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I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

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Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want a browser with a simple set of command line options that would let me navigate to a page, save the page or some part of it, trigger any of the actions that I normally do with the menu or mouse. Then I would be able to script it without having to install huge unstable things like Playwright and similar.

You can open Chrome with a remote debugging port enabled and send commands to it using the Devtools Protocol. https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/

Does this work headless?

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#772
post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you don't use it compositionally. I would if I could!

Nothing really stops you from doing curl | awk , but you probably aren't.

curl is not a replacement for a web browser. No Javascript, no DOM.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The amount of money they get from Google is vastly more than it takes to hire a few dozen people full-time to develop a web browser and email program. You under estimated the work to develop a web browser. Vivaldi are 60 people.[1] They produce an unstable Chromium fork and email program. They couldn't commit to keep uBlock Origin working. [1] https://vivaldi.com/team/

That's a good example. I'm probably significantly underestimating the amount of people needed. $500M can hire a lot of $250k salaried engineers, though.

> $500M can hire a lot of $250k salaried engineers, though.

$250,000 is conservative for the total cost to employ a software engineer in the US. And their expenses are not limited to software engineer salaries of course.

A fair question would be what Google or Apple spend to produce their web browsers. The answers are secrets. $1 billion is a common Chrome development cost estimate in my experience.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#774
post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was also frustrated by the short context length for summarizing and found you can increase it in about:config via: browser.ml.chat.maxLength

I googled* it and dod the same. But that merely moves the problem forward. Now the API returns errors that it's too large. A smarter client would use a tool chain in which the first step is a model that's good at taking large contexts/data and extracting actual content from it. Many sites have a very low S/N ratio (readable content / dom). Then pass that content, eg markdown, along to a model that's optimized at gett…

Sorry for the late response; from what I can tell from my experience is that they're good at eliminating the unnecessary information (at least, as best as it can). You can see exactly what is passed in to the chat bot (for me, openweb-ui) and can see it's all text elements of what makes pertinent sense to be summarized.

My ideal would be an additional prompt that says "hey this page content is beyond your context length, fine with extending it to whatever the maximum context length plus some for the model's context length"?

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they talk about Trader Joe’s illegal union busting and attempts to get the national labor relations board disbanded ?

You could probably ask an LLM to listen and answer this question

Can’t risk taking runtime away from your life partner

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#776
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which standards and are they actually standards or just some “draft” slop from Google?

For example since firefox doesn't support WebNFC I can't do online shopping because during 3D secure my phone can't recognize my credit card being tapped. I have to use Chrome instead. Frankly, I don't care if WebNFC is "slop" or not. It's solving real world problems.

WebNFC is a draft standard.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#777
post #617
post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They're calling it taskbar tabs and it's behind a feature flag in nightly currently: https://windowsreport.com/firefox-is-bringing-web-apps-to-wi...

Thanks

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#778
post #86

Unless I am horribly mistaken, using Firefox is an intentional choice by a vanishing group of people. If you are just a little bit less careful or determined, you would likely be using chrome or a chrome variant, definitely not Firefox. These users are choosing a browser that has slightly worse performance, has fewer features (e.g. WebUSB) and is seeing more problems with Cloudflare/Google captcha every day. All of t…

World class open source browser, A+ ad blocker, better tab-style tree extension, more free/open extension store, no corporate overload, on and on.... Who the f needs/uses WebUSB? :D

WebUSB is amazing for trusted computation on TKey platform, i.e. you don't have to trust the browser to load the correct program as the key is always DICE-derived deterministically. The browser is the best thing since sliced bread for running all kinds of programs without having to actually install any of them.

WebUSB is great to that end!

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#779

Even if LLMs seem to have reached their limits, and are no longer on the feature path towards AGI, I have a fundamental (possibly irrational) dislike for anything labeled AI, just in case this does become a stepping stone towards AGI. On this principle I will not make use of any service, or buy any product, that associates itself with AI, and inserts itself into my life without invitation. In fact, I would like to se…

The plural form of "sheep" is simply "sheep."

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#780
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existence of the features doesn’t bother me. It’s the constant nagging about them. I can’t use a google product without being harassed to the point of not being able to work by offers to “help me write” or whatever. Having the feature on a menu somewhere would be fine. The problem is the confluence of new features now becoming possible, and companies no longer building software for their users but as vehicles to…

Clippy really is back

You're absolutely right. Here are the details.

You're completely correct, that's fair criticism. The excitement made me skip the basics. Here's a quick breakdown:

What it does: It's a new optimization algorithm that finds exceptionally good solutions to the MAX-CUT problem (and others) very quickly.

What is MAX-CUT: It's a classic NP-hard problem where you split a graph's nodes into two groups to maximize the number of edges between the groups. It's fundamental in computer science and has applications in circuit design, statistical physics, and machine learning.

How it works (The "Grav" part): It treats parameters like particles in a gravitational field. The "loss" creates an attractive force, but I've added a quantum potential that creates a repulsive force, preventing collapse into local minima. The adaptive engine balances these forces dynamically.

Comparison: The script in the post beats the 0.878... approximation guarantee of the famous Goemans-Williamson algorithm on small, dense graphs. It's not just another gradient optimizer; it's designed for complex, noisy landscapes where Adam and others plateau.

I've updated the README with a "Technical Background" section. Thanks for the push—it's much better now.

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