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Orbit by Mozilla

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Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#341

Post by ssivark »

I don't understand all the pessimism.

- It's clear from user share graphs that Firefox as just a browser is tending towards irrelevance. No amount of "improving the browser" is going to solve the problem.

- More fundamentally, the browser is just one portal to the internet / world wide web. With technology outside the browser getting increasingly sophisticated, Mozilla necessarily needs to expand their mandate beyond Firefox in order to serve user needs and influence the landscape. Otherwise we might easily end up in a future where the browser becomes irrelevant and everybody interacts with proprietary large models.

- As far as innovation in browser features goes, this seems like a breath of fresh air. Internet users at large deserve access to AI services in a secure and privacy-friendly, and as a pillar of the free web Mozilla is well-placed as a distribution channel to serve these needs. Therefore, this seems like a very good stepping stone / experiment for Mozilla.

There will be execution challenges that need to be figured out. AFAIK Mozilla doesn't have the talent+budget for training large AI models, or even for doing intensive product research. So they're going to have to team up with some other AI expertise -- either explicitly or implicitly, by depending on open source models. Regardless, IMHO this is a risk they have to take and figure it out as they go along.

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#342

Post by spencerflem »

Dalewyn wrote: post #199
askvictor wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Co…

Right, but its board and owners that it is beholden to is the Non-Profit.

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#343

Post by knallfrosch »

mort96 wrote: post #322

I have to ask: why, exactly, does it make sense for Mozilla to invest heavily into running expensive servers to run vanity chat bots for people? What's the path here to something which improves their financial situation or browser market share? How isn't this just yet another random service they'll throw money into for a couple of years before shutting down?

In 2-3 years, devices will run this locally.

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#344

Post by altairprime »

likeabatterycar wrote: post #330
j45 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Firefox has to do things to try and grow itself along with their mission. If they aren’t trying things, they would also then be accused of languishing in obscurity. AI being built into browsers isn’t new. Summarization isn’t novel. It’s not early in the game where resources are crazy high. Summarization could run with a basic low powered model privately hosted. Market share changes based on what browsers do w…

A car with square wheels doesn't grow itself by adding three horns and a bubble dome...

Firefox the browser doesn’t make any money. Doesn’t matter if the wheels are square or round if no one’s willing or able to put gas in the tank. As many prior rounds of Mozilla on HN have pointed out, it’s completely unacceptable to consider having to pay Mozilla for Firefox, and anyways a few million dollars will barely hire enough coders to keep afloat on CVEs (unlike e.g. Let’s Encrypt, who has a much simpler organization to operate!).

So we’re now in the timeline where Mozilla is the liquid metal terminator in T2 trying to escape lava by shapeshifting, as you say, three horns and a bubble dome. Accurately put! And a hilarious image too.

We’d best hope that the antitrust lawsuits don’t kill the Google money that’s keeping their car fueled.

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#345

Post by mdaniel »

CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #324
i_love_retros wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What value would a rewrite in rust bring?

It was sold as supporting a much more concurrent rendering engine, which they felt was basically too hard to write correctly/safely in C++, but presumably would be considerably faster.

My interest in a rust web engine is absolutely memory safety, because it's a fun game at work to post the "RCE o' the week" seemingly caused from exposing literally millions of lines of C++ to the wild Internet https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/search/label/Stable%20...

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#346

Post by bloppe »

antonvs wrote: post #241
JonChesterfield wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a profit to Google digging around in the information people send them? Are there long and vague terms of service documents backed by a pile of lawyers? There you go, incentive and means. I'm not even confident companies would see that as a problem when it was raised with them directly, in much the same way that Microsoft hosting all the corporate email seems to be just fine.

The disincentive is far higher than the incentive, and the TOS have been scrutinized deeply by some of the biggest enterprises on the planet. GCP is not a consumer service like Gmail or Maps. As the comment above suggested, any information to the contrary would be business-destroying for GCloud. Many of their enterprise users have strict requirements about access to and use of their data. Re the example of Microsoft…

Can confirm. I worked in gcloud for years. There are so many policies in place to keep customer data secret, even when you're on-call and trying to solve customer issues, it's actually annoying.

It makes sense. Some gcloud customers are banks. Some are federal govt agencies. Some are foreign governments. Google would not only destroy it's cloud business, but also probably get fined and sued out of existence if it was poking around in cloud or gsuite data.

You get what you pay for (in terms of privacy) at Google. Regular users never pay Google a dime, so they don't get much privacy. Cloud and gsuite users fork over mountains a cash directly, and their data is kept about as safe as can be as a result.

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#347

Post by pyaamb »

I wonder of this or something like it can be extended to "unclickbait" videos/article titles by spawning a background crawler that reads the article / watches the video and comes back with a resolution to the curiosity bait they used to get you to click. Would save countless hours and make the web less shitty IMO. Plenty of examples available just scrolling through youtube for training data.

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#348

Post by JFingleton »

ph1lw wrote: post #277

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)

> Brave supports bringing your own LLM e.g. through Ollama

It's a shame Brave is so far ahead of the game but no one seems to notice.

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#349

Post by wiseowise »

goobert wrote: post #252
wiseowise wrote: post #251

Mozilla is like that ADHD child that will do anything except to work on what made company successful in the first place - browser.

This move makes sense for Firefox adoption, as Chrome has AI features built in now such as Lens

You know what would make sense for Firefox adoption? iOS Firefox that actually works. People complain that every browser is a reskin of Safari on iOS, but somehow only Firefox, native iOS app, manages to lag worse than any webview wrapper app I've ever used.

Re: Orbit by Mozilla

#350

Post by binkHN »

j45 wrote: post #325
mort96 wrote: post #322

I have to ask: why, exactly, does it make sense for Mozilla to invest heavily into running expensive servers to run vanity chat bots for people? What's the path here to something which improves their financial situation or browser market share? How isn't this just yet another random service they'll throw money into for a couple of years before shutting down?

Because Firefox has to do things to try and grow itself along with their mission. If they aren’t trying things, they would also then be accused of languishing in obscurity. AI being built into browsers isn’t new. Summarization isn’t novel. It’s not early in the game where resources are crazy high. Summarization could run with a basic low powered model privately hosted. Market share changes based on what browsers do w…

> If they aren’t trying things, they would also then be accused of languishing in obscurity.

They are languishing into obscurity not because they aren't trying things, but because their browser functionality is languishing behind the others.

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