Hopefully I don’t get many downvotes for this, but it isns’t necessary to deny anything related to AI and bombard Mozilla for this. Sure, Copilot is a disaster, because it is a service and will call home to M$ and collect your data. But all of what Mozilla offers us is on-device AI, which is exceptional. I’ve been waiting so long for on-device AI-based webpage translation, so people don’t need to rely on external services like Google or Bing to translate any more.
Yeah, Mozilla is doing good work, and AI is here to stay. It’s all about making and using AI ethically.
Same, their local translation tech is absolutely great! If they keep working “AI” features that are pretty much quality of life ML stuff I’m all in for it.
It’s fun playing with local AI stuff. I’ve been playing with piper-tts and it’s fast on a modern system.
didnt mozilla recently introduce on-device translation?
We are approaching the use of AI in Firefox — which many, many of you have been asking about
Which one of you was it, who asked for AI in Firefox???
It looks like they are riding the AI wave to bring more features that are just good, local ML-based, and I’m all in for it. Firefox Translation is a great recent example, it’s good.
AI actually can be very good at translating things locally while keeping tone and intent, and thats what mozilla mentions here. I’m fully down with AI powered local translation tools native to firefox, it’ll put it way above the competition
Some LLMs are low enough in resource usage to do this on weak and older PCs
It’s a useful technology. Would be stupid to ignore it
when used to enhance accessibility? me. especially in this case where it’s used for better alt text and descriptive text in pdfs, a tech that has long struggled with that.
Me.
Board of directors, I guess.
The chatbots, presumably.
“At Mozilla, we work hard to make Firefox the best browser for you. That’s why we’re always focused on building a browser…”
You don’t need to lie to us. We are just happy you are finally working on browser features.
I’m looking forward to reducing ui clutter and profile improvements.
Where would the lying be?
The lie is that they are always focused on making the best browser. The last few years they have focused on everything but the browser.
Pretty please, fuck off with the AI. It’s really not something I need from a browser, don’t inflate your download size for a screen reader, just MAKE IT OPTIONAL in every way.
I totally agree regarding making it optional, but I have to say the idea of auto generating alt texts sounds like a really useful application of AI - no one really likes to do that manually yet a significant number of beautiful people rely on it.
I do agree with your point about auto-generated captions being better than no captions. But isn’t it bad to insert them automatically on creation? If we use these models to caption images shouldn’t it be done by the screen reader instead? That way people can benefit from future advancements of the tech and customize the captioning system for themselves. With the current system there is no way to tell if you got a crappy AI caption that you may want to replace with a better auto-generated caption or a human written caption.
So - I don’t think Firefox would be generating captions for PDFs on PDF creation.
But of the major ways that PDF’s do get created - converted from text editors or design software, I know that Microsoft Word automatically suggests captions when the document creator adds an image (but does not automatically apply captions), and I believe that some design software does, as well.
I think that, functionally, both suggesting captions at time of document creation, or at time of document read are prone to the same issues - that the software may not be smart enough to properly identify the object, and if it is, that it is not necessarily smart enough to explain it in context.
By way of example, a screenshot of a computer program will have the automatic suggestion of “A graphical user interface” (or similar), but depending on the context and usage, it could be “A virus installer disguised as ___ video game installer.” Or “The ___ video game installer.” Between the document creator and the creation software or screen reader, only the document creator would really know the context for the image.Which is all to say that I think that Mozilla has the right idea with auto-tagging, but it will always fail on context. The only way to actually address the issue is to deal with it within the document creation software.
But I wouldn’t be opposed to ML on those that can auto-suggest things or even critique how content authors write their descriptions.So - I don’t think Firefox would be generating captions for PDFs on PDF creation.
I’m not sure. The blog post is not entirely clear on that.
Between the document creator and the creation software or screen reader, only the document creator would really know the context for the image.
Agreed. Context is usually very important for images. But with an auto-generated caption embedded in the document itself, you already lose some context. Because if the automatic caption is incorrectly stored as “The ___ video game installer” you cannot decide anymore if this was written by the author with the context in mind or just generated. Which I would argue is worse than no caption, as it lowers your trust in all captions.
But I wouldn’t be opposed to ML on those that can auto-suggest things or even critique how content authors write their descriptions.
Absolutely, I think that will be by far the best solution. It could massively encourage users to write their own captions if in most cases you only need to accept the suggestion. But so far, that seems unlikely to be the way forward. Why do that when you can just throw even more “AI” at the problem?
Totally agree, that would be even better.
I’m looking forward to a local ai-powered translator so I don’t have to send data to google or bing
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Afaik nearly every feature/product Mozilla has shipped with Firefox in the past has been optional. So surely these will be as well.
I only need Firefox to load pages faster than Chrome
Good luck convincing people to switch to it based only on “it loads pages faster than Chrome” though. It’s a good goal to have, but getting tunnel-visioned on it when their current speed in real world use is pretty comparable is definitely not a good long-term plan.
Soon, Firefox can block ads better than Chrome. Ads are annoying. I see Chrome losing at least a 5% of the market, if not more, to Firefox, just because they’re going to break uBlock Origin, and Firefox isn’t.
You really overestimate how many people use an ad blocker. I wish it was that many.
And all of them will jump ship.
Hopefully.
I’m not talking about pulling more people. I’m talking about my issue as an existing and looooong term user of Firefox. I started using a very low end phone recently, and Firefox vs Chrome on it is night and day difference. I don’t notice it on my galaxy phone, but on low end devices it’s torturous.
Oh, you mean FF for Android? Yeah, on that front it really needs a ton of work. On the desktop side things are pretty much fast to a point where in real world use the difference is minimal.
I still use it all the time exept when a page crash. Wich unfortunately happened too often with Firefox lately. I have a Pixel 8 and it crashes/freeze when scrolling heavy pages or PDF.
It’s annoying that the browser I want to use is crashing so often. But I won’t use Chrome unless I’m forced to, wich the only reasons I was forced to was Firefox freezing.
The only thing Mozilla should be doing instead of working on useless stuff and wasting resources, as usual.
Tab Grouping would be great if implented well.
Is it tab groups?
It’s not gonna fix my 5900x taking off like a jet engine when I launch 100 JavaScript heavy web apps.
So they say. I’ll believe it when I see it.
does that mean workspaces?
Holy shit, it is. I’m really hoping that includes mobile, since it’s the only thing keeping me using a Chromium browser
kinda excited to see what their native vertical tabs will look like. i’ve been using sidebery for the past ~3 years and i’m extremely satisfied with it, i somehow doubt their native version will look as good
Same but for tab groups. I can’t believe it took this long and every extension-based alternative is busted in some fundamental way.
Even if it doesn’t look as good, it’ll hopefully include some better APIs that extensions can utilise to improve their experience. E.g. hide the native tabs.
hide the native tabs
YES! i currently have to use custom css to achieve this, would be so much more convenient if it was an extension
We are approaching the use of AI in Firefox — which many, many of you have been asking about — in the same way. We’re focused on giving you AI features that solve tangible problems, respect your privacy, and give you real choice.
We’re looking at how we can use local, on-device AI models — i.e., more private — to enhance your browsing experience further. One feature we’re starting with next quarter is AI-generated alt-text for images inserted into PDFs, which makes it more accessible to visually impaired users and people with learning disabilities.
NO! I don’t want AI in my Firefox. If Mozilla really adds AI, I will consider switching my main browser since Firefox 1 came out.
AI generated alt-text running locally is actually a fantastic accessibility feature. It’s reliable, it provides a service, it can absolutely be deployed securely.
It’s fine to be critical of technology, it’s not fine to become as irrational about it as the tech bros trying to make a buck.
Not irrational to be concerned for a number of reasons. Even if local and secure AI image processing and LLMs add fairly significant processing costs to a simple task like this. It means higher requirements for the browser, higher energy use and therefore emissions (noting here that AI has blown Microsoft’s climate mitigation plan our of the water even with some accounting tricks).
Additionally, you have to think about the long term changes to behaviours this will generate. A handy tool for when people forget to produce proper accessible documents suddenly becomes the default way of making accessible documents. Consider two situations: a culture that promotes and enforces content providers to consider different types of consumer and how they will experience the content; they know that unless they spend the 1% extra time making it accessibile for all it will exclude certain people. Now compare that to a situation where AI is pitched as an easy way not to think about the peoples experiences: the AI will sort it. Those two situations imply very different outcomes: in one there is care and thought about difference and diversity and in another there isn’t. Disabled people are an after thought. Within those two different scenarios there’s also massively different energy and emissions requirements because its making every user perform AI to get some alt text rather than generate it at source.
Finally, it worth explaining about Alt texts a bit and how people use them because its not just text descriptions of an image (which AI could indeed likely produce). Alt texts should be used to summarise the salient aspects of the image the author wants a reader to take away for it in a conscise way and sometimes that message might be slightly different for Alt Text users. AI can’t do this because it should be about the message the content creator wants to send and ensuring it’s accessible. As ever with these tech fixes for accessibility the lived experience of people with those needs isn’t actually present. Its an assumed need rather than what they are asking for.
Local and secure image recognition is fairly trivial in terms of power consumption, but hey, there’s likely going to be some option to turn it off, just like hardware acceleration for video and image rendering, which uses the same GPU in similar ways. The power consumption argument is not invalid, but the way people deploy it is baffling to me, and is often based on worst-case estimates that are not realistic by design.
To be clear, Apple is building CPUs that can parse these queries in seconds into iPads now, running at a few tens of watts. Each time I boot up Tekken on my 1000W gaming PC for five minutes I’m burning up more power than my share of AI queries for weeks, if not months.
On the second point I absolutely disagree. There is no practical advantage to making accessibility annoying to implement. Accessibility should be structural, mandatory and automatic, not a nice thing people do for you. Eff that.
As for the third part, every alt text I’ve seen deployed is not adding much of value beyond a description of the content. What is measurable and factual is that the coverage of alt-text, even in places where it’s disproportionately popular like Mastodon, is spotty at best and residual at worst. There is no question that automated alt-text is better than no alt-text, and most content has no alt-text.
That is only the tip of the iceberg for ML applied to accessibility, too. You could do active queries, you could have users be able to ask for additional context or clarification, you could have much smoother, automated voice reading of text, including visual description on demand… This tech is powerful in many areas, and this is clearly one. In fact, this is a much better application than search, by a lot. It’s frustrating that search and factual queries, where this stuff is pretty bad at being reliable, are the thing everybody is thinking about.
Just use librewolf or something, or if they incorporate ai, I’d be surprised if an ai-free fork doesn’t pop up quickly
I’ve looked at alternative forks of Firefox before, but there were two problems for me: a) most are not up to date or slow to update, and b) hard to trust my browser to any community or other company. You see, I actually trust Mozilla, specifically Firefox and Thunderbird. At least the AI is local only, but it would add another attack vector and bloat for no reason to me. We’ll see if it can be disabled.
Librewolf is quick to update, it’s just a hardened fork of firefox
Accessibility is “no reason”?! I never called someone ableist before, but… gosh, you’re coming close.
You misunderstand me. “bloat for no reason to me” means it is no reason to use to me. I don’t care about alt-text in PDFs.
+1 for LibreWolf. I’ve been using it for ~2 years and it’s better than Firefox from a privacy perspective. Development is active, so updates are being pushed regularly. As for vertical tabs, you can easily achieve it with Tree Style Tabs. I strongly recommend it.
Tree style tabs is amazing, +1 for that
I think that sounds like a cool use case. If it runs locally what’s not to like?
The visually impaired will certainly agree that not helping them with a local AI model is a sacrifice worth being made for the purely moral stance of “no AI at all”.
/s obviouslyPlus I think there will be a way to disable it (like with local translation we have rn).
Local translation is amazing, they just need to polish the settings.
Are you aware that Firefox Translate uses AI models[1] to translate text and it’s already included in current versions of Firefox?
[1]: not a completion/instruction LLM, but still very much a “language” model
I don’t want AI in my Firefox. If Mozilla really adds AI, I will consider switching my main browser
Don’t know why you anti-AI so much. An on-device AI is absolutely fine to me, and it’s not like Mozilla will force you to use it. Remember the world is not about only you but also people having disabilities.
Remember the world is not about only you but also people having disabilities.
Remember the world is not about only for people with disabilities. Secondly, this is a nonsense argument, because this does not “require” Ai. Especially not for every user. If its integrated into Firefox and I cannot remove it, then its very much forced. Why not make an extension for people who need or want it? (nobody needs this)
Hey. Hey? Hey. Hello friend.
You just got good advice. Remember that the world is not only for you.
Like, it’s super not for you. It’s mostly not for you at all. If you ask me whether I care about things for people with disabilities or things for you, you don’t even chart. That’s only two options and you’re not even second on that list.
So yeah. Good advice.
I think there is only one thing worth answering in your reply:
Why not make an extension for people who need or want it?
For web page translation, it is considered a very basic feature that should be there by default in all mainstream browsers (e.g. Chrome), but Firefox hadn’t provided this feature for a very long time.
For any AI-assisted accessibility feature such as image tagging, my opinion is that it is even more important to make it easily turn on, rather than requiring user to search and download some extensions, which might be a too hard task for a disabled person.
You missed my point entirely. If it is an extension that is installed by default, because a minority needs it, then at least the majority who don’t want it can remove the extension. This is especially more important because it is AI and not a regular program. AI is always a black box that cannot be verified.
And if its too hard for a disabled person to install extension, then its probably too hard to use Firefox in the first place. That’s nonsense argumentation. But that’s not even my actual argumentation and I think you guys try to misunderstand me, just because I don’t like what you like. AI in the browser is bullshit idea, it does not matter if its disabled or not person. And not something “required” as the base minimum, that cannot be removed.
That all sounds pretty reasonable to me. You AI holdouts are going to have accept it in some form sooner or later.
You have no idea what freedom is, if you think I have to accept bullshit.
Do you use autocomplete? AI in some of the various ways that’s being posited is just spicy autocomplete. You can run a pretty decent local AI on SSE2 instructions alone.
Now you don’t have to accept spicy-autocomplete just like you don’t have to accept plain jane-autocomplete. The choice is yours, Mozilla isn’t planning on spinning extra cycles in your CPU or GPU if you don’t want them spun.
But I distinctly remember the grumbles when Firefox brought local db ops into the browser to give it memory for forms. Lots of people didn’t like the notion of filling out a bank form or something and then that popping into a sqlite db.
So, your opinion, I don’t blame you. I don’t agree with your opinion, but I don’t blame you. Completely normal reaction. Don’t let folks tell you different. Just like we need the gas pedal for new things, we need the brake as well. I would hate to see you go and leave Firefox, BUT I would really hate you having to feel like something was forced upon you and you just had to grin and bear it.
Thank you for the understanding and not getting stuck on the choice of my words. I have to say that local AI is much more acceptable to me and remedies some key points I dislike about AI usage in normal cases. But I don’t like the idea of an AI, as it is a black box and it is not possible to verify. I mean in source code we can look at it, test it, modify it, build it. But with an AI like this, we cannot. There is a lot I don’t like about AI.
But autocomplete question? Well yes off course I use autocomplete for my programming, just not with AI. Only simple autocomplete. And I like that.
Generative AI will be forced on you, regardless of whether you want it in your life. The entire world is moving in that direction very rapidly. We are not just talking micro scale like which web browser you use - every institution you rely on in your daily life will have AI implementation at some level.
Generative AI will be forced on you, regardless of whether you want it in your life. The entire world is moving in that direction very rapidly.
No. Sad that you don’t know what freedom means. AI is marketing bullshit and the way to control you. Nobody will force me to use it and you know it. Just because you tell me that I have no choice does not take away my choice. You are a Linux user godamn, you should know that better.
Don’t let corporations control you with AI. Don’t be a lemming.
How exactly do you think stuff around you works? Machine learning is everywhere gobbling up massive swaths of data wherever possible. Insurances, work shift planning, goddamn Spotify. All are using ML and have for years. To think you can just stay away from those Models is ridiculous.
Which does not mean that I HAVE TO USE IT ON MY MACHINE! Shift planning, inusurances are not software I am using and it is not MY RESPONSIBILITY. I don’t use Spotify and also that is not an important program such as my Firefox. You guys search for reasons to accept AI and let you control by every company for no reason. All in the name of “accessibility”, when in reality this is not needed.
lol
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I am just hoping governments will see the massive issues and copyright problems with AI and ban that garbage outright soon so all these companies eager to add their AI trash to every single product they ship will stop.
There is no general copyright issue with AIs. It completely depends on the training material (if even then), so it’s not possible to make blanket statements like that. Banning technology, because a particular implementation is problematic, makes no sense.
The only relevant training material to make a truly complete dataset must include copyrighted material or you do not have a full set of data to draw from and thus it is useless. Stop defending this horrible technology.
What do you mean “full set if data”?
Obviously you can not train on 100% of material ever created, so you pick a subset. There is a a lot of permissively licensed content (e.g. Wikipedia) and content you can license (e.g. Reddit). While not sufficient for an advanced LLM, it certainly is for smaller models that do not need wide knowledge.
You can’t even rely on Wikipedia to be right, and how is reddit “content you can license”? Its articles are owned by their sites, and the original stuff posted there is from the poster and is usually wildly inaccurate or outright wrong (or even downright dangerous). And even when they do pull in tons of stuff they shouldn’t, the results are frequently laughably wrong.
You’re not making a good argument for LLM crap here. Just accept the fact that it’s a failed technology that needs to be shut down. Please. How are people so excited and gung-ho over this garbage, failed, laughably bad technology? It’s almost like people WANT chaos.
Wikipedia is no less reliable than other content. There’s even academic research about it (no, I will not dig for sources now, so feel free to not believe it). But factual correctness only matters for models that deal with facts: for e.g a translation model it does not matter.
Reddit has a massive amount of user-generated content it owns, e.g. comments. Again, the factual correctness only matters in some contexts, not all.
I’m not sure why you keep mentioning LLMs since that is not what is being discussed. Firefox has no plans to use some LLM to generate content where facts play an important role.
Sure hasn’t helped AI/LLMs with accuracy yet. And never will. Computing doesn’t actually think and reason, it’s just mashing together bits of data it has, and if what it has now isn’t accurate, how is anything going to be?
You and others continue to harp on how great this new technology is and meanwhile we have seen it do nothing but absolutely, laughably fail. You keep saying it will get better, but it won’t. It is limited by the fact that computers don’t work that way. Sick and tired of the people justifying this garbage “tech” that is stealing art, code, text, etc, sucking up huge amounts of power, and giving wrong information, telling people to do dangerous things and even kill themselves because computers don’t know the difference.
Just admit it. AI/LLM is garbage. Please. Stop being a massive fanboy for something that has clearly, evidently, 100% failed miserably and dangerously.
Meh, if it will do stuff like merging results in the awesome bar, I’ll happily take it.
The problem is, this should be an addon that people can install or at least, remove. I don’t want AI in my text editor, in my browser or in my operating system.
I mean the address bar. If I type in a port which I know something is on locally, it shows me five different entries pointing to the same thing. I’m saying they should be merged. You and I know that this is programmatically simple and should be the default behaviour, however in this age, at least according to marketing, it’s AI.
And I am saying, if they want to it, then it should be an addon and not installed by default that cannot be removed.
I’m sorry, but you’re being ridiculous. Why should it be an add-on to say merge two identical rows from a database query?
Why not? I think you are ridiculous. Just for two identical rows to merge them is not a good reason to introduce AI into the system. This could have been done without AI, but if they really want an AI, then it has to be an addon. If its really that simple, then there is no need for an AI.
I’m guessing you haven’t had your coffee yet, because I blatantly said
You and I know that this is programmatically simple and should be the default behaviour, however in this age, at least according to marketing, it’s AI.
If you want to fight for the sake of fighting, please go find someone else. It’s too early for this stupidness.
You’re just irrationally disliking it based on the name “AI” and nothing factual.
I just want HDR video support
This and the “Cast youtube video to TV” without an external bridging software
Literally the only reason I ever fire up a different browser. Come on guys.
Noo, you want ai!!! 😞😞😞
More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker.
So make things even harder to find? A classic menu bar is not clutter!
At least in firefox it’s not hard to change toolbars…
FUCK AI
There’s a lot of doom and gloom online about this, but to me these seem like welcome changes 🤷
This has actually been the most positive reaction to a Firefox announcement I’ve seen in a long time. I’ve yet to find a piece of open source software users act more toxic towards than Firefox. It is impossible to find any Firefox-related announcement in recent years that’s received broadly positive feedback. For a long time, the top voted comment would always be someone demanding tab groups or vertical tabs. Now they’re adding those, which is probably why the reaction has been a bit more positive. But of course, AI and UI changes have become the new things to complain about.
The top comment is usually someone saying nothing should ever change and every feature is bloat and should be an extension.
Finally, the only two features I’ve been missing - tab groups and profiles. With all the modern internet browser stones, we’ll be unstoppable!
JMINS (just make it not suck). Fix the existing brokeness before adding more useless stuff. E.g. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749612 open for 2+ years and marked “enhancement” even though it’s a bug that makes the feature unusable a lot of the time.
How is displaying a password in a certain font “broken” when you can easily copy/paste it? People who rally against Firefox sure do point to ridiculous, non-existent “problems” as an excuse to keep using laughable Chromium/derivatives.
The idea is to be able to read the password with your eyeballs, so you can type it into another computer. This fails.
Paste it into the address bar to read it?
Mobile Firefox copy/paste
I will have to check whether the font in the address bar has the same issue (edit: yes it does). But the reason the “make password visible” feature exists at all (instead of just “copy password to clipboard”) is to make the password readable by eyeball. It fails to do that. That failure is why there is an open Bugzilla ticket. If it worked properly, there would be no ticket or it would have been closed. But making it work is treated as an enhancement rather than a fix. Gack.
Also, pasting the password into the address bar drops it into the search system and maybe leaks it, who knows. Not a good idea.
Good points, why not change it and recompile Firefox and see what font works. Then you can submit a pull request for this issue and they might actually accept it
Have you ever compiled Firefox? If not, it’s best not to suggest that to others. It’s not for the faint of heart.
Anyway the usual fixed width fonts like Courier work, or they could put it in about:config.
Yes, but I used the NixOS “recipe”. I just tell it the new source folder in my config and do a
sudo nixos-rebuild swirch --impureIt takes two hours, but completely hands off
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You have a computer in front of you and yet you’re relying on wetware? Found the issue.
Hardy har har. I have a saved password on my phone and I want to use it on my laptop. This happens now and then but not often enough to want to introduce another software dependency and its security problems. It’s a password (randomly generated, but still), not War And Peace. Simple enough-- read it off the phone and type it into the laptop, but no. They used a font that makes some characters indistinguishable, there is a 2 year old open ticket to fix it, and you sit there making wisecracks. Found the issue:
So copy and paste it into something else on your computer if you’re too blind to see the difference in letters in that font (I can tell, easily) and tell it to use another font. PEBCAK issue, not a real one.
This is on my phone (Android Firefox), not the computer (desktop Firefox). Yes some of the characters in the font are indistinguishable. That’s why there’s a ticket open after all. And even if crappy workarounds exist, it can and does still suck. Thus, JMINS.
Why do you defend this crap? I never understand what makes people do that.
“FIREFOX SUX BECAUSE MY OUTSIDER 0.00000001% USE CASE AND I OPENED A TICKET BOOHOO!”
This is how you sound. Just because there’s a ticket open for outlier bullshit doesn’t make it valid to gripe about endlessly, especially when there are so many possible, simple ways around it. Slightly annoying does not mean broken.
Phones have copy/paste, by the way.
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