Great silent AI captioning. I can’t see this going wrong.
Honestly I think Mozilla has it all wrong
So they say. I’ll believe it when I see it.
It’s not gonna fix my 5900x taking off like a jet engine when I launch 100 JavaScript heavy web apps.
does that mean workspaces?
Holy shit, it is. I’m really hoping that includes mobile, since it’s the only thing keeping me using a Chromium browser
It looks like they are riding the AI wave to bring more features that are just good, local ML-based, and I’m all in for it. Firefox Translation is a great recent example, it’s good.
It’s a useful technology. Would be stupid to ignore it
AI actually can be very good at translating things locally while keeping tone and intent, and thats what mozilla mentions here. I’m fully down with AI powered local translation tools native to firefox, it’ll put it way above the competition
Some LLMs are low enough in resource usage to do this on weak and older PCs
Board of directors, I guess.
The chatbots, presumably.
Me.
Pretty please, fuck off with the AI. It’s really not something I need from a browser, don’t inflate your download size for a screen reader, just MAKE IT OPTIONAL in every way.
I totally agree regarding making it optional, but I have to say the idea of auto generating alt texts sounds like a really useful application of AI - no one really likes to do that manually yet a significant number of beautiful people rely on it.
I do agree with your point about auto-generated captions being better than no captions. But isn’t it bad to insert them automatically on creation? If we use these models to caption images shouldn’t it be done by the screen reader instead? That way people can benefit from future advancements of the tech and customize the captioning system for themselves. With the current system there is no way to tell if you got a crappy AI caption that you may want to replace with a better auto-generated caption or a human written caption.
Totally agree, that would be even better.
So - I don’t think Firefox would be generating captions for PDFs on PDF creation.
But of the major ways that PDF’s do get created - converted from text editors or design software, I know that Microsoft Word automatically suggests captions when the document creator adds an image (but does not automatically apply captions), and I believe that some design software does, as well.
I think that, functionally, both suggesting captions at time of document creation, or at time of document read are prone to the same issues - that the software may not be smart enough to properly identify the object, and if it is, that it is not necessarily smart enough to explain it in context.
By way of example, a screenshot of a computer program will have the automatic suggestion of “A graphical user interface” (or similar), but depending on the context and usage, it could be “A virus installer disguised as ___ video game installer.” Or “The ___ video game installer.” Between the document creator and the creation software or screen reader, only the document creator would really know the context for the image.Which is all to say that I think that Mozilla has the right idea with auto-tagging, but it will always fail on context. The only way to actually address the issue is to deal with it within the document creation software.
But I wouldn’t be opposed to ML on those that can auto-suggest things or even critique how content authors write their descriptions.So - I don’t think Firefox would be generating captions for PDFs on PDF creation.
I’m not sure. The blog post is not entirely clear on that.
Between the document creator and the creation software or screen reader, only the document creator would really know the context for the image.
Agreed. Context is usually very important for images. But with an auto-generated caption embedded in the document itself, you already lose some context. Because if the automatic caption is incorrectly stored as “The ___ video game installer” you cannot decide anymore if this was written by the author with the context in mind or just generated. Which I would argue is worse than no caption, as it lowers your trust in all captions.
But I wouldn’t be opposed to ML on those that can auto-suggest things or even critique how content authors write their descriptions.
Absolutely, I think that will be by far the best solution. It could massively encourage users to write their own captions if in most cases you only need to accept the suggestion. But so far, that seems unlikely to be the way forward. Why do that when you can just throw even more “AI” at the problem?
I’m looking forward to a local ai-powered translator so I don’t have to send data to google or bing
Afaik nearly every feature/product Mozilla has shipped with Firefox in the past has been optional. So surely these will be as well.
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You sound like you have no disabilities that make it hard for you to use the Internet. Good for you.
If AI can add usability features that help people use the Internet easier then that’s a good thing. You don’t need to use it. Why complain about software being capable of helping others?
Tab Grouping would be great if implented well.
@petsoi
Do you do somethig to solve these Security Issues:
madaidans-insecurities.github.…kinda excited to see what their native vertical tabs will look like. i’ve been using sidebery for the past ~3 years and i’m extremely satisfied with it, i somehow doubt their native version will look as good
Even if it doesn’t look as good, it’ll hopefully include some better APIs that extensions can utilise to improve their experience. E.g. hide the native tabs.
hide the native tabs
YES! i currently have to use custom css to achieve this, would be so much more convenient if it was an extension
I only need Firefox to load pages faster than Chrome
Good luck convincing people to switch to it based only on “it loads pages faster than Chrome” though. It’s a good goal to have, but getting tunnel-visioned on it when their current speed in real world use is pretty comparable is definitely not a good long-term plan.
Soon, Firefox can block ads better than Chrome. Ads are annoying. I see Chrome losing at least a 5% of the market, if not more, to Firefox, just because they’re going to break uBlock Origin, and Firefox isn’t.
You really overestimate how many people use an ad blocker. I wish it was that many.
And all of them will jump ship.
Hopefully.
I’m not talking about pulling more people. I’m talking about my issue as an existing and looooong term user of Firefox. I started using a very low end phone recently, and Firefox vs Chrome on it is night and day difference. I don’t notice it on my galaxy phone, but on low end devices it’s torturous.
I still use it all the time exept when a page crash. Wich unfortunately happened too often with Firefox lately. I have a Pixel 8 and it crashes/freeze when scrolling heavy pages or PDF.
It’s annoying that the browser I want to use is crashing so often. But I won’t use Chrome unless I’m forced to, wich the only reasons I was forced to was Firefox freezing.
Oh, you mean FF for Android? Yeah, on that front it really needs a ton of work. On the desktop side things are pretty much fast to a point where in real world use the difference is minimal.
Finally, the only two features I’ve been missing - tab groups and profiles. With all the modern internet browser stones, we’ll be unstoppable!
Any good Lemmy plugins for FF?
To do what, exactly?
I don’t know. Maybe make Lemmy more intuitive
There are a bunch of alternative front-ends at least, like photon
More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker.
So make things even harder to find? A classic menu bar is not clutter!
At least in firefox it’s not hard to change toolbars…
There’s a lot of doom and gloom online about this, but to me these seem like welcome changes 🤷
This has actually been the most positive reaction to a Firefox announcement I’ve seen in a long time. I’ve yet to find a piece of open source software users act more toxic towards than Firefox. It is impossible to find any Firefox-related announcement in recent years that’s received broadly positive feedback. For a long time, the top voted comment would always be someone demanding tab groups or vertical tabs. Now they’re adding those, which is probably why the reaction has been a bit more positive. But of course, AI and UI changes have become the new things to complain about.
Here’s what we’re working on in Firefox… spyware.
It says nothing about spyware, the article isn’t hyped up at all, and describes a token to track installations vs downloads.
"This data will allow us to correlate telemetry IDs with download tokens and Google Analytics IDs. This will allow us to track which installs result from which downloads to determine the answers to questions like, “Why do we see so many installs per day, but not that many downloads per day?”
Also there is an opt-out during installation.
I don’t even use Firefox, and I honestly am not attacking but your comment seemed very hyperbolic and with little detail.
You’re right that it’s good to be aware of this stuff, I also don’t see this being a road block for the average user.
I don’t even use Firefox, and I honestly am not attacking but your comment seemed very hyperbolic and with little detail.
Well I used to use Firefox as my main browser, however it does a LOT of calling home. Just fire Wireshark alongside it and see how much calling home and even calling 3rd parties it does. From basic ocsp requests to calling Firefox servers and a 3rd party company that does analytics they do it all, even after disabling most stuff in Settings and config like a sane user would do.
I can’t stand behind a browser that still calls home after painstakingly going over every setting in config and disabling everything that can be disabled. If you search a bit online you’ll also find that I’m not the only one finding this. There’s also the shady finances thing around Firefox and the foundation.
describes a token to track installations vs downloads. (…) Also there is an opt-out during installation.
How much do you trust that toggle? Did you ever test if it doesn’t call home before you get to the opt out?
Literally the only reason I ever fire up a different browser. Come on guys.
This and the “Cast youtube video to TV” without an external bridging software
Noo, you want ai!!! 😞😞😞
