aims. Happy new year.

Sure I do think we need to be pragmatic which is why I was questioning your original principle, but you don’t seem willing to abide by your stated principle at all. I’m just not sure why you said it if you have no intention to stand behind it

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#272

Post by manjalyc »

BrenBarn wrote: post #234
dageshi wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Chrom…

You're right in a way. The problem is that Mozilla seems unwilling to accept that that's their audience, so they keep trying to appeal to the 95%. If they would just double down on the "power user" audience they could make a killer browser. But instead they alienate those nitpicky users with pointless UI changes, breaking extensions, and so on.

Ignoring 95% of a uniform market to target the 5% of users who all have niche and conflicting preferences is a ridiculous strategy for stability, growth, and profitability.

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#273

Post by thiht »

traspler wrote: post #264
thiht wrote: post #244

Such a weird domain name, why not orbit.mozilla.com? This looks like a phishing attempt

Yeah, I really don‘t understand why companies on one side try everything in their power to teach people to be vigilant of phishing and then do stuff like this. Azure does it too with www.microsoftazuresponsorships.com I always feel like one of these days I will get phished if those are the domains they force me to use :(

Oof, www.microsoftazuresponsorships.com is terrible, it even looks like phishing... at this point I have to ask: are you sure it's NOT phishing? :D

The fact it doesn't even work without www. feels suspicious as well

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#274

Post by bluehatbrit »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #260

Am I the only person who isn't hugely interested in summarizing emails? I don't want emails summarized because that bypasses a tell-tale sign that said email isn't worth reading in the first place.

Honestly, I don't receive any emails which are even worth summarising. I unsubscribe from marketing emails, and the humans who email me aren't writing more than a couple paragraphs at most. It becomes more effort to hit a summary button, wait for it to generate, and then read something of roughly the same length.

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#276

Post by serbuvlad »

grues-dinner wrote: post #259
rtpg wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Does open source not itself severely mess with free market dynamics by having billions and billions of dollars of work being done for free?

There is a fundamental difference between a "regular" foss project and a "free" service in this sense.

Once a foss project has been written, the cost of one additional user is almost zero (some small amount of bandwidth to obtain the package).

I think it's legitimate to worry even about how the funding occurs for those comparatively small costs: the costs of running GitHub (subsidized by M$) and distribution repositories.

But with an LLM service, or any other service which does not run locally, the cost of one additional user is very real. It has to be paid by someone.

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#277

Post by ph1lw »

Unfortunately no BYOLLM. Brave supports bringing your own LLM e.g. through Ollama

Besides that I'm using AI Summary Helper plugin for Chromium-based browsers https://philffm.github.io/ai-summary-helper/ which also allows using Ollama (or OpenAI / Mistral), asking questions to articles and inserting summaries right into the DOM (which is perfect for hoarding articles / forwarding them to Kindle)

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#278

Post by pixxel »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #262
pixxel wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the Bing API went offline a short while back, the DDG website was a blank page. No fall back, nothing. A Bing wrapper with ‘trust us’ privacy marketing.

How often does the Bing API go offline? Meanwhile, every single google search I carry out includes, right at the top, 'AI' generated nonsense which is sometimes wildly inaccurate. DDG never does that.

> How often does the Bing API go offline?

That’s not the point.

Use any search engine in a terminal to strip the shit. Welcome to Hacker News.

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#279

Post by serbuvlad »

caoilte wrote: post #227
mentalgear wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

people will blame anyone for anything. mozilla is a non-profit so doesn't need to respond to market signals. it would do a lot more and a lot more sustainably if it focused on the core mission of its browser. but these costly "big swings" justify outrageous compensation packages for its executives and so it lets its browser wither.

> mozilla is a non-profit so doesn't need to respond to market signals.

No? They, just like every other entity, will have to achieve it's investors goals using the least amount of costs possible.

It just happens to be the case that Mozilla's investor's goals aren't more money.

For example, if a non-profit wants to build a bridge to a small island to provide the children of that island access to the mainland's schools; that non-profit would still be very susceptible to market signals regarding the most cost-efficient materials for bridge-building.

It is precisely because of current market signals that this move is a bad move for Mozilla. If GPUs were a dime a dozen and an AI engineer cost a thousand times less to employ than a browser engineer, Mozilla offering an LLM service would be a lot less objectionable than in the current economy.

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#280

Post by marginalia_nu »

IshKebab wrote: post #205
silisili wrote: post #168

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

Their browser is fine. But so is Chrome, and Chrome wins by default because it's installed by default on Android and Android really pushes you to it. Once you're using Chrome on Android and have all your passwords saved there, Firefox is a difficult sell. I can't think of a single Firefox feature that's better than "I don't have to faff around with passwords". Maybe if they allowed adblock on mobile, but last I check…

Their android browser is kind of terrible. It's significantly more sluggish than chrome, bordering on unusable on some websites. Maybe there's a state of the art flagship phone out there somewhere that can run firefox android and see it perform well, but I've sure never seen it run well.
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