- cross-posted to:
- firefox@fedia.io
- hackernews@lemmy.smeargle.fans
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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.
The chatbots, presumably.
- Fizz ( @Fizz@lemmy.nz ) 43•10 months ago
“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?
- Fizz ( @Fizz@lemmy.nz ) 5•10 months ago
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.
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.
It’s always been the case, uBO has a wiki page on github about how chrome has already been limiting it’s capabilities.
Also, were they able to release any updates to the useful version of uBO in the past few months?
But yeah, it’ll only get worse over there, pretty fast.
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.
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 obviously
Plus 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.
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.
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 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…
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.
There’s nothing that would fix that, though.
So they say. I’ll believe it when I see it.
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
FUCK AI
Finally, the only two features I’ve been missing - tab groups and profiles. With all the modern internet browser stones, we’ll be unstoppable!
Great silent AI captioning. I can’t see this going wrong.
Honestly I think Mozilla has it all wrong
Reading pages out loud has been an unexpected hit for me on the latest iOS. I’d love this in Firefox too.
You can do that already, I’m doing it very often.
On the Desktop go to reader mode and click the play button.
On Android I use https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hyperionics.avar just share any website with it and it starts reading it.
Ooh will try thanks for the heads up!
Fix freezing/crashing bugs on android first ! I don’t need nor want AI. I need and want a stable browser.
@petsoi
Do you do somethig to solve these Security Issues:
madaidans-insecurities.github.…