5 ms·

Firefox mentions the following ones: "- Translations, which help you browse the web in your preferred language. - Alt text in PDFs, which add accessibility de

by mrklol 7mo ago

Firefox mentions the following ones: "- Translations, which help you browse the web in your preferred language. - Alt text in PDFs, which add accessibility descriptions to images in PDF pages. - AI-enhanced tab grouping, which suggests related tabs and group names. - Link previews, which show key points before you open a link. - AI chatbot in the sidebar, which lets you use your chosen chatbot as you browse, including options like Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Le Chat Mistral."

mort96 7mo ago
I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar. Isn't a chat bot in a tab good enough? And calling translation "AI" seems like deceitful retroactive rebranding. Why is machine translation suddenly "AI" now? It was never branded as such before. Is "AI" here just used to mean machine learning?
- johnnyanmac 7mo ago
  Wouldn't be the first time. Google gave an option to turn off gemini in Gmail, and suddenly the inbox tabs they had for over a decade decided to disappear.
- input_sh 7mo ago
  IMHO no. Every chatbot has so much wasted space, it really doesn't need to be full-width. Also, what's easier? Option 1: Being on a tab, copying the URL of the tab, switching to the chatbot tab, pasting the URL and writing some instructions about what to do with that tab. Option 2: Clicking on the "summarise page" button (whether from the sidebar or from right-click context menu), and having the browser pre-fill the prompt with the URL + the reader view version of the content on that page.
  - mort96 7mo ago
    Option 3: don't
    - input_sh 7mo ago
      Then you right-click on the AI button and click on "remove", but that's a whole different discussion than what you asked in the previous comment. It's also why I really don't understand the need for a kill switch to begin with (other than pleasing annoying users), you don't need to wait for it. You can already get rid of the chatbot integration, there's a remove button already. It's also kind of annoyingly easy to misclick it, so they're just gonna remove it from those places and put it away in settings and those same annoying users will consider that a win.
      - mort96 7mo ago
        Why can't you people who want a ChatGPT sidebar just add that as a plugin?
        input_sh 7mo ago
        "You people"? Take a look at my comment history and see my takes on AI please, but this is like the least harmful way of integrating it and yet "you people" are the loudest about it. Can you do the same on Windows? Is it tucked away in settings on macOS? Can you disable it on Google? Can you disable it anywhere else? Why are you the most vocal about the integration that is literally the easiest to turn off? You need two clicks to do it right now, you're gonna need at least three once this kill switch is in settings.
        mort96 7mo ago
        The AI boosting from the likes of you is the reason Mozilla is sinking Firefox by turning it into an "AI browser". I don't want anything to do with that. I would've been equally outraged about Windows becoming an "agentic OS" if I had been a Windows user. I don't like what Apple is doing to my phone and laptop, but at least they haven't promised to make the iPhone an "AI phone". More than one thing can be bad at a time, and right now, this conversation is about Mozilla. We can have a conversation about other bad things some other time.
- jeppester 7mo ago
  > I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar. Isn't a chat bot in a tab good enough? If it wasn't because I find myself using the AI-sidebar all the time I would probably have shared your opinion. I guess it's just quite convenient to have it separated from the "regular" tabs and their history.
  - mort96 7mo ago
    Then you can install an AI extension.
    - jeppester 7mo ago
      You were saying: > I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar I answered: > If it wasn't because I find myself using the AI-sidebar all the time I would probably have shared your opinion. Perhaps they did actually test it. Perhaps the majority is like me and find it useful. > Then you can install an AI extension. As mentioned I didn't know that I'd like this feature. I wouldn't have reached for such an extension. It's obvious that you don't want this functionality - which you can now easily disable. What if the majority of the users actually like this? Or the majority either like it or are not the slightest bothered by it? Is it not a good addition overall then?
  - UI_at_80x24 7mo ago
    Could you please describe your use-case? How do you use it? How do you make use of it? I use Claude code, so I understand that paradigm; I don't grok this though. Is it any different then going to a web page i.e. gemini.google.com and typing your query there? Could this side bar have been a "search bar" at the top? Now that I say it out lou, adding them to the 'search providers' isn't a bad idea. Generally speaking I am against this being shoved at us, but I find it as a useful tool in a limited number of areas.
    - jeppester 7mo ago
      I always have my browser open, so having it just one click away and not interrupting with whatever else the browser is showing feels convenient. I'm using linux, so there are no official desktop apps I could use instead. Had there been, perhaps I'd have had a different opinion about the AI sidebar.
- throwawayk7h 7mo ago
  I saw someone else using this feature. It does more than just be a chat bot. You can direct it to automate tasks like go to a web page, search for stuff, etc. -- I asked it to go to pinterest and download the top ten images for "cyberpunk," and it succeeded. Nifty I suppose.
  - dormento 7mo ago
    As much as i detest everything about it, i must admit i'm mildly curious as to what workflows people are using it for.
- lynndotpy 7mo ago
  "AI" is a term which means a dozen things and has changed a dozen times. It's about as meaningful a signifier as "smart". If I were to draw a line, I'd say AI is anything with a transformer model powering it. As exhausted by 'AI' as I am, translation is one of the things neural networks (and especially transformers) have been constantly improving SOTA on.
- AndrewDucker 7mo ago
  They use a Neural Network engine to power it. That definitely counts as AI: https://aclanthology.org/P18-4020/ https://aclanthology.org/P18-4020/
- wongarsu 7mo ago
  The word artificial intelligence was coined in a 1955 research proposal [1] which listed seven aspects of the "artificial intelligence problem". Computers using languages was one of them. Another is "neuron nets", which would indeed encompass a large part of ML and at least Google Translate since circa 2016 [2]. This is also perfectly in line with how the word AI was used until circa 2022. The weird thing is this narrowing of AI to only mean transformer or diffusion based neural network approaches. And many translation approaches would even fall under that, so not sure how narrow you perceive the term to be now. How do you even define AI to include everything OpenAI calls AI but not include modern translation approaches 1: https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmo... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20180507195240/https://ai.googleblog.com/2016/09/a-neural-network-for-machine.html https://web.archive.org/web/20180507195240/https://ai.google...
  - squeefers 7mo ago
    > This is also perfectly in line with how the word AI was used until circa 2022. show me a screenshot or link of one website or app using AI to mean machine translation from prior to 2022, AI has re-entered the lexicon covering anything from an algorithm to Sora. if anything its broadened, not narrowed in scope. me and you might mean transformer when we say AI, but the average speaker doesnt make that distinction. they call video sites "social media", so can you really be surprised they dont quite use AI correctly either?
    - Volundr 7mo ago
      Here you go: https://web.archive.org/web/20200929085743/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Translate https://web.archive.org/web/20200929085743/https://en.wikipe... Admittedly I don't think this uses the term AI, but "deep learning" and "artificial neural network" are indeed AI, and if you follow those links in the Wikipedia article you will indeed find them described as such.
      - squeefers 7mo ago
        i agree, but the guy said AI was a synonym for machine translation long before the currently confused meaning appeared
- nsvd2 7mo ago
  The transformer architecture that powers large language models was designed by Google for the purposes of machine translation. As others have said, ML and AI have always been closely related if not synonymous.
- Dwedit 7mo ago
  I've run an AI translation tool under a debugger just to see what it did. It tokenized your input, fed it into a model, then ran the model. Literally the same thing as any other local AI software. Except the model was for translation.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- stonogo 7mo ago
  Firefox's translation specifically is from Project Bergamot: https://browser.mt/ https://browser.mt/ It's a set of language models in the style that people currently call AI.
- AdmiralAsshat 7mo ago
  It is annoying. LLMs are not AI, and on-device translations are one of the few genuinely useful features Firefox has shipped in the past few years.
  - sigmar 7mo ago
    LLMs are definitely AI. All neural networks are a subset of AI. LLMs use transformer architecture within a neural network.
Spixel_ 7mo ago
They all seem like great features.
- mrweasel 7mo ago
  On paper yes. The problem is that they clutter the UI, they trigger at weird times and they turn out to be less useful that they may appear. Then there's also people, like me, who just want the browser to browse the web. I don't want link preview (annoying feature), Firefox isn't my PDF viewer, I don't have that many tabs that I need to group them and I don't use AI chatbots. So having a single button to disable all of these features is pretty great. I still want a Firefox Lite, that just does browsing and allows me to add the few extension I want to whatever feature I believe is missing.
  - pamcake 7mo ago
    You might like Konform Browser. Optional features like that disabled with the nag removed (but local ones can still be enabled in preferences). https://codeberg.org/konform-browser/source https://codeberg.org/konform-browser/source
- MallocVoidstar 7mo ago
  I started clicking a 'next page' link before I'd actually finished reading something (so I kept holding the mouse buttown down), and a couple of seconds later Firefox popped up a 'link preview' box informing me that I was clicking on a link to a web forum. Wow, thanks, couldn't have figured that out myself. (It did not actually summarize the next page in any way.)
techwizrd 7mo ago
Whoa, I have been looking for AI-enhanced tab grouping for a while. This is actually pretty awesome.
badsectoracula 7mo ago
> AI chatbot in the sidebar, which lets you use your chosen chatbot as you browse, including options like Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Le Chat Mistral." When i saw this i expected something more... integrated, but when i tried it with a local LLM (using koboldcpp) after enabling the option to show localhost as an option (it is hidden by default for some reason) all it did was to local whatever webpage was running on the localhost URL (even though koboldcpp also provides an OpenAI compatible endpoint, which is what i expected Firefox to use to provide its own UI). It seems to have some sort of heuristic to find the input box where you type in queries and autofills that with the page text or parts of it (if you have it selected) and that's all. I kinda expected it instead to use the API endpoint, have its own chat UI, provide MCP tools for accessing and manipulating the page's content, let you create reusable prompts, etc. The current solution feels like something you'd throw together in a weekend at most.
- skywhopper 7mo ago
  The chatbot providers don’t allow any cleaner integration unless you are using pay-per-request API rates.
  - badsectoracula 7mo ago
    This is not a problem for local LLMs though - and AFAIK Firefox does require from you to login to the cloud chatbots, so you'd probably be the one getting charged for it.

by mrklol 7mo ago

mort96 7mo ago

I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar. Isn't a chat bot in a tab good enough? And calling translation "AI" seems like deceitful retroactive rebranding. Why is machine translation suddenly "AI" now? It was never branded as such before. Is "AI" here just used to mean machine learning?

johnnyanmac 7mo ago
Wouldn't be the first time. Google gave an option to turn off gemini in Gmail, and suddenly the inbox tabs they had for over a decade decided to disappear.
input_sh 7mo ago
IMHO no. Every chatbot has so much wasted space, it really doesn't need to be full-width. Also, what's easier? Option 1: Being on a tab, copying the URL of the tab, switching to the chatbot tab, pasting the URL and writing some instructions about what to do with that tab. Option 2: Clicking on the "summarise page" button (whether from the sidebar or from right-click context menu), and having the browser pre-fill the prompt with the URL + the reader view version of the content on that page.
- mort96 7mo ago
  Option 3: don't
  - input_sh 7mo ago
    Then you right-click on the AI button and click on "remove", but that's a whole different discussion than what you asked in the previous comment. It's also why I really don't understand the need for a kill switch to begin with (other than pleasing annoying users), you don't need to wait for it. You can already get rid of the chatbot integration, there's a remove button already. It's also kind of annoyingly easy to misclick it, so they're just gonna remove it from those places and put it away in settings and those same annoying users will consider that a win.
    - mort96 7mo ago
      Why can't you people who want a ChatGPT sidebar just add that as a plugin?
      - input_sh 7mo ago
        "You people"? Take a look at my comment history and see my takes on AI please, but this is like the least harmful way of integrating it and yet "you people" are the loudest about it. Can you do the same on Windows? Is it tucked away in settings on macOS? Can you disable it on Google? Can you disable it anywhere else? Why are you the most vocal about the integration that is literally the easiest to turn off? You need two clicks to do it right now, you're gonna need at least three once this kill switch is in settings.
        mort96 7mo ago
        The AI boosting from the likes of you is the reason Mozilla is sinking Firefox by turning it into an "AI browser". I don't want anything to do with that. I would've been equally outraged about Windows becoming an "agentic OS" if I had been a Windows user. I don't like what Apple is doing to my phone and laptop, but at least they haven't promised to make the iPhone an "AI phone". More than one thing can be bad at a time, and right now, this conversation is about Mozilla. We can have a conversation about other bad things some other time.
jeppester 7mo ago
> I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar. Isn't a chat bot in a tab good enough? If it wasn't because I find myself using the AI-sidebar all the time I would probably have shared your opinion. I guess it's just quite convenient to have it separated from the "regular" tabs and their history.
- mort96 7mo ago
  Then you can install an AI extension.
  - jeppester 7mo ago
    You were saying: > I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar I answered: > If it wasn't because I find myself using the AI-sidebar all the time I would probably have shared your opinion. Perhaps they did actually test it. Perhaps the majority is like me and find it useful. > Then you can install an AI extension. As mentioned I didn't know that I'd like this feature. I wouldn't have reached for such an extension. It's obvious that you don't want this functionality - which you can now easily disable. What if the majority of the users actually like this? Or the majority either like it or are not the slightest bothered by it? Is it not a good addition overall then?
- UI_at_80x24 7mo ago
  Could you please describe your use-case? How do you use it? How do you make use of it? I use Claude code, so I understand that paradigm; I don't grok this though. Is it any different then going to a web page i.e. gemini.google.com and typing your query there? Could this side bar have been a "search bar" at the top? Now that I say it out lou, adding them to the 'search providers' isn't a bad idea. Generally speaking I am against this being shoved at us, but I find it as a useful tool in a limited number of areas.
  - jeppester 7mo ago
    I always have my browser open, so having it just one click away and not interrupting with whatever else the browser is showing feels convenient. I'm using linux, so there are no official desktop apps I could use instead. Had there been, perhaps I'd have had a different opinion about the AI sidebar.
throwawayk7h 7mo ago
I saw someone else using this feature. It does more than just be a chat bot. You can direct it to automate tasks like go to a web page, search for stuff, etc. -- I asked it to go to pinterest and download the top ten images for "cyberpunk," and it succeeded. Nifty I suppose.
- dormento 7mo ago
  As much as i detest everything about it, i must admit i'm mildly curious as to what workflows people are using it for.
lynndotpy 7mo ago
"AI" is a term which means a dozen things and has changed a dozen times. It's about as meaningful a signifier as "smart". If I were to draw a line, I'd say AI is anything with a transformer model powering it. As exhausted by 'AI' as I am, translation is one of the things neural networks (and especially transformers) have been constantly improving SOTA on.
AndrewDucker 7mo ago
They use a Neural Network engine to power it. That definitely counts as AI: https://aclanthology.org/P18-4020/ https://aclanthology.org/P18-4020/
wongarsu 7mo ago
The word artificial intelligence was coined in a 1955 research proposal [1] which listed seven aspects of the "artificial intelligence problem". Computers using languages was one of them. Another is "neuron nets", which would indeed encompass a large part of ML and at least Google Translate since circa 2016 [2]. This is also perfectly in line with how the word AI was used until circa 2022. The weird thing is this narrowing of AI to only mean transformer or diffusion based neural network approaches. And many translation approaches would even fall under that, so not sure how narrow you perceive the term to be now. How do you even define AI to include everything OpenAI calls AI but not include modern translation approaches 1: https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmo... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20180507195240/https://ai.googleblog.com/2016/09/a-neural-network-for-machine.html https://web.archive.org/web/20180507195240/https://ai.google...
- squeefers 7mo ago
  > This is also perfectly in line with how the word AI was used until circa 2022. show me a screenshot or link of one website or app using AI to mean machine translation from prior to 2022, AI has re-entered the lexicon covering anything from an algorithm to Sora. if anything its broadened, not narrowed in scope. me and you might mean transformer when we say AI, but the average speaker doesnt make that distinction. they call video sites "social media", so can you really be surprised they dont quite use AI correctly either?
  - Volundr 7mo ago
    Here you go: https://web.archive.org/web/20200929085743/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Translate https://web.archive.org/web/20200929085743/https://en.wikipe... Admittedly I don't think this uses the term AI, but "deep learning" and "artificial neural network" are indeed AI, and if you follow those links in the Wikipedia article you will indeed find them described as such.
    - squeefers 7mo ago
      i agree, but the guy said AI was a synonym for machine translation long before the currently confused meaning appeared
nsvd2 7mo ago
The transformer architecture that powers large language models was designed by Google for the purposes of machine translation. As others have said, ML and AI have always been closely related if not synonymous.
Dwedit 7mo ago
I've run an AI translation tool under a debugger just to see what it did. It tokenized your input, fed it into a model, then ran the model. Literally the same thing as any other local AI software. Except the model was for translation.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
stonogo 7mo ago
Firefox's translation specifically is from Project Bergamot: https://browser.mt/ https://browser.mt/ It's a set of language models in the style that people currently call AI.
AdmiralAsshat 7mo ago
It is annoying. LLMs are not AI, and on-device translations are one of the few genuinely useful features Firefox has shipped in the past few years.
- sigmar 7mo ago
  LLMs are definitely AI. All neural networks are a subset of AI. LLMs use transformer architecture within a neural network.

Spixel_ 7mo ago

They all seem like great features.

mrweasel 7mo ago
On paper yes. The problem is that they clutter the UI, they trigger at weird times and they turn out to be less useful that they may appear. Then there's also people, like me, who just want the browser to browse the web. I don't want link preview (annoying feature), Firefox isn't my PDF viewer, I don't have that many tabs that I need to group them and I don't use AI chatbots. So having a single button to disable all of these features is pretty great. I still want a Firefox Lite, that just does browsing and allows me to add the few extension I want to whatever feature I believe is missing.
- pamcake 7mo ago
  You might like Konform Browser. Optional features like that disabled with the nag removed (but local ones can still be enabled in preferences). https://codeberg.org/konform-browser/source https://codeberg.org/konform-browser/source
MallocVoidstar 7mo ago
I started clicking a 'next page' link before I'd actually finished reading something (so I kept holding the mouse buttown down), and a couple of seconds later Firefox popped up a 'link preview' box informing me that I was clicking on a link to a web forum. Wow, thanks, couldn't have figured that out myself. (It did not actually summarize the next page in any way.)

techwizrd 7mo ago

Whoa, I have been looking for AI-enhanced tab grouping for a while. This is actually pretty awesome.

badsectoracula 7mo ago

> AI chatbot in the sidebar, which lets you use your chosen chatbot as you browse, including options like Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Le Chat Mistral." When i saw this i expected something more... integrated, but when i tried it with a local LLM (using koboldcpp) after enabling the option to show localhost as an option (it is hidden by default for some reason) all it did was to local whatever webpage was running on the localhost URL (even though koboldcpp also provides an OpenAI compatible endpoint, which is what i expected Firefox to use to provide its own UI). It seems to have some sort of heuristic to find the input box where you type in queries and autofills that with the page text or parts of it (if you have it selected) and that's all. I kinda expected it instead to use the API endpoint, have its own chat UI, provide MCP tools for accessing and manipulating the page's content, let you create reusable prompts, etc. The current solution feels like something you'd throw together in a weekend at most.

skywhopper 7mo ago
The chatbot providers don’t allow any cleaner integration unless you are using pay-per-request API rates.
- badsectoracula 7mo ago
  This is not a problem for local LLMs though - and AFAIK Firefox does require from you to login to the cloud chatbots, so you'd probably be the one getting charged for it.