- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
You must log in or # to comment.
where is this AI bloat exactly? I use Firefox every day and see no difference
There is none, this is all AI=bad knee-jerk reaction. From what I can tell, so far Firefox has 3 ML-based systems implemented:
- Site / text translation - fully local, small model, requires manual action from user
- Tab grouping suggestions - fully local, small model, requires manual action from user
- Image alt text generation (when adding images to a PDF) - fully local, small model, looks like it’s enabled by default but can be turned off directly in the modal that appears when adding alt text
All of these models are small enough to be quickly run locally on mobile devices with minimal wait time. The CPU spikes appear to be a bug in the inference module implementation - not an intended behavior.
Firefox also provides UI for connecting to cloud-based chatbots on a sidebar, but they need to be manually enabled to be used. The sidebar is also customizable so anyone who doesn’t want this button there can just remove it. There’s also a setting in about:config that removes it harder.
I actually really like the way Mozilla is introducing these features. I recently had to visit another country’s post office site and having the ability to just instantly translate it directly on my device is great.
Same here, I’m on 141.0 Linux. No tab grouping unless I group them. I do see the ai button but have not bothered with it.
I remember tab groups showing up one day by themselves maybe a week ago, and then I quickly clicked about two buttons and now they’re totally gone and I almost forgot they were a thing. But likely if I had summarily clicked 2 different buttons it might have been turned on without me realizing it, and that would cause the model to be downloaded and the CPU cycles to be spent (at least if I kept the tab groups on)
Do you have to enable the feature first? Because I’m on v141 and I don’t see this feature. Complaining about a useless and draining feature that you yourself enabled is a special kind of stupid tbh.
Bro, several users have taken to the Firefox subreddit, this is definitely worthy of being the most upvoted post on Lemmy rn
Because people seem to have a special hate boner for Firefox on here.
And please don’t call me bro.
Edit: hate not hat
There’s a lot of negativity from certain users/communities on software/services that are mostly good but have imperfections. I rarely if ever see any recommendations for alternatives that actually make sense when this happens.
Firefox and Proton are two very common targets. Sure, they are both not perfect, but they are both offering a solution that does not enrich the current oppressive market leader and they do a pretty solid job at it.
Yes, flaws deserve to be criticized, but there’s such a thing as too much.
It’s tiring.
That sums it up pretty nicely.
Purists being copted by shadowy corpo astroturfing campaigns, name a more iconic duo.
Just use a fork. I don’t know why I would use vanilla Firefox when there are so many great forks out there that have cool extra features.
Forks get security patches with delay so I prefer to use vanilla Firefox and just disable the things I don’t like, it’s not much work.
i use user js
This is sarcastic right lol
Mozilla is no longer about making a great browser. Mozilla is about making sure their Google bucks come in each year without fail. They don’t work for consumers anymore – they work for Google.
Throughout the years, the market share of Firefox has shank and shank and their C-Suite has continued giving themselves raises.
Mozilla Inc. has been very sick for a long time. It’s a shame that one of the last pieces of honest competition for web browsers belongs to them, because I’m not sure how much longer they will be able to shamble on like this.
Instead of trying to get Google money, I actually wish they would offer a monthly/annual/lifetime membership as the cost of not enshittifying to stay in business. And then severing ties with Google as a company.
A lot of tech companies are holding onto unsustainable business models from 10 years ago to make their products at a loss or “free,” and it’s forcing them into AI, oligarchy, or being beholden to oligarchs. End users paying a fair price to own the products they use is a better alternative than this because it puts the power back in our hands as opposed to tech bros and shareholders.
Much like electricity, lazy boards seek the path of least resistence. What’s easier, building a world-class browser and properly marketing it and maintaining profitability, or just setting your default search engine to “Google.com” and cashing the massive check?
At this point, there’s very few people even left at Mozilla that could even reverse the trend. Go back and look at their past few years. Other than some minor activity to Firefox, almost all their initiatives are little side missions that last for a few years and then are sunset.
Stuck like Pocket, Mozilla Social, Firefox Send, Firefox OS, etc. The list goes on and on. They invest heavily in some flash in the pan initiative and then ax it off a few years later.
People won’t pay for that. Or, at least, not enough people.
We literally saw this play out with media. Everyone hated cable tv. Suddenly we had netflix (2.0) where we can “pay for what I want”. Except… then everyone got in on that because apparently we want things beyond Netflix Original Pictures and whatever they could get cheap out of Korea.
And now? “Ugh, there are juts so many services. I need like twelve. I wish there was one big bundle of everything”.
Not exactly the same but a premium browser (that, again, isn’t going to make anywhere near enough money to fund development) would be dropped even faster than the guy whose patreon is still “pay one dollar per episode”
What about Wikipeida? Internet Archive? All of the products/services that live on kickstarter/patreon/gofundme/etc?
People are more than willing to pay for the things that they love, but Mozilla knows that people wouldn’t be willing to pay enough to continue floating the Executive salaries. That’s why they don’t transition.
The orgs that are heavily dependent on federal funding as well as major corporate investors? That run the websites that the vast majority of people just think is free?
Again, we’ve seen how this plays out with Patreon et al. Everyone says it is totally viable because the ridiculously popular people make bank. And as more and more celebrities flock to it, there is less and less money for the “small creators” and so forth.
Also, Firefox and Thunderbird are backed by the Mozilla Foundation which is already doing exactly that.
I feel like I’m mis-understanding your argument. Are you saying that Mozilla can’t do things that other groups are already successfully doing, because “The popular people make too much money” doing it, and “They are already getting that via the Mozilla Foundation”?
That doesn’t make sense to me.
The point is that they are already doing what those orgs are doing. They are dealing with a userbase that doesn’t want to give them money by getting large amounts from special interest groups and corporations.
Which is why the Wikimedia (?) Foundation pushed REAL hard for AI until basically the entire editorbase told them to fuck off.
But hey? There is obviously infinite money so yeah, I am sure if Mozilla drops all those corporate interests and just switches to an optional patreon they would have even MORE money than they already do and would have no need to placate said special interests.
The userbase does want to give them money though. I constantly hear people say that they want to donate to Firefox, but Mozilla doesn’t let them do that.
Also, I never said that Patreon would give them more money. It would be less money, but it would be more effective, as they could finally ditch the worthless exectutives that keep draining Mozilla’s resources.
A huge problem with America’s and many other economic systems is that companies are incentivized to undercut the competition, use a monopoly growth model, acquire or push out competitors, and then screw the customer when the competitors are either gone or irrelevant.
Without guardrails, the bubble will burst and some other “affordable solution” will just show up to replace streaming, and then we’ll start all over again before it enshittifies too. But there won’t be guardrails anytime soon, and most refuse or are unable to vote with their wallets, so we’re just screwed.
I don’t know what the solution is, but as a consumer, I’m exhausted. I wish there were options to just buy products, sometimes more expensive ones to keep a steady, sustainable business model, for piece of mind that the company won’t stab me in the back someday.
In a perfect world? Yeah, I would love to just spend money and get what I want forever.
The problem is that most of these products would never exist without external funding. We all remember Microsoft getting slapped hard for bundling internet explorer and the like in the 90s. What people don’t remember is just how GOOD IE was… because it was largely subsidized by the OS et al that everyone bought because it was that damned good. Netscape was very much A Thing and anything else was more or less trash.
Same thing with the idea of “use a monopoly growth model”. What is the alternative? Actively making a product worse because everyone else is? Because that is collusion. Hell, if anything, browsers for the past few years have been exactly what we would theoretically want. Google are the de facto monopoly. They literally pumped insane amounts of cash into Mozilla et al to fund their competition so there would actually BE competition.
Same thing with the idea of “use a monopoly growth model”. What is the alternative? Actively making a product worse because everyone else is? Because that is collusion.
This question really highlights the danger of the growth-at-all-costs model in forcing every company to race to the bottom when one company does. The future of the human race may one day depend on killing technological progress and emphasizing stability over profits.
As somebody who is out of the loop a bit here, how is Morzilla making money through Googhe?
Firefox really does seem to have lost the plot… they don’t seem to go five minutes without slamming their dick in another drawer. It starts to look like they’re in to it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, it was forced on me. I have updates disabled too. Pieces of shit.
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.
It’s not their AI (Bixby). It’s Gemini. But yes.
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
It’s not a new updated it’s been that way for years.
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.
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
You can rebind it
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.
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.
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?
The aqueducts?
Oh. Aqueducts? Shut up!
@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.I would argue that it’s a bit easier to still follow your values if your business consists of mostly selling games.
Literally no one on this green earth asked for this shit.
This is why I use the version of Firefox that does not update.
Maybe check out LibreWolf. It’s Firefox except with good defaults. Otherwise, it’s exactly the same
TBH despite I don’t like this specific idea, nor use Firefox directly, I do like the usage of local inference vs sending your data to thirdparty to do AI.
They just needed to do it OPT IN, not OPT OUT.
It is though.
then why the fuck is this newsworthy? ugh. Why is there such a huge hateboner for firefox lately?
A lot of people would rather sit around and tear down the progress being made around them for being imperfect, than pitch in to help change things for the better.
I really don’t get it either.
It’s not like it’s a paid product either.
Because they keep betraying their supposed values for short-term gains.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fair point. Not on the semantics per se, but on taking the best approach, 100%.
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?
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.
even without AI, to me tab groups are already feature creep bloat in browsers. do people really put that much effort into organizing tabs?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
FF already has tab groups. Right click on one.
Yeah, they were added somewhat recently, I know.
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.
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.
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 :(
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.
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.
yes, that’s exactly what i was getting at.
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.
I started using tab groups when they released vertical tabs.
Another local LLM guy here, i fully agree with you - this is probably just a move to acquire capital in the case that the google-cashflow stops.
According to the article, this is mainly for grouping tabs with a suggested name. Talk about backwards. Use AI to process the top websites on the Internet and create groups and/or logic to group them by keywords (cluster analysis), then save the small data structure in Firefox so it can group most websites instantly, using kilobytes of ram in the process; don’t try to do this on everyone’s device ffs.
Besides the heat and battery problem, this also means that the GUI is going to be non-deterministic, suggesting groups differently day-to-day based on the slight differences of input and the whims of the LLM. Burn it with fire.
Oh, so that’s what the fuck it was. I was wondering why my tabs were getting grouped without any logic or reason. Impressive ability to make everything actively worse
I don’t think the centralised approach works either. If you bake that grouping metadata of individual popular pages into Firefox you have an issue with keeping it current if page content changes. And you have a difficult trade-off between covering enough pages vs not blowing up the size too much. And the approach can’t work for deep web pages, e.g. anything people can only see when logged in.
Ignoring all that: The groupings you could pre-process would be static and determined over some assumed average user behaviour, not an actual cluster of a specific users themes. You take some hardcore Warhammer 40k fan, and all his tabs on minis and painting techniques and rulebooks and fan media, and apply the static grouping then it all goes into “Warhammer”. However if you ran it locally it might come up with “Painting” “Figures” “Rules” “Fanart” or whatever. It would produce a more fine grained clustering for someone who is deep into a specific niche interest, and a more coarse grained one otherwise.
So I think fundamentally it’s correct to cluster locally and dynamically for a usable result. They need to make it opt-in, and efficient enough. Or better yet they could just abandon the idea because it’s ultimately not that much use compared to the required inference cost.
The problem with useful suggestions like these is that they can’t be used when the MO is to shove AI into everything and anything to seem relevant, and chase the pot of cost savings at the end of the rainbow which is totally gonna turn up any day now, we think, we’re pretty sure anyway.
It does seem bizarre and woefully inefficient to run this process on-the-fly locally.
Finally using Firefox ESR helped me
I was actually wondering why it felt like my Firefox was dying, possible could align with this.
Firefox is a good example of “either you die a hero or live long enoigh to see yourself become the villian”
So is RHEL.
Awful Idea? Anal Intrusion? Actually Irrelevant?Activating Idiocy? Adding Incompetence?
Altogether Imbecilic
Arrived in the Idiocracy?
Abominable intelligence
Absent Intelligence
Just make it an official extension ffs…
I’m fine with them pulling a Pocket as long it dies in the end.
At least they offer a fix for it:
Head to about:config in a new tab, accept the risk warning, and use the search bar to find the controls.
To kill the AI chatbot feature, search for browser.ml.chat.enabled and set it to false.
To stop smart tab grouping, search for browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled and set it to false.
They offer a fix behind a bunch of barriers? Is it not in settings with an obvious on/off toggle for the thing?
Why would they bury the option… are they being paid to include this AI feature or something…?
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.
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.
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
They haven’t needed donations for years. In the current situations donos are, at best, part of the CEO and top-brass bonus.
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
could be, I can’t judge that. do you have any source for that info or is it based on an assumption?
Their public, reviewed 2023 financial statement and their official documents about administration salaries and bonus.
That’s basically what LibreWolf does.
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.
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.
Why not add this features as browser extension?
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.
Facebook Container comes to mind, they’ve done this before already.
If a browser only aims at tech savvy people, practically no one will end up using it.
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.
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.
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
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).
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
They aren’t doing anymore for years. I moved to forks of ff instead.
deleted by creator
