Tab groups how? Bunched up into 1 tab so you can’t see anything or are they replacing the Simple Tab Groups extension. And what’s different from the current profile manager.
Changes are all well and good until they force me to change my workflows even a little; then technology has gone too far!!!
And what’s different from the current profile manager.
From a usability standpoint, what current profile manager? Having to web search to find out how to open it puts it beyond the reach of most users.
I wish it was harder to find in Gnome, where its right below “New Private Window” in the right-click context menu. I accidentally open it almost every time I try open a private window. Thankfully I don’t need private windows as much now that I use the Multi-Account Containers extension.
wait, really? For me on Windows 11 the launcher right-click literally just has one entry: Firefox. Nothing for recent/frequent/open tabs. Nothing for opening a new tab or window. Nothing for Private. Just that one entry that does the same thing as just clicking the launcher. There’s a separate start menu item for private browser window, I could pin that on the taskbar next to the regular launcher.
Here’s mine
Well color me jelly. That’s like actually usable and shit.
Don’t feel too jelly though, the actual profile manager has been in need of some care for a while, now…
…and it’s apparently getting it soon! No way they’ll hide the button after they polish it up, right? Happy times to come for all, I hope :^)
Might be a Linux thing because I have the same function under KDE as he describes it, which I wasn’t even aware of (I don’t really use that right click launcher functionality, like ever). Either way, I think opening it should be part of the main menu of the browser and the actual profile manager (not the profile manager page) should also have proper functionalities.
YEAH!
YEAH!
YEAH!
no.
Isn’t that
no.the exact attitude a lot of boomers have for technology? Look where that got them.Why the no?
It’s local only, and actually used to improve the product as opposed to being another shitty chatbot.
This is how it should be done.
Yeah, everyone is putting AI into their browsers, to some extent Mozilla needs to do this to compete.
I’m very much in favor of them integrating a local FOSS model rather than to partner with OpenAI like everyone else. Even if you’re against AI, you should understand that this is a way better situation.
Vertical tabs will be neat for my ultra-wide!
Building back to that 2005 standard feature set.
None of these features existed in 2005…
Local AI sounds nice. One reason I’m cynical about the current state of AI is because of how many send all your data to another company
Eh, I don’t particularly care too much either way. It seems to be solving problems with the 80/20 approach: 80% of the benefit for 20% of the effort. However, getting that last 20% is probably way more difficult than just building purpose-built solutions from the start.
So I’m guessing we’ll see a lot more “decent but not quite there” products, and they’ll never “get there.”
So it might be fun to play with, but it’s not something I’m interested in using day-to-day. Then again, maybe I’m completely wrong and it’s the best thing since sliced bread, but as someone who has worked on very basid NLP projects in the past (distantly related to modern LLMs), I just find it hard to look past the limitations.
It is. Unfortunately it does tend to use up a lot of RAM and requires either a fairly fast CPU or better yet, a decent graphics card. This means it’s at least somewhat problematic for use on lower spec or ultraportable laptops, especially while on battery power.
Eh, as long as the browser works…
Awesome news! Really miss the tab groups from Chrome, really the only thing haha
If you’re here because of the AI headline, this is important to read.
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.
They are implementing AI how it should be. Don’t let all the shitty companies blind you to the fact what we call AI has positive sides.
There are a lot of knee jerk reactions in the comments. I hope few of those commenters have read the article or, at the least, your comment.
thats most of the internet, just reacting to headlines.
AI has become truly meaningless term for everything and nothing.
Not to mention all the justified hate it received. It’s probably time to kill it once again and delegate it to the future like usual every 10 years or so starting with Deep Blue
They are implementing AI how it should be.
The term is so overused and abused that I’m not clear what they’re even promising. Are they localizing a LLM? Are they providing some kind of very fancy macroing? Are they linking up with ChatGPT somehow or integrating with Co-pilot? There’s no way to tell from the verbage.
And that’s not even really Mozilla’s fault. It’s just how the term AI can mean anything from “overhyped javascript” to “multi-billion dollar datacenter full of fake Scarlett Johansson voice patterns”.
there are language models that are quite feasible to run locally for easier tasks like this. “local” rules out both ChatGPT and Co-pilot since those models are enormous. AI generally means machine learned neural networks these days, even if a pile of if-else used to pass in the past.
not sure how they’re going to handle low-resource machines, but as far as AI integrations go this one is rather tame
AI generally means machine learned neural networks these days
Right, but a neural network traditionally rules out using a single local machine. Hell, we have entire chip architecture that revolves around neural net optimization. I can’t imagine needing that kind of configuration for my internet browser.
not sure how they’re going to handle low-resource machines
One of the perks of Firefox is its relative thinness. Chrome was a shameless resource hog even in its best days, and IE wasn’t any better. Do I really want Firefox chewing hundreds of MB of memory so it can… what? Simulate a 600 processor cluster doing weird finger art?
I use my local machine for neutral networks just fine
i mean, i’ve worked in neural networks for embedded systems, and it’s definitely possible. i share you skepticism about overhead, but i’ll eat my shoes if it isn’t opt in
I don’t doubt it’s possible. I’m just not sure how it would be useful.
We’re also using machine learning for the local site translation. The AI buzzword is doing more damage than good PR.
That’s all fine and good but Firefox on Android is currently in a sorry state. No per-site process isolation, buggy, can’t keep tabs open, slow, choppy, drains battery. Had to uninstall it on my brand new Galaxy S24+ and my Pixel 6 Pro because it was draining so much battery. When are you going to finally stop ignoring Firefox Android, Mozilla?
Idk, it seems to work fine on my old, crappy Moto G, and it also seems to work fine so far on my new Pixel 8 (just bought it recently).
Maybe Chrome is a little faster, idk, I don’t use it much, but Firefox is completely fine.
Then again, maybe my standards are lower. I just want it to browse the web, and it does that pretty well. The ad-blocker is an absolutely killer feature which is why I don’t use Chrome, so maybe I’m willing to put up with worse performance. But it seems plenty smooth to me.
This is the big thing for me. Any speed gains I might get from Chrome are entirely wiped out by how much the web browsing experience is dragged to a crawl by ads and spyware.
slow, choppy, drains battery
Sounds like you don’t have an adblocker.
I ran Firefox Android with uBo and AdGuardDNS.
I heavily use Firefox for Android on multiple devices since many years. It HAS annoying bugs. The most annoying for me is the tab view keeps forgetting the last tab you were on, when for example closing a tab from tab view or moving between tabs by swiping the address bar.
I think every person’s bugs depends on how they use the software.
edit: quick word order fix.
I’m experiencing a similar issue on my phone and I’m using ublock, it is draining the battery very fast and making the phone hot.
I wonder if there is a good alternative/degoogled chrome for Android?
Nope. He’s right. There are similar threads on reddit too every single week about the mobile version. It’s simply bad.
Maybe some issue with rendering on specific hardware…?
Maybe. It feels slower than it’s open source forks which feel a bit slower than chromium alternatives. And the group tabbing is so bad and no process isolation.
He mentioned a a Pixel, but I’m running it on Pixel with no problems whatsoever.
And just like there, a bunch of people here squinting and saying “huh what are you talking about it works great?”
I use it on a Pixel 7 Pro. Can’t say I have the same issues.
I also have a notorious problem with too many tabs (I am beyond 99)I’ve used it exclusively for a long time and haven’t experienced any of this
Yeah, same. This is bonkers to me. I have dozens of tabs open on my Pixel 7 and my battery still lasts all day.
Well here’s the drain I was talking about at least. 18% in less than an hour and thirty minutes of use for a web browser isn’t normal. In an hour of use a Chromium browser only drains 6-7 ish % for me. This has been an issue for I guess the past month or so? It drove me crazy so I had to uninstall. And it’s not just me either, there are tons of posts from people with the same problem on Reddit. If you don’t have problems, good for you I guess.That’s not what that means. That means out of all the battery drain you’ve had since the last charge, Firefox was only 18% of that. For example if your phone was fully charged 3 hours ago and you dropped 20% then it would’ve been only 18% of that 20% battery drop. It’s really confusing the way Android shows battery usage now.
Agreed, there a two years bug still open on Firefox just refusing to load pages.
I have to force quit Firefox multiple tones a day and there are new bugs popping up on the tab picker.
Its hard to go back to chrome and lose addons. I need u block especially on mobile.
Im having a great experience on samsung internet with adguard and blokada 5 (on a pixel 7 if it’s relevant)
I’ve been using it for at least a decade now and haven’t encountered any of the issues you mention.
Profile management
Fucking finally!
The fact that you had to use external applications or manually go to an internal Firefox menu to change from to another sucked!
All great changes! I’ve been using Floorp to have vertical tabs, but I’d gladly switch back to Firefox when its implemented. Profiles have always been a great feature, but had a bad user experience, glad to see its being improved.
Really interested in the local AI. Firefox has been doing interesting work with that recently.
Sidebery is a great FF extension that provides vertical tabs, trees, and groups.
I’ve tried a few extensions, but they haven’t felt as integrated as the one’s in Floorp, due to firefox limitations. The main reason I want vertical tabs is to save vertical screen space by removing the horizontal tab bar, which can be done with userchrome.css, but thats inconvenient to do on multiple devices. I appreciate the recommendation though, I haven’t used that one and it looks very powerful.
One of these things is not like the other
I do not know why browser makers like Opera or Brave(and now apparently Firefox) is going hey ho over AI. I don’t see a proper benefit of integration of local AI for most people as of no
As for vertical tabs, Waterfox got it just now. It is basically a fork of Tree Style Tabs and very basically implemented. I am honestly happy with TST on Firefox and while a native integration might be a bit faster(my browser takes just that few extra seconds to load the right TST panel on my slow laptop), it’ll likely be feature incomplete when compared to TST.
It depends. I really liked Mozillas initiative for local translation - much better for data privacy than remote services. But conversational/generative AI, no thank you.
AI-generated alt-text for images inserted into PDFs
Sounds more like classification so far. Things like summarising web-pages would be properly generative, LLMs in general could be useful to interrogate your browsing history. Doing feature extraction on it, sorting it into a graph of categories not by links, but concepts could be useful. And heck if a conversational interface falls out of that I’m not exactly opposed, unlike the stuff you see on the net it’s bound to quote its sources, it’s going to tell you right-away that “a cat licking you is trying to see whether you’re fit for consumption” doesn’t come from the gazillion of cat behaviour sites you’ve visited, but reddit. Firefox doesn’t have an incentive to keep you in the AI interface and out of some random webpage.
Mozilla actually had a project for that: https://memorycache.ai//
They just suck at naming things, and unfortunately it’s not getting much of the necessary dev time it needs to get out of the POC stage.
The biggest thing I want is local only models that use my activity & browsing history as a way for me to recall or contextualize events and information.
tab grouping
Sure, okay.
vertical tabs
To each their own.
profile management
Whatever, it’s fine.
and local AI features
HOLLUP
I tried one of their test builds. Seems like the AI part just means the browser can integrate with llamafile (Mozilla’s open source solution for running open source llm’s with just one file on any platform)
I wonder when tech companies are going to start calling AI something different to deal with the luddites. Like skyscrapers whose floors are labeled 12 and 14.
Focus on “local”. Mozilla is working since a while on that.
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. The alt text is then processed on your device and saved locally instead of cloud services, ensuring that enhancements like these are done with your privacy in mind.
IMO if everything’s going to have AI ham fisted into it, this is probably the least shitty way to do so. With Firefox being open source, the code can also be audited to ensure they’re actually keeping their word about it being local-only.
Don’t you need specific CPUs for these AI features? If so, how is this going to work on the machines that don’t support it?
Nope, they can use your NPU, GPU or CPU whatever you have… the performance will vary quite a bit though. Also, the larger the model the more memory it needs to run well.
You only need lots of precessing power to train the models. Using the models can be done on regular hardware.
The feature will obviously just be disabled on machines that don’t support it.
With it being local it’s probably a small and limited model. I took a couple courses on machine learning years ago (before it got rebranded as “AI”), and you’d be surprised at how well a basic image recognition model can run on the lowest-spec macbook from 2012.
Tbh the inversion of typical intuition that is LLMs taking orders of magnitudes more memory than computer vision can mess people unfamiliar up on estimates of the hardware required
Yeah that’s very true.
Running AI models isn’t that resource intensive. Training the models is the difficult part.
While I dislike corporate ai as much as the next guy I am quite interested in open source, local models. If i can run it on my machine, with the absolute certainty that it is my llm, working for my benefit, that’s pretty cool. And not feeding every miniscule detail about me to corporate.
I mean that’s that thing. They’re kind of black boxes so it can be hard to tell what they’re doing, but yeah local hardware is the absolute minimum. I guess places like huggingface are at least working to try and apply some sort of standard measures to the LLM space at least through testing…
I mean, as long as you can tell it’s not opening up any network connections (e.g. by not giving the process network permission), it’s fine.
'Course, being built into a web browser might not make that easy…
Sums up my thoughts nicely. I am by no means able to make sense of the inner workings of an llm anyway, even if I can look at its code. At best i would be able to learn how to tweak its results to my needs or maybe provide it with additional datasets over time.
I simply trust that an open source model that is able to run offline, and doesnt call home somewhere with telemetry, has been vetted for trustworthiness by far more qualified people than me.
I want something like XULRunner back.
No, they don’t owe me anything. I just want it back.
So Tree Tabs built in? I’ve used them for so long, I don’t know how other manage without them. Yet I know no one else who uses them, even after I show them. Be interesting see how well the new built in ones work.
I tried, but I already use TMP in full page vertical view.
I never got the hang of tree style tab in the sidebar. I think I just don’t like the sidebar.
I tried, but I already use TMP in full page vertical view.
I never got the hang of tree style tab in the sidebar. I think I just don’t like the sidebar.
Can I disable all local AI features? Or better yet not have that functionality installed?
Can I dsable all local AI features
Hopefully
Or better yet not have that functionality installed?
Unlikely. Firefox has long been gone down the way of “everything included”. They started bundling extensions and peripheral features into the core of the browser long ago, and despite backlash kept going that way. We’re already in the “I have to disable a lot of stuff when I install Firefox” territory.
AI BAD!
People that wanted vertical tabs must be really excited
Its honestly the only reason i use brave and edge over Firefox. Can fully commit to FF now.
The TreeStyleTab extension for Firefox has added vertical tabs for a decade
Yes, but you have to have a custom user.js file or whatever to remove the tabs on top.
Ok, so do that once and you’re done. :)
It should be an option in the UI though.
It removes the close/maximize/minimize buttons though. Not ideal.
This is avoidable with the right CSS.
I’m sure you’re right lol I just don’t know it and its more work than it needs to be.
The way tree style tabs worked after they broke it was never very good. Floorp is what to use if you wanted side tabs on Firefox.
That said I still went back to Vivaldi after trying to use Floorp because of stupid little ux issues like pinned tabs not being protected from closing, and broken session saving.
Sidebery is a very good implementation of the vertical tab panel
Anyone who really cared was already using an extension that did these things.
That’s unnecessarily dismissive. Unfortunately, even the best extensions have their downsides. Some used a browser that suited their preferences better instead, which is a shame for both Firefox and the user, in my opinion.
Mozilla recognizes this and is finally taking action to integrate highly requested features into Firefox. Many “who really care” are glad for this, because it is a good thing.
What’s extra funny is that those extensions are made by Mozilla already
At least tab grouping and vert tabs were last I looked
Anything to fill all that absolute wasted space from every website formatting things to fit phones and not desktops. Ultra wide really sucks ass for a lot of things.
To be honest, it’s not just for phones. The wider the monitor, the more I’d need to move my head if a website uses the whole space, instead of keeping it centered. Obviously it shouldn’t be too slim but you can’t really just fill an entire monitor or align your content to the left of the screen anymore nowadays.
IMO that’s mostly a window-management problem, not an app layout problem. The point of an ultra wide monitor setup (other than flight sims or something) is to be able to view a bunch of different things side-by-side.
tabs themselves ought to be part of the window decoration, not the app
Well, Windows did try that. It sounds cool as an idea, but it also severely limits what the tabs can do, as most programs don’t need tabs that are as advanced as browsers’, and even browsers’ implementations of tabs vary widely.
I admit, this news has made me add a note to re-download firefox on my work machine…
