• brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    The pathological need to find something to use LLMs for is so bizzare.

    It’s like the opposite of classic ML, relatively tiny special purpose models trained for something critical, out of desperation, because it just can’t be done well conventionally.

    But this:

    AI-enhanced tab groups. Powered by a local AI model, these groups identify related tabs and suggest names for them. There is even a “Suggest more tabs for group” button that users can click to get recommendations.

    Take out the word AI.

    Enhanced tab groups. Powered by a local algorithm, these groups identify related tabs and suggest names for them. There is even a “Suggest more tabs for group” button that users can click to get recommendations.

    If this feature took, say, a gigabyte of RAM and a bunch of CPU, it would be laughed out. But somehow it ships because it has the word AI in it? That makes no sense.

    I am a massive local LLM advocate. I like “generative” ML, within reason and ethics. But this is just stupid.

    • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      When I’m browsing around with multiple tabs open, the last thing I want is something to start moving them around and messing my flow up. This is a solution looking for a problem.

      • Otter@lemmy.ca
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        Yup

        Auto naming functionality is neat in some cases, like the AI chat UI itself

        • It’s convenient to have names when toggling between a few recent chats or searching through 10s or 100s of chats later on
        • I spawn new chats often and it’s tedious to name them all
        • I don’t have a strong preference for what the title is as long as it’s clear what the chat was about

        Tab groups don’t hit those points at all

        • I’ll have a handful of tab groups
        • I don’t make them often
        • I have a strong preference for what it’s called, and the AI will have trouble figuring out exactly what I’m using those sites for
    • acosmichippo@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      even without AI, to me tab groups are already feature creep bloat in browsers. do people really put that much effort into organizing tabs?

      • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        It is to some people. My approach though, when I happen to have multiple “work group” to organize, is just to use my OS ability to have multiple windows. No need for any extra bloat, the feature is already there, and it works as I’m used to.

        But apparently, using the tools already available to you is not a common skill these days :(

        • amorpheus@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          But apparently, using the tools already available to you is not a common skill these days :(

          So, are you not understanding that other people work differently, or are you just not using that skill?

          Besides offering different approaches for different preferences, there are clear benefits to the extra level of organization. As an additional exercise, try to picture someone using multiple windows and tab groups.

          Not everyone operates on the basic level. Hell, why even have tabs? The OS can manage multiple windows, and you can use multiple desktops to achieve the same result without that bloat.

          • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            So, are you not understanding that other people work differently, or are you just not using that skill?

            The very first five words of my message was that this was useful to some people.

      • Digitalprimate@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        For work at any given point I have 17-20 tabs open. It’s totally useful for me to sort them into tabs to cut out the “noise” when I’m doing research.

      • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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        3 months ago

        No, but I think the idea of a second layer of organization to tabs is a wonderful idea. Maybe not a gig of RAM to sort them, sure.

      • hisao@ani.social
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        3 months ago

        You probably look at tabs as something inherently transient. In my tab group powered workflow a lot of tabs are persistent between browser restarts and stay open at all times. To try to formalize it, there is a set of core tabs that are permanently open, and there are transient tabs are opened and closed from those core tabs. Before tab groups I used “Tree Style Tab” extension but I like tab groups more. It’s especially cool tab groups are integrated well with containers so that you can have for example I2P tab group tied to I2P container configured to use I2P proxy port to automatically browse all tabs opened within group through your I2P proxy port.

      • exu@feditown.com
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        3 months ago

        I like the tab groups. I use them often at work to group an issue with related tabs and my attempts at solving it. Also makes it easier to pause work on one problem and work on something else because I have the tabs grouper and know exactly where to go back.

        • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          I like the tab groups.

          And nobody should stop you installing an extension that provides tab groups. I agree with the other commentator that some features can be left to extensions and don’t need to be part of the core web browser, though.

          • frongt@lemmy.zip
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            3 months ago

            True, but I’m not sure that an extension would have the necessary access to manipulate the browser like that. I don’t think it should. A malicious extension could do horrible things.

            • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              I’m not sure that an extension would have the necessary access to manipulate the browser like that.

              I don’t know if they still do but they used to have. That, however, is something to discuss with the genius decision makers at Mozilla who decide to break extension APIs every couple of years. Firefox on Android still hasn’t recovered from last time.

      • Mr. Satan@lemmy.zip
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        3 months ago

        Yes, especially at work. Different tasks, different tab groups. Once the task is done, the group dies. Really useful when working on multiple tasks at “the same time”.

        Pair that with multi account containers and temporary containers and it’s a godsend tool for web dev.

        Now does that need AI in any capacity? Absolutely not! I’m more upset that they’re even considering such thing because ir sounds utterly useless. A browser should do the browser thing and get out of my way.

    • Saleh@feddit.org
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      3 months ago

      I agree with you on almost everything.

      It’s like the opposite of classic ML, relatively tiny special purpose models trained for something critical, out of desperation, because it just can’t be done well conventionally.

      Here i disagree. ML is using high dimensional statistics. There exist many problems, which are by their nature problems of high dimensional statistics.

      If you have for an example an engineering problem, it can make sense to use an ML approach, to find patterns in the relationship between input conditions and output results. Based on this patterns you have an idea, where you need to focus in the physical theory for understanding and optimizing it.

      Another example for “generative AI” i have seen is creating models of hearts. So by feeding it the MRI scans of hundreds of real hearts, millions of models for probable heart shapes can be created and the interaction with medical equipment can be studied on them. This isn’t a “desperate” approach. It is a smart approach.

      • tabular@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Based on this patterns you have an idea, where you need to focus in the physical theory for understanding and optimizing it.

        How do you tell what the patterns are, or how to interpret them?

        • Saleh@feddit.org
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          3 months ago

          The recognition of the pattern is done by the machine learning. That is the core concept of machine learning.

          For the interpretation you need to use your domain knowledge. Machine learning together with knowledge in the domain analyzed can be a very powerful combination.

          Another example in research i have heard about recently, is detection of brain tumors before they occur. MRIs are analyzed of people who later developed brain tumors to see if patterns can be detected in the people who developed the tumors that are absent in the people who didn’t develop tumors. This knowledge of a correlation between certain patterns and later tumor development could help specialists to further their understanding of how tumors develop as they can analyze these specific patterns.

          What we see with ChatGPT and other LLMs is kind of doing the opposite by detaching the algorithm from any specific knowledge. Subsequently the algorithm can make predictions on anything and they are worth nothing.

    • Godort@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      The pathological need to find something to use LLMs for is so bizzare.

      Venture capital dumped so much money into the tech without understanding the full scope of what it was capable of. Now they’re so in so deep that they desperately NEED to find something profitable it can do, otherwise they’ll lose the farm.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Firefox has little financial motivation for this, though?

        Other than getting “AI” investor money, if that’s the plan… But otherwise it just feels like they’re following a meme.

        • A Wild Mimic appears!@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          3 months ago

          90% of their cash flow comes from google to be the default search engine - they are probably trying to open up alternative routes of funding to reduce the risk, since it’s not guaranteed that the money will keep coming due to the current lawsuit.

          • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Right, I sympathize with that.

            …But also it’s ridiculous. Like why should including a feature with “AI” in it get them VC money? Even if that’s kinda reality?

            TBH they should just become a contributor to llama.cpp and market that somehow.

            • PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au
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              Like why should including a feature with “AI” in it get them VC money?

              Spoken like someone who’s never interacted with Silicon Valley VCs… just imagine someone with tons of a money, a moderately competent business background, and very little understanding of even the basics of technology that you and I take for granted. And then make them stupid and greedy.

              “AI? Yes please! Here’s some money, I’ve heard of Firefox so I know you’re good for it.” It’s not really any more complicated than that, I don’t think.

              • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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                3 months ago

                Well, exactly. Then why the pretense?

                They could contribute to some existing local inference effort, do actually useful dev work, and slap their brand on it. It would both be cheaper and “look” better to VCs.

                Basically do what ollama’s doing but less shady.

                • PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au
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                  3 months ago

                  Yeah. There would be a way to do it that I feel like might potentially be useful. The described method (doing clustering instead of just having a similarity threshold to group tabs together, vectorizing the entire tab title through a whole fucking network instead of just tokenizing it and calling two tabs similar if they have uncommon tokens that are within a certain similarity level) really sounds to me like people who have no real idea what they’re doing, just being “ML experts” all over the codebase and fucking things up, and probably walking away very proud of themselves while helping themselves to bunches and bunches of the Mozilla Foundation’s Google-money.

        • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          It makes a lot more sense when you realize that the Mozilla corporation is a for profit run by the same techno-fascist aggrandizing bait-and-switch narcissists as the rest of SV.

          I’ve been saying it for years, but I will never donate to Firefox until it is freed from the shackles of a for profit corporation that can use your donation for any profit motive it sees fit; not even related to Firefox.

          • Gigasser@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Isn’t the “for-profit” Mozilla Corporation owned by the “non-profit” Mozilla Foundation though?

            • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              I don’t care. It’s a corrosive force that causes them to pay for over priced CEO’s and integrate services that nobody cares about into Firefox (like pocket) or that runs against their principles (container VPN’s exclusive to Mozillas for-profit VPN).

          • piefood@feddit.online
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            3 months ago

            IIRC, you can’t even donate to Firefox. You can only donate to Mozilla. It seems pretty clear to me why they set it up that way…

  • barnaclebutt@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Which fork should I be using? I am already using IronFox on Android and I’m loving it. What about Linux? What’s your favourite?

      • U@piefed.social
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        3 months ago

        Zen user here also. Awesome project. Beautiful and useful browsing experience.

    • rozodru@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I like Floorp. it’s a FF fork by a Japanese dev team. Best I can compare it to is Vivaldi as far as customization (what Mozilla will allow).

      However the updates for it have been coming less frequently over time so I’m not sure how that bodes for the long term.

      But hey i’m currently building my own FF fork with fediverse integration, tree style/stacking tabs, and vim navigation sooooo look forward to that? /shameless self promotion.

    • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
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      3 months ago

      I can only answer that last question with Waterfox, as I’ve been using it for something like a decade.

      My other browser is Vivaldi because of the tab stacking feature makes organising, uh, …stuff… easier…

    • hansolo@lemmy.today
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      3 months ago

      I use vanilla FF, Floorp, LibreWolf, and Mullvad in the FF family (plus Vivaldi for Chromium) - I only use vanilla FF for anything that I want to use persistent logins and containers for, so it’s like an hour a day at most. I only installed the update 36 hours ago, do other than set bookmarks, I haven’t searched anything with FF to give it the opportunity to recommend anything.

      In the settings, there’s 2 boxes you can un-check about recommendations. Seems pretty easy to disable this.

    • SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org
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      3 months ago

      They are all out of date, updates just take longer to arrive including security patches. Just use base Firefox and configure it as needed.

      • Dozzi92@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Always the answer until it goes to complete shit. Folks will always suggest other forks, but in the same breath describe them as subpar compared to Firefox base. FF is still best, just tweak it a smidge, browse away.

      • barnaclebutt@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        This is always the answer I go back to with Firefox. I just don’t see a benefit to switching (yet) to another version of Firefox.

      • Zink@programming.dev
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        LibreWolf seems pretty fast about it. The difference is only ever a matter of a few days for routine updates.

        For example, it looks like Firefox 141 with the AI stuff was released on July 22, a few weeks ago.

        My LibreWolf install is 141.0.2 (edit: since updated) My Firefox install is 141.0.3

        That difference is worth it to me to know that various things I don’t want have been removed from the code entirely, and that I can keep a completely default install of Firefox and/or nuke and replace that install whenever necessary.

        Edit to add: A few hours since posting, I checked for updates and now I’m on LibreWolf 141.0.3. :)

  • Pjonathan@lemmy.world
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    I was actually wondering why it felt like my Firefox was dying, possible could align with this.

  • Nate@piefed.alphapuggle.dev
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    Holy fucking shit. I swear to God, I had to download chromium because running Jupiter lab in browser ate through 22gb of ram and got my shit OOM killed. If this is what’s causing it I stg. I’m not even using vanilla Firefox, but the Zen fork got tebased on v141 right before this happened

      • Nate@piefed.alphapuggle.dev
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        3 months ago

        Julyterlab has been pinned for multiple versions now and the issue only started happening on the latest Firefox update. Still works fine in chromium

      • klay1@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Ecosia on Android is based on Chromium. Qwant on Android is based on: Firefox for Android, which uses the GeckoView engine.

        Otherwise they are just search engines.

      • BurgerBaron@piefed.social
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        I mean truly independent of USA code base. Everything is still relying on upstream Chromium or Firefox with superficial tweaks and gimmicks. The maintainers of LibreWolf and Fennec which are what I’m using are more like game mod devs.

        If ecosia+qwant actually forked from either and broke compatibility going their own path I’d consider them non USA. I know those two are working together on a search indexer and I’m very excited about that coming to fruition because that’s more what I’m talking about and eager to support.

        I realise what a mammoth challenge this is :( Probably needs EU funding like the search indexer.

    • defaultwizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 months ago

      It’s still a way out but Ladybird might be the alternative going forward. However, they’ve stated that it’s only going to support linux/mac with a windows version in the “eventually” column which makes it kinda hard to sell to people.

      • BurgerBaron@piefed.social
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        3 months ago

        American non-profit open source browser from scratch is certainly better, still not it.

        Even though I’ll probably switch :p I follow their youtube channel. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough and all that.

      • JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

        It’s actually a smart move. Linux users are the most receptive audience, and the most likely to support its development.

  • 58008@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Literally no one on this green earth asked for this shit. In fact, we’ve been pretty direct about how much we don’t want it.

    It’s exhausting.

    • btaf45@lemmy.worldBanned
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      Literally no one on this green earth asked for this shit.

      This is why I use the version of Firefox that does not update.

    • bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works
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      Well, stupid people want it and they do use it when its shoved in their face. Like how samsung updated and BLATANTLY made their peice of shit AI button TAKE OVER THR POWER BUTTON so when you try to turn off your phone little old granny gets confused that an ai agent pops up and starts recording you. Absolutely infuriating and I wish torture on whoever implemented that shit.

      • somethingsomethingidk@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Holy shit I had no idea until I read your comment. I thought “surely they will have respected all of my opt outs”. I guess this is my last samsung phone lol

      • btaf45@lemmy.worldBanned
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        Like how samsung updated and BLATANTLY made their peice of shit AI button TAKE OVER THR POWER BUTTON

        Was that part of OneUI 7? I’m so glad I never installed that downgrade.

        • CertifiedBlackGuy@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Pretty sure this goes back to the second to last Note. It’s been a thing for years now

          Power button became the bixby or google assistant button. It’s annoying as hell

        • Swordgeek@lemmy.ca
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          3 months ago

          It was. I’m struggling to find anything that was an actual improvement in the UI. Most of the changes were trivial and change for change’s sake; but some were awful, and none are clearly better.

        • bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works
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          No my s23 has no bixby buttons. Just power and 2 volume. Samsung DELIBERATELY updated so the POWER BUTTON activated their shitty agent. Only software shutdown was avilable until I changed.

          Getting a linux phone when this dies. Fuck samsung.

        • Univ3rse@lemmynsfw.com
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          3 months ago

          Bixby was not llm based, originally, and sometimes updates will rewrite a user’s custom settings. For instance, I had a galaxy on which I made pushing the power button three times turn on the flashlight. An update occurred that overrode that setting by deleting it and turned on five presses to call 911. I ended up accidently calling 911 at 3am (accompanied by a blasting alarm sound) trying not to wake someone by turning on the light.

          • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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            Bixby was not llm based

            I’m not really sure how that really makes any difference though. I’m not defending their decision I’m just saying that it’s been around for a while now.

            I’ve just pressed my power button five times and it does call, what I’m assuming is, emergency number. It’s the wrong one for my country (genius Samsung) so God knows what that would actually do, but it doesn’t auto call I have to actually press the call button. Maybe they received some user feedback?

            Seems a bit pointless given the fact that I have to press the button five times to call the emergency services but their phone number is only three digits long.

            • Univ3rse@lemmynsfw.com
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              3 months ago

              That’s goofy as hell that the emergency number isn’t localized. I think the idea that pressing a physical button 5 times quickly is faster than having to look at the phone and select options. Idk, though, I don’t use it.

      • JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

        The kinds of people who want that switched to Google Chrome years ago. Only people who care more about software freedom than convenience are still using Firefox today.

    • Swordgeek@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      Mozilla has stopped working on developing and improving their products, and is now entirely focused on adding trendy terms and garbage, to feed money to their C*Os.

      • michaelmrose@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        They in the last year or so added built in vertical tabs , much better hardware support for decoding video on Linux, continue to support manifest v2 and high quality ad blocking. Have increased performance and memory usage.

        In the last 7 years performance is night and day different as is multiple process performance and switched away from unmaintainable old broken addon system.

        They also created one of the premiere programming languages which is making in roads in the Linux kernel.

        • angrystego@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          All right, but apart from the vertical tabs, better video decoding, support for manifest v2, high quality adblocking, increased performance, and the useful programming language, what has Mozilla ever done for us?

        • Glog78@digitalcourage.social
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          @michaelmrose @swordgeek I 100% agree that Mozilla is important but it’s also clear that currently their is not enough business to keep Mozilla going. I don’t blame them for trying to make a Business , i blame them for not following their former values. You can make a business and still mostly follow values ( look for example to GOG ).
          And what i don’t like the most is the change from opt in to opt out. Every new feature most users don’t want. You can argue that they know this and make it harder and harder to turn off those new “features” . The last time it was hidden in a sub menu in the settings ( switching off sending data to their ad service ) now it’s hidden in about:config.
          I guess next time you need 3rd party patches and compile the browser yourself to switch a “feature” off.

    • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      Same here … all I do is read most of the time … I’m only interested in reading about 2,000 words which shouldn’t take any data … yet Firefox will struggle under the weight of advertising, adblock, scripts, background links, preloading and all kinds of stupidity that I will not and refuse to use.

  • pheggs@feddit.org
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    3 months ago

    I wish Mozilla would just debloat the browser, focus on performance and making browsing a good experience. But unfortunately their revenue situation is bad. At this stage, they won’t even manage to survive through donations after annoying their main user base.

    • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      They haven’t needed donations for years. In the current situations donos are, at best, part of the CEO and top-brass bonus.

      • Pup Biru@aussie.zone
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        3 months ago

        it’s even worse than that tho: donations are for the mozilla foundation which is doing all the nonsense everyone hates… firefox is the mozilla corporation, which is a distinct entity

        IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO DONATE TO FIREFOX

      • pheggs@feddit.org
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        3 months ago

        could be, I can’t judge that. do you have any source for that info or is it based on an assumption?

        • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Their public, reviewed 2023 financial statement and their official documents about administration salaries and bonus.

      • Zink@programming.dev
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        3 months ago

        Yep, and it still works great. I even use LibreWolf on my work machine, and since it’s running Linux I need to use all the Microsoft 365 stuff, like attending meetings via Teams, in my web browser. I just let it persist and share some site data to make things run smoothly. (which is a compromise, yeah)

        The only real issue I had was when I installed the flatpak version, and it was the flatpak permissions screwing with me. Most of the time though I have been using the version from their repo.

    • haloduder@thelemmy.clubBanned
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      3 months ago

      Their revenue is fine. They just waste it on unnecessary bullshit.

      They’re a business, after all. They don’t care about their products. They care about doing the least amount of work while making the most amount of money.

      It’s not about keeping the lights on. It’s about living as luxurious a life as possible.

      • pheggs@feddit.org
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        3 months ago

        They care about doing the least amount of work while making the most amount of money.

        I mean that’s what capitalism does in a nutshell. Lower costs and increase the price. It’s optimized for profit, not for the best product, unfortunately. The only thing that should keep it within lines is competition, but if the competition isn’t any better it won’t help

    • Kissaki@feddit.org
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      3 months ago

      How do you make browsling a good experience, other than performance?

      I like the webpage translation it offers. I’d hate to lose it. Sync and tab sending is also very important to me, between desktop, mobile phone, and tablet.

      I’m sure debloating would inevitably mean losing features that are required to catch the average internet user.

        • Kissaki@feddit.org
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          3 months ago

          Extending and managing extension APIs and extensions also comes at a cost. I certainly wouldn’t be against that - but I’m not familiar with the technical details or cost of the features involved.

        • jbk@discuss.tchncs.de
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          3 months ago

          If a browser only aims at tech savvy people, practically no one will end up using it.

          • Zink@programming.dev
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            3 months ago

            Yeah, a good browser should probably take an approach similar to Linux Mint.

            It has to be easy to install and it has to work great for like 99.9% of normal uses without changing a single setting.

            But, being free and open, if you are tech savvy then you can change and customize whatever you want. Sometimes it means I can lock down the privacy and data storage in my browser, and sometimes it means I can change the icon on my work computer’s “start” button to be a check engine light. It’s all just part of being able to use your computer the way you want to.

          • GenosseFlosse@feddit.org
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            3 months ago

            This is an UI issue. You could just show them a landing Page and ask them if they want this new feature, and then it installs the extension in the background, without explicitly ask the user to go to the extension page to install something by hand.

      • pheggs@feddit.org
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        3 months ago

        Well this is obviously personal to some degree, but for me it would be to fix bugs, don’t crash, dont make me restart after an update and lose my incognito tabs, focus on being w3c compliant, block ads, maybe allow blocking annoying cookie banners and maybe allow good keyboard navigation. I like some features other browsers have, such as integrated tor browsing - but since I am not a big fan of bloat, I’m not sure whether that should be handled outside of the browser

        • cally [he/they]@pawb.social
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          3 months ago

          block ads, maybe allow blocking annoying cookie banners and maybe allow good keyboard navigation.

          those are/could be browsing extensions. i don’t see why the browser should integrate ad blocking when it could just be an extension (that could be installed by default, like how librewolf has ublock origin installed by default).

          • pheggs@feddit.org
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            3 months ago

            Fair, I’m all in for de-bloating! The only problem with plugins is that it can become increasingly difficult to provide the same quality of testing and quality, because you can’t possibly test all combinations of enabled plugins - even if most don’t interfere with each other, it can easily break stuff

    • Novaling@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      If you’re a little less afraid of stuff breaking, use IronFox, it’s been configured for privacy and security. If you don’t want websites to break as much use Fennec.

  • Pycorax@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    Instead of capitalising on Google pissing off power users with its crusade against adblockers, why the hell is Mozilla fucking up so hard here? Seriously, which chain of command green lit all of this and didn’t even think this would be remotely an issue?

    • orclev@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Sadly this is nothing new for Mozilla. It’s easier to count the decisions they’ve made that aren’t terrible than the ones that are. Their history is a long series of fuckups occasionally punctuated by a decent decision.

      • medem@lemmy.wtf
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        3 months ago

        Because of this, I’ve always had ‘mixed feelings’ (to put it mildly) towards Mozilla, and sometimes I really struggle not to hate them. They’re (yet) not Google or Microsoft and that’s cool, but besides that, I also cannot think of more than a handful of good decisions against a ton of pretty awful ones, so right now I’ve settled for ‘a necessary evil’, which is pretty sad considering their potential.

    • absquatulate@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Even if they wanted to bank on the adblocker thing I imagine they can’t because they have to stay in Google’s good graces. Like 90% of their revenue was google money, and has been for years now.

      At this point I’d honestly even pay for a privacy focused mozilla browser that is clean of all this crap, just to keep them afloat, but fat chance of that happening.

      • Pycorax@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        At this point I’d honestly even pay for a privacy focused mozilla browser that is clean of all this crap, just to keep them afloat, but fat chance of that happening.

        As much as I’d love for something like that I don’t think it’s even remotely possible. I don’t think enough people are willing enough to pay for a browser that respects them, heck the amount of people who remain on Chrome shows that people aren’t even willing to take a small step to stop using a browser that’s actively working against their interests. I’d love to be proven wrong though.

        • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          This. It costs hundreds of millions per year to develop a web renderer. The security expertise required in particular is immense.

          People have made clear they will not pay for browsers. At the same time, Mozilla doesn’t want to hoover up mountains of personally identifiable information like Google and MS do.

          People hate Mozilla for doing what they can to make money, and they also hate the idea of paying.

          I understand the frustration, but I genuinely don’t know what the community expects.

          Don’t get me wrong, I don’t agree with or see sense in every Mozilla decision, but people act like they’re satan incarnate and it’s just ridiculous.

          • orclev@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Developing from scratch yes, but several decent open source renderers exist. I’d love to see someone grab Servo and polish it to a fully usable state (I think it’s something like 75% of the way there).

            The issue also isn’t Mozilla trying to make money, it’s Mozilla trying to make money in the stupidest way possible, or even worse actively wasting money like with this AI slop. There’s also the issue of what Mozilla is spending on. It came out a little while back how much their executives are making and it’s completely ridiculous. They could afford multiple full time devs with just the money the CEO makes for making the worst decisions imaginable.

          • Pycorax@sh.itjust.works
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            3 months ago

            Honestly if that is it, it is understandable. This AI nonsense, however, is plainly a waste of money and resources, Mozilla’s and their users’.

            • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              Depends what you mean by this AI nonsense. Some of it is great. Offline translation in Firefox is great, as is the enhanced screen reader for blind people.

              Chat bot integration less so, but it’s opt-in so I don’t bother getting myself worked up about it.

          • tempest@lemmy.ca
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            3 months ago

            The community are idiots.

            They just want free shit. They claim they would love to pay but look at the percentage of donations things like VLC get, they won’t pay.

            Google likely spends over a billion dollars a year developing Chrome and everyone likes to talk about how AI might upset web search forgetting that what is where Mozilla’s money comes from.

    • IO 😇@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      3 months ago

      it might have been Laura Chambers, who is CEO since early 2024.

      It has been less than a week since the new interim CEO took over the reigns from long-time Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker. Today news broke that Mozilla is changing its product strategy going forward. The organization plans to focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox” and to scale back some of its other products and services.

      Breaking: Mozilla changes strategy, focuses on Firefox and AI

      She used to work for McKinsey according to her Wikipedia which explains a lot if you ask me.