Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

manualdousuario.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

601–610 of 782 posts

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#601

Post by sidewndr46 »

moregrist wrote: post #419
cornholio wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to push some agenda All companies push an agenda all the time, and their agenda always is: market dominance, profitability, monopoly and rent extraction, rinse and repeat into other markets, power maximization for their owners and executives. The freak stampede of all these tech giants to shove AI down everybody's throat just shows that they perceive the t…

> The freak stampede of all these tech giants to shove AI down everybody's throat just shows that they perceive the technology as having huge potential to advance the above agenda, for themselves, or for their competitors at their detriment. I think there are more mundane (and IMO realistic) explanations than assuming that this is some kind of weird power move by all of software. I have a hard time believing that Sal…

I think the real takeaway here is that Jensen Huang was smart enough to found a technology company that developed innovative products with real consumer demand. He's also smart enough to have seen the writing on the wall regarding consumer market demand saturation for high-margin products. No matter what happens with AI, Huang will be recorded as having executed the greatest pivot of all time in terms of company direction.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#602

Post by easygenes »

y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #461
kakuri wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a frontend dev and use Firefox as much as I can. But I can't use it for development. Firefox's dev tools need to be better. I use Chrome for development because Chrome has great dev tools.

I've used Firefox as my daily driver for years on a high end gaming laptop and have the same gripe. The dev tools are truly bad. Even outside of dev work, there's sites where I want to hide paywall or login banners by simply setting a container to "display: none;", but opening up the inspector (slow) and doing so causes the browser to freeze.

I think Lizard is the best UI for elements hiding in FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lizardextensi...

The name is in keeping with a lineage of animal tools for ad hoc page manipulation in Firefox. First was Aardvark, then Platypus. https://github.com/dvogel/AardvarkDuex

More background: https://chatgpt.com/share/69177dc6-6378-8011-bdae-c8dcbb124f...

I was an original early user of Aardvark. These tools have remained obscure, but with a cult following because they’re such a quick and easy way to rip up a page to your liking. They were the direct inspiration for modern browser dom selector tools.

For hairy edge cases, uBlock Origin’s element picker is the gold standard for manipulating pages.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#603

Post by meatmanek »

Kiro wrote: post #334
bildung wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example of a good implementation of ai captions? I've only experienced those on youtube, and they are really bad. The automatic dubbing is even worse, but still. On second thought this probably depends on the caption language.

Do you have an example? YT captions being useless is a common trope I keep seeing on reddit that is not reflected in my experience at all. Feels like another "omg so bad" hyperbole that people just dogpile on, but would love to be proven wrong.

Captions seem to have been updated sometime between 7 and 15 months ago. Here's a reddit post from 7 months ago noticing the update: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1kd9210/autocaptio...

and here's Jeff Geerling 15 months ago showing how to use Whisper to make dramatically better captions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1M9NOtusM8

I assume Google has finally put some of their multimodal LLM work to good use. Before that, they were embarrassingly bad.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#605

Post by chipotle_coyote »

paradox460 wrote: post #446
toomuchtodo wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My two cents is Mozilla should be in a European tech hub, with some component of their funding coming from the EU, where the EU's belief in regulation and nation state efforts to protect humans exceeds that of the US.

Europe had a potential Mozilla: Opera. They let it flounder and Chinese investors bought it.

I liked the original Opera—it’s been a while, but I think I actually paid for it on Windows a long, long time ago—but I’m not sure they were ever a “potential Mozilla,” at least in the way I would interpret that. They were a closed source, commercial browser founded by a for-profit company.

(Also, point of order: Opera was always based in Norway, which is not a member of the European Union.)

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#606

Post by novemp »

vidarh wrote: post #518
novemp wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DuckDuckGo has a great tool for dealing with those ones: "Block this site from all results".

That doesn't get me their content.

Why would you reward those sites with clicks? Just go to the sites that actually respect your time.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#607

Post by thesuitonym »

metabagel wrote: post #299
DeusExMachina wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a Firefox user, but I am baffled by the fact that every time I see news about it is because its developers are trying to push something that users dislike. All the comments I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money instead of working on more important things. My impression is that this is the reason why they keep losing market share. I never see any positive news about Firefox or Mozilla,…

I don't understand why anyone would choose Chrome over Firefox. I get that it's performant, but it's developed by a dominant advertising company. Why would you trust Chrome if you care about your privacy? Firefox is excellent, despite the grumbling of people who want it to have a narrower focus (which I'm not disagreeing with).

The same reason people used to choose Internet Explorer over Firefox, because it was already installed on their device. The device of the masses has changed from desktop computers to Android phones, and those have Chrome.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#608

Post by thesuitonym »

simianparrot wrote: post #335
DeusExMachina wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a Firefox user, but I am baffled by the fact that every time I see news about it is because its developers are trying to push something that users dislike. All the comments I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money instead of working on more important things. My impression is that this is the reason why they keep losing market share. I never see any positive news about Firefox or Mozilla,…

Every time I try Firefox it’s slower than Chrome or Safari. Every time. And since that never seems to improve, I suspect that’s why its market share keeps dropping because all the fluff doesn’t matter if the core feature is just worse.

I hear this complaint all the time, but I just don't see it as having any basis in reality. I use Firefox, Chrome, and Edge side by side all the time, and I never experience any difference in page load times except on YouTube, where we all know that Google purposefully delivers a slower experience for Firefox users.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#609

Post by [deleted] »

railka wrote: post #153
transcriptase wrote: post #10

Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird to be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with fewer restrictions on extensions. That’s it. The rest is just activism and kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money to pad out their resume with whatever topical keywords might land them their next gig.

I am a regular Firefox user; it is literally the tool I use most often during my working hours. I like it more than Chrome. Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity. The 2-4% of users who use it care about their privacy. But they are not being deprived of it; the AI tab is optional, and no one is removing the regular tab. (Of course, it would be better…

[deleted]

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#610

Post by stogot »

shawnz wrote: post #246
DeusExMachina wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a Firefox user, but I am baffled by the fact that every time I see news about it is because its developers are trying to push something that users dislike. All the comments I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money instead of working on more important things. My impression is that this is the reason why they keep losing market share. I never see any positive news about Firefox or Mozilla,…

Here are some of the things that make Firefox the best browser for me: - An extension system more powerful than Chrome's, which supports for example rich adblockers that can block ads on Youtube. Also, it works on mobile, too - Many sophisticated productivity, privacy, and tab management features such as vertical tabs, tab groups, container tabs, split tabs, etc. And now it also has easy-to-use profiles and PWA suppo…

When/where was the PWA support added? I tried to test that this week and their docs say to use a third-party extension.
Post reply on HN