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Can’t wait for vertical tabs
Vertical slabs
I’ve heard a lot of people talk about vertical tabs but personally I don’t see the appeal. Can you explain to me what is desirable about vertical tabs?
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You can have tons of tabs open while still being able to read what they are
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Moving the tabs to the side of your browser window frees up more vertical real estate which better matches the webpage layout of most websites, which otherwise have wasted space on the left and right sides of the page when viewing them on a computer
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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.
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.
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You sound like you have no disabilities that make it hard for you to use the Internet. Good for you.
If AI can add usability features that help people use the Internet easier then that’s a good thing. You don’t need to use it. Why complain about software being capable of helping others?
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!
Reading pages out loud has been an unexpected hit for me on the latest iOS. I’d love this in Firefox too.
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???
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
Me.
There’s a lot of doom and gloom online about this, but to me these seem like welcome changes 🤷
I just want HDR video support
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
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.
Is it tab groups?
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
The way that profiles works today is the reason I don’t use it. Chrome just handles it all so gracefully between profiles and opening links from other applications.
FUCK AI
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.
Just use librewolf or something, or if they incorporate ai, I’d be surprised if an ai-free fork doesn’t pop up quickly
+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’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.
I think that sounds like a cool use case. If it runs locally what’s not to like?
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
