tab grouping
Sure, okay.
vertical tabs
To each their own.
profile management
Whatever, it’s fine.
and local AI features
HOLLUP
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.
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.
You only need lots of precessing power to train the models. Using the models can be done on regular hardware.
Running AI models isn’t that resource intensive. Training the models is the difficult part.
The feature will obviously just be disabled on machines that don’t support it.
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’m not interested in AI, but if it’s not touching the network, I might leave it enabled. We’ll see.
All I want from Firefox is to keep up on web standards, implement security features, and improve performance. I don’t particularly care about most of the rest of the browser features they throw in.
Focus on “local”. Mozilla is working since a while on that.
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.
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.
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 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.
I use my local machine for neutral networks just fine
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.
We’re also using machine learning for the local site translation. The AI buzzword is doing more damage than good PR.
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
People that wanted vertical tabs must be really excited
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.
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.
Edit: speaking of which, now that we’ve come almost full-circle from no tab support, to multiple tabs in the same process, to one process per tab, it seems to me that tabs themselves ought to be part of the window decoration, not the app. I mean, they’re useful for almost everything you might want to have multiples of (editors, file managers, terminals, etc.) so why force every app maker to implement them over and over again?
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.
Exactly. I have an ultrawide at work, and I just have three things open side-by-side. I have a dual-monitor setup at home, and I have two things on the larger one (27") one and one on the other (24"). My workflow is nearly equivalent between them, the main difference is bezels.
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.
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
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
The issue is that because they broke the UI customization that allowed for it all the extensions are just a kludge to add a panel to the side without actually getting rid of the top tabs.
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.
I remember back in the day (FF 4?) I had the window buttons, tabs, back/forward, URL bar, etc all on one row, which was pretty cool. So it was something like this, from left to right:
- Firefox menu - was
Firefox, but now would be the hamberger menu - back/forward buttons
- extension butons
- URL bar
- tabs
It worked pretty well. It would be nice to do that again.
- Firefox menu - was
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.
I have been running vertical tabs for a while now and it’s broken about 3 times, once every few months. Currently, I’ve had no min/maximise/close buttons for about a week because I can’t be bothered to fix it. Far from “one and done”.
I admit, this news has made me add a note to re-download firefox on my work machine…
would be cool if it’s smooth like how arc does it, would instantly switch back to Firefox if they manage that. arc is still buggy on many things or when i use some websites.
I am, specially after seeing how well it was implemented in the nightly version. It can’t be compared to an extension that enables the same capability.
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
This is what Mozilla should have done a LONG time ago - focussed on browser features, ease of use, compatibility and speed. Make a better browser if you want to win a browser war.
Maybe they should, but focusing on adding new features endlessly is how we ended up with this state of internet browsers. The most complex app running on a desktop are too big, it’s basically impossible to create a new one. (Yes you can fork but that’s just adding toppings to ice cream). The browser war ends only one way.
If we break up the do-everything application into significant parts then a healthy “war” can exist. Why does a browser need to play video, you already have an app for that.
I definitely don’t want them to continually add more feature cruft. When I said “focussed on features” I simply meant “make sure what they’ve got is second to none”.
Forcing useless features or features that are useless to most users is more or less what windows is doing. Why the double standars?
Especially when Firefox could have included those features as optional modules (even as preinstalled extensions) that we could simply remove if we dont want them?
How are they being forced upon you?
They are adding them as features to the browser, making it heavier and slower, instead of adding them as optional extensions so that they are only there for the ones who wish them.
How do you know the features are making the browser slower?
How are you quantifying the increase in weight?
Just disable them. It’s not like unused code paths consume resources usually.
They are adding them as features to the browser, making it heavier and slower, instead of adding them as optional extensions so that they are only there for the ones who wish them.
Whoa, you’ve already seen the features and already know how they are implemented? Tell me, what’s the future like?
I definitely don’t believe Mozilla should continue to add features. But I like them focussing on the ones they’ve got.
Edit: Changed this comment to better reflect what I actually meant.
It might be me and in that case i apologize
…focussed on browser features, ease of use …
It just sounds like you think its good that they added all these featueas
It’s not you. It’s ridiculous that they’re this indignant.
My apologies. I definitely wasn’t meaning to come across indignant. I guess it’s just one of those things of things sounding perfectly clear in your head and not perfectly clear in the receiver’s ear. Hope you have a good day going forward.
If that’s what you’re trying to express then I kind of feel like you miswrote your comment. You want them to focus on browser features but not continue to add features? You don’t feel like there’s any room for confusion there?
Agreed, really hoping they stick to refocusing on the browser.
I loved the suckless user interface of Firefox. Vivaldi? Chrome? Arc? They suck
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 now.
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.
I want fewer built-in features, not more of them. All of these things should be extensions, not built into the browser core.
I mean, I’d be perfectly happy for said extensions and more to be shipped by default – it would be good for Firefox to come “batteries included” even with adblocking and such, and that’s most likely the way I would use it. But I just want it to be modular and removable as a matter of principle.
I remember how monolithic Mozilla SeaMonkey got too top-heavy and forced Mozilla to start over more-or-less from scratch with
PhoenixFirebirdFirefox, and I want it to stick close to those roots so they don’t have to do it again.They are probably extensions, just like pip, pocket, screenshot upload, languages, search engines, themes, etc.
Shipped by default, handled like extensions internally but not exposed to the user. You see it in the extension*.json files in your profile folder.
In that case, I want them exposed just like user-installed extensions, so it’s more obvious how to get rid of them if you want.
Yeah, me too. I made once a pacman hook that empties the respective folder in /usr on update/install. I have no use for all of them and picture-in-picture is annoying to me.
Btw, i think it’s mentioned somewhere in about:support too?
We need modular browsers. It is hard for Mozilla to keep the track to the W3C and all the nonstandard stuff that Google, Microsoft and Apple add to their browsers. If those elements were modules, it would be easier for people to collaborate and for Google and Microsoft to be obligated to add support for other browsers.
You’re talking about a modular rendering engine, which is a different thing than what I’m talking about. I’m talking about stripping down the UI until it resembles XUL Runner, then adding the functionality back as extensions.
You’re not wrong that it’s important for the engine’s code to be organized well for developers’ benefit (and ideally for the engine as a whole to be self-contained – it’d be great if Gecko were as easily-embeddable as Blink), but I’m not so sure that users need to be able to add or remove pieces of it in a way similar to what I’m talking about for UI features.
More concretely:
I think Firefox should ship by default with all the functionality it currently has, plus uBlock Origin and some other things. But I want it to be designed such that if you went into the extensions manager and disabled everything, things like tab support, bookmarks, history, and maybe even the address bar and back button would be gone. It would still be capable of fully rendering a web page, though.
If they do that, normies will start yelling that Firefox has removed their beloved features and will immediately download Chrome. I have a strong suspicion that a majority of people don’t use extensions at all.
Did you miss this part of my previous comment?
I think Firefox should ship by default with all the functionality it currently has, plus uBlock Origin and some other things.
Okay. Replace core features as extensions. Kind of like the suckless philosophy.
While it’s a good idea, I think extensions are purposefully made weaker, that is, they don’t/can’t have the same capabilities of core features. It will require a huge rework which I just don’t see happening.
The default experience when people Google “install Firefox” should absolutely provide as much feature parity with other major browsers as possible. 99% of users will want them or not mind them. And for that last 1%, I guess I’m not sure if it’s worth the development headaches for them to bake in a configuration change that power users could get by forking the codebase anyway.
Something like a deeper integration of an addOn/extension would be nice.
Modularity could be a way to do it.
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.
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Profile management
Fucking finally!
The fact that you had to use external applications or manually go to an internal Firefox menu to change from one to another sucked!
I just bookmarked the settings page for profiles, which made it work pretty well. But it was definitely more janky than something native.
-P -no-remote works great for me.
Finally I can have a personal profile, a work profile, and a porn profile!
Tab grouping, nice! Finally back after they removed then years ago…
I wish they’d backpedal on the floating tabs too. I still fucking hate them and they never really used them for anything like they said they would. They’re just as shitty as they always have been.
Eh, I honestly don’t notice it. There’s a very small (like <5px) gap between the tab and the next bar down, and it’s only noticeable when I’m looking at it, which is pretty much never. I’ve attached a screenshot for reference (I use the built-in dark theme, Container Tabs, and shrunk my tabs in about:config).
Aside from the fact that this is way more than just 5 pixels, it’s also not just the bottom but also the top, doubling the wasted space. Followed by another gap before reaching the toolbar at the bottom, and another gap at the top above the tabs.
I use container tabs, which fills the space at the top on most of my tabs. In my screenshot, that is literally the top of my screen, there’s no extra space above it. Here’s a slightly bigger screenshot just above my extensions:
I used a screen measuring tool, and the black gap (the floating part) between the tab and my extensions bar is 2-3px (hard to tell exactly). The tab itself is ~30px (give or take 1-2px). So if Firefox used non-floating tabs, it would save about 2-3px. That’s it.
Chrome doesn’t have floating tabs, and it takes up more space than Firefox, here’s a screenshot comparing the two:
Brave has floating tabs, and is also bigger, here’s a screenshot comparing Brave and Firefox:
This is on my Macbook Pro, so YMMV on Windows, but it looks very similar to what I have on my Linux devices. At least for me, Firefox is plenty compact and more compact than its main competitors.
You’re conveniently ignoring the huge spacing within the floating tab. lol That’s about 8 pixels, plus the 3 outside the tab we’re already at over 10 pixels of empty space, on both sides, making it over 20 pixels in total.
In my FF it is worse though. It’s a total of 16 pixels from the icon to the top, 19 pixels to the address bar (excluding the 1 pixel border of that). It’s like 85 pixels before I reach the website content area. https://i.imgur.com/0MxEcW5.png
No idea why you bring other browser into this when the comparison was with older FF designs. I really don’t give a shit about any chromium browser to be honest.
I showed the other two since they’re popular, and what others would be comparing against. Firefox (on my machines) is more compact than them. So it’s not like Firefox is especially wasteful here. One has worse floating tabs, and the other has worse non-floating tabs. So it could be way worse.
Removing all the space would make it super cramped, and I don’t think it’s worth it for 10-20px. On a typical 1080p screen, that’s like 1-2% of the vertical resolution.
That said, it should be configurable. You can probably get what you want with the userChrome.css or whatever it’s called.
“Others do it just as bad / even worse” is just not a good argument for making your own software worse imo.
Floating?
Hi,
We bring a modernized and differentiated look to tabs since Firefox 89 in order to create a signature Firefox look and experience. This major redesign will help us enable more use cases and features in the future.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1338169
Before this, tabs were clearly separated and were directly connected to the rest of the browser UI, while also using much less space & padding. It was one of the major enshittification updates for Firefox and to this day they have not given us any of those mentioned “use cases and features” that would make use of this redesign.
It was one of the major enshittification updates for Firefox
That’s not what that term means. That term specifically and explicitly means “making a service worse for the user in order to wring more money out of it.” It doesn’t mean “feature or design change I didn’t like.”
“AI”, more like A-eyeroll 🙄
There’s AI and there’s AI. I really like that Firefox has local models for translating content. Them adding AI that describes images for visually impaired people is pretty cool.
Yeah people forget that AI isn’t just the garbage generators of late. It’s all machine learning based software. There are lots of perfectly valid applications of AI that have been used for decades. The term has just become tainted recently by LLMs.
I kind of hate how machine learning and LLM and a whole bunch of other things are thrown together into “AI” to leverage the hype cycle but that’s tech life.
Ok that seems like a good idea. But since when did we need “AI” to translate text? I think this is my big problem. It feels like a lot of “Here’s an AI to wake you up at the right time before work!” When shit like that has existed for years with a bunch of “if” and “else” statements. It’s not hard to create a series of conditions to do a lot of the things I’m seeing AI uselessly shoved down our throats.
Since a decade or more? Machine learning-based text translation is the reason we get such fantastic automatic translations these days.
It’s not an LLM. LLM is AI but not all AI is LLM.
Local AI, or also, how AI should be. Actually helpful, instead of a spying and data gathering tool for companies
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?
I’ve been using it for at least a decade now and haven’t encountered any of the issues you mention.
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.
Well that was 18% of 90% so still awful drain regardless.
slow, choppy, drains battery
Sounds like you don’t have an adblocker.
Nope. He’s right. There are similar threads on reddit too every single week about the mobile version. It’s simply bad.
And just like there, a bunch of people here squinting and saying “huh what are you talking about it works great?”
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.
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?
There is this.
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.
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)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)
Same. I had to uninstall due to the battery drain issues. Pixel 6 Pro. Battery life is not something I am willing to compromise on.
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Building back to that 2005 standard feature set.
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Tab grouping, vertical tabs, multiple profiles all did on desktop firefox.
Iphones and Androids had just begun to exist.
Awesome news! Really miss the tab groups from Chrome, really the only thing haha
