In a memo sent to employees Mozilla says it wants to bring “trustworthy AI into Firefox”. To help it do this sooner it’s merging its Pocket, content, and AI/Ml teams.
Yeah, I’m not sure this is the “renewed focus” we’re looking for, chief
Hmm. Yeah might be a big mistake if they add more bloat.
Absolutely. I suppose the AI stuff could be disabled in config but it would still be more dead weight to download with every update, like Pocket and the other removed they built into the browser.
Despite Firefox’s declining marketshare on desktop the browser is in use health. It’s fast and feature enough to hold its own against its rivals
Huh?
AI
No AI writes this badly
No, they usually write this worse. If this is Mozilla’s AI they’re removeding up something fierce.
And a bad one too. Modern LLMs can write flawless English at 7B.
Yeah that’s badly written, but Firefox is actually gaining de desktop marketshare now!
(According to gs.statcounter.com)
The problem with stats like these are that Firefox users (and the browser’s defaults) block a lot of the scripts and images used for tracking.
Cloudflare’s stats show higher Firefox usage (4.737% for 2023 Q3), although that’s still less than even Edge. My own logs show more still, although my visitors are more technical than usual.
Yeah, its gaining marketshare, I’m glad we agree.
(I use StatCounter mostly for trends, not hard numbers, because of the exact thing you just said)
“is in good health”? I was looking for autocorrect typos but can’t figure out anything likely, unless they’re not using querty.
“trustworthy AI”
Why? Why can’t we have even a single decent browser? Servo is my last hope.
I’d never heard of Servo before this, but judging from the website it’s nowhere near a GUI offering. The work they’re doing on the engine looks solid (to me as not-a-developer) but it’s a telltale sign that there are no UI screenshots on their landing page. So, not an alternative to Firefox yet.
Because, as pointed in the page, Servo is being developed as a(n embeddable) Rendering Engine, not as a full blown end user Browser.
Its alternatives are not Chrome, Safari or Firefox, but Webkit, Blink and GeckoThere’s an example GUI called Servoshell, but it is more of a testing ground and example on how to embed the engine in an app than a serious alternative to anything currently in the market.
Already this kind of work is difficult and daunting. Adding to it a full GUI would make it completely impossible for the current size and financial backing Servo has.
Big words aside it just means that Servo wants to be only one of the parts that compose a real browser: the one that takes HTML, Javascript, WASM and translates them into the things you see on your monitor. All the user facing functionality are left to the devs of the app that embed it.
Thanks for the big word elaboration! 👍
While it’s not an alternative right now, I think Servo’s focus on being embeddable might help it in the long run. A big issue with Gecko is that it was difficult, if not impossible to embed. It’d be nice to see something like Vivaldi that runs on Servo.
Oh, that’s fair. I’m not complaining about the work being put into a new browser engine, and there is definitely space for improvement over the ones we have.
Vivaldi, though? I’d vastly prefer an open source browser, and maybe one with less baggage than Vivaldi has — but I’ll look forward to any GUI implementation of Servo, when and if, etc.
I was more talking about Vivaldi feature-wise, FWIW. There’s features I’d like from Vivaldi that don’t have a close equivalent to Firefox, not even from its forks (tab tiling’s my go-to example), and maybe in the distant future, there’d be a browser like it running on Servo.
Hmm. Now there’s an idea for developers. Some kind of modular compatibility standard.
Obviously not. Building a modern browser engine from scratch is an immense undertaking, so it’s definitely possible that it will never be usable as a replacement for every day webbrowsing. But for now I won’t give up hope :)
I want them to make an untrustworthy AI so that I can post funny conversations online for internet clout.
Would probably be more useful.
Yes, focus on your main thing. It’s the thing that makes you matter. I want your browser to stay competitive.
The actual news is “renews focus on AI bullremoved”.
I want an API to control firefox with ny own text gen open source AI. Locally and offline.
I don’t understand what this is for or how it applies
Edit:
Oh wait… ok I think I get it. Maybe tjis is what I need then. If I can just, list tab titles, read tab content, move tabs around, close tabs, open tabs from the console cli, then that coyld be it.
There are paid APIs that make this simpler, but I didn’t look them up because the OP is about self hosted software.
In a memo sent to employees Mozilla says it wants to bring “trustworthy AI into Firefox”. To help it do this sooner it’s merging its Pocket, content, and AI/Ml teams.
That’s pretty concerning. It could go either way but I assume they are going to try to shove more sponsored content in an effort to further monetize Firefox in spite of getting hundreds of millions of dollars a year in donations. Maybe I’m just cynical about Mozilla though.
Yes, the change of focus is good news overall but there’s still reasons to be concerned about Mozilla. It’s good that they are moving focus back to Firefox from struggling ancillary projects.
But what they want to do with that additional focus could be a problem. Another round of gimmicks with some newer buzzwords isn’t likely to help Firefox.
And this only just after they enabled a whole raft of add-ons in their mobile browser that have already stripped away so much removed from my daily browsing experience.
I switched last year when Google entered their new phase of ad tracker evil and I bet I wasn’t the only one. Feels to me like Firefox removeded with the money and they’re being brought to heel.
What? They’re laying off people working on a metaverse platform, mozilla.social, and other assorted products nobody cares about. They’re doing exactly what everyone said they should do, slimming down and focusing on Firefox
fediverse*
I’m sorry but what word are you trying to replace? I can’t tell
They misinterpreted “metaverse platform, mozilla.social” as a single item in the list, not as two items.
For anyone who isn’t aware, Mozilla has a thing called Mozilla Hubs that could be considered a metaverse product
A I see, thank you for clarifying,.I was genuinely confused
Grammatically it can be properly read either way, but I think you’re right that’s probably how they meant it.
Metaverse. mozilla.social is the fediverse
I know, they had also opened a thing called Mozilla hubs, something I consider metaverse product, like the other person said, I am aware mozilla.social is a fediverse platform
Cool, I’m liking this new Mozilla already! …NOT!!!
Why? Isn’t it good that Mozilla is focusing on Firefox instead of a host of random removed?
In a memo sent to employees Mozilla says it wants to bring “trustworthy AI into Firefox”. To help it do this sooner it’s merging its Pocket, content, and AI/Ml teams.
Eww.
I’ll need to switch browsers soon. I do not want AI crap.
Edit - There is also the reduction in their privacy services (VPN, Relay etc.). This could be the start of a trend in that direction too. Only time will tell.
Worry not. I’m sure Tor Browseeu and lots of other Firefox derivatives will simply strip out the AI bits
Yeah, thankfully.
When they say ai, I think they mean stuff like the tra elation feature in Firefox, not those stupid obnoxious ai sidebars
Use librewolf
That’s some serious spin there in the title.
They finally woke up
I hope to be optimistic too but I’d hold on to the cheers for a bit still personally
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Where’s saving a page as pdf on mobile
Menu -> Print -> Save as PDF
ALSO: Menu -> Share Icon -> Save PDF
One method is built-in, the other uses the system’s PDF saver. You have the choice on which to use.
Damn, when did they add the print function in android. I remember when you couldn’t print a year ago.
I found it, it was added at the end of last year Firefox for Android ver 118. I can finally disable chrome on android.
I donate to Signal but would never give money to Mozilla with their priorities.
Meanwhile signal is prioritising becoming the western crypto WeChat
I think the big thing is for them to get company to actually make money.
removed Pocket with your AI dick Mozilla, just leave me a toggle in about:config to turn it off or I’ll find a fork that has none of that removed.
I think you might enjoy Librewolf
