Interesting; it reminds me a little of an addon from maybe a dozen years ago that would do the same kind of thing but with fiction. So you’d be reading a post on Slashdot or whatever, and the addon would find a sequence of words that matched the start of one of the stories it had, and it would add a few words of that story. If you noticed, you could click on them to get more of the story, and if you kept clicking it would eventually replace the text of the whole page with the story. It was a really neat way of just stumbling across fiction. Wish I could remember the name of the addon. For some reason I think it was Australian, maybe put together by a university or an arts council or something?
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.
when used to enhance accessibility? me. especially in this case where it’s used for better alt text and descriptive text in pdfs, a tech that has long struggled with that.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hopefully I don’t get many downvotes for this, but it isns’t necessary to deny anything related to AI and bombard Mozilla for this. Sure, Copilot is a disaster, because it is a service and will call home to M$ and collect your data. But all of what Mozilla offers us is on-device AI, which is exceptional. I’ve been waiting so long for on-device AI-based webpage translation, so people don’t need to rely on external services like Google or Bing to translate any more.
Same, their local translation tech is absolutely great! If they keep working “AI” features that are pretty much quality of life ML stuff I’m all in for it.
blog.mozilla.org
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