That’d certainly be a good feature, but it feels to me like it’s a fairly niche need. And as per that post, it’s also a big technical effort. I can see why there isn’t anything in the way of development updates.
That is me being a bit of an apologist for Firefox though. If you consider Firefox unusable because of that, then that’s a pretty valid frustration.
Still, I’d encourage you to try and find a way to make it work for you because Chrome is evil.
I don’t use Google Chrome, but there are plenty of other chromium-based browsers out there.
This isn’t the first time I’ve run up against technical shortcomings of Firefox, either. I used to frequent a site which made use of the CSS class column-span. Chrome added full support for that class in early 2016. I was probably accessing this site from about late 2016 until about 2018 or so. Firefox didn’t support column-span until December 2019. The whole time I used the site, Firefox simply could not render it in a usable way.
I’ve said for a long time that we’d be better off if Firefox switched to Chromium. They clearly don’t have the resources to keep up with the rapid pace of change on the web. 5 years and they still don’t support a browser feature that Google got out in a out 1 year and I think Edge got it done in 2 or 3 (and unsurprisingly, Apple has it ready day 1, though that’s an unfair comparison for obvious reasons). Three and a half years behind other browsers in getting out a CSS feature that’s being used live on the web already.
If they based their browser on Chromium, there would be so much less work for them to do. They’d have to spend some effort maintaining features Google has decided to drop, like Manifest V2, but they wouldn’t be alone in that effort, since they can pool resources with the likes of Vivaldi and Brave, and maybe even Microsoft in some cases. So I’m the end a much higher percentage of their resources could be spent developing features that differentiate them and help maintain them as a great privacy-focused browser, instead of merely keeping up on the treadmill of platform change.
They can be slow to adopt changes. I think the Mozilla foundation getting more funding, staffing, and refocusing on their browser would be the better solution.
While Chromium is an open source project, it is still developed and maintained by Google. For something as important as a web browser, I think it’s imperative that there’s an option outside of their control.
Sure, but Google has no control over any forks of Chromium. They can’t control Edge, or Brave, or Vivaldi, or a hypothetical Mozilla fork. And if those other forks want, they can collaborate together to maintain any features they want to have that Google themselves don’t want.
Like, yeah, more funding for Firefox would be the ideal case. But that’s not something Mozilla really has the ability to effect. They can choose what engine they’re using. And using Chromium would allow them to essentially “steal” the work Google has put in, while not preventing them from changing stuff that they don’t like. In fact, in some respects it would help them even with that stuff they don’t like from Google, since they can pool resources with other privacy-forward browsers like Vivaldi and Brave. I honestly see it as win-win.
Sure, but Google has no control over any forks of Chromium. They can’t control Edge, or Brave, or Vivaldi
Sorry but that’s not how it goes, Google can exert control on forks by increasing the difficulty of maintaining changes. The forks have a vested interest in staying compatible with upstream to benefit from Chromium changes over time, which unfortunately means they avoid making any deep changes to the code. None of the Chromium forks are hard ones, unlike Chromium itself which was a hardfork of Apple’s webkit, which in turn was a hard fork off KDE’s KHTML.
Also, Mozilla should DEFINITELY NOT adopt Chromium. We need diversity in web browsers, the idea is that by having different user agents we give the user more bargain power over how they want to browse the web. Remember, Google, Microsoft and Apple are NOT your friends, all they want is to ransack everything and increase their shareholder values. If they can turn the web proprietary and fully locked down, they will.
For now. If Firefox became a Chromium fork, ideally it would stay that way. But if Google did make things too hard in the way you describe, then I would suggest Firefox, Brave, Vivaldi, etc. should share a sort of medium-hard fork of Chromium. Keep their own track with features they need, but keep it close enough that the basic rendering engine can still be merged in from work Google does.
We need diversity in web browsers
That’s an ideological position. I don’t agree that there’s any inherent value in the underlying browser engine being diverse. If anything, I think it’s useful for it to be consistent and predictable.
As I write this, I’m talking myself into a slightly different position. Maybe they don’t need to fork Chromium, but it would be valuable to dump Gecko in favour of Blink. I don’t actually know what Chromium gets you besides Blink (and V8, which I lump together with Blink because for the same reasons, I think it would make sense to unify around). Stick with Blink & V8 to let Google to the work on the rendering side (while still being able to contribute back yourself where necessary), while maintaining your own browser and extension ecosystem. So web developers get a single platform to develop against, users get the full experience of any site they visit regardless of their browser, and Mozilla can maximally utilise their development resources in building and maintaining features that differentiate them.
In their landing page there are some cool features, do yall know any reason nota to migrate? I havê been thinking of quitting firefox to another browser for some time now (dont Sant chrommiun tho)
Ehhh. I get that exploitative techbros and cryptobros have confused the issue by latching onto the AI bubble.
But at the same time generalized artificial intelligence is very likely possible and will be an absolute game-changer if and when it happens. It’s easily of similar value to fusion technology.
And it is already bringing truly impressive results into reality - protein folding and diagnostic medicine come to mind.
But at the same time generalized artificial intelligence is very likely possible and will be an absolute game-changer if and when it happens. It’s easily of similar value to fusion technology.
The “AI” we have now is basically advanced Autocomplete.
In the same way that computers are basically advanced abaci.
Don’t confuse a simplification made to demonstrate the basic functioning to a layman with how things actually work.
LLM’s are neural networks, which are based on a model of brain function. There’s little reason to believe that we cannot eventually reach similar levels of effectiveness as human brains.
Hell - reaching the levels of pigeon brains would already be absurdly useful.
While I agree that LLMs can achieve human-tier efficiency at most tasks eventually (some architectural changes will be necessary, but the core approach seems sound), it’s wrong to say it’s modeled after the human brain. We have no idea how brains work as they’re super complex, we’re building artificial neural networks from the ground up. AI uses centuries’ worth of math, but with our current maths knowledge the code isn’t too complicated. Human brains aren’t like that, they can’t be summed up in a few lines of code because DNA is a huge mess that contains so much more than just “learning”, so many inactive or redundant bits and pieces. We’re building LLMs with knowledge of how languages work, not how brains work.
Transformers are not built with our knowledge of language. That’s a gross approximation – it would honestly be more accurate to say they’re modelled after the human brain than that they’re built with our understanding of language. A big problem is that the connection between AI and language is poorly understood – we can’t even understand what the word2vec axes are.
i’m not talking about knowing about how humans perceive/learn languages, i’m talking about language structure. Perhaps it’s wrong to call it “how languages work”
different neural network types excel at different tasks - image recognition was invented way before LLMs, not only for lack of processing power, but also because the previous architectures didn’t work with languages. New architectures don’t appear out of thin air, they are created with a rough idea of what we could need to make the network do a certain task (e.g. NLP) better. Even tokenization isn’t blind codepoint separation but is based on an analysis of languages. But yes, natural languages aren’t “parsed” for neural networks, they don’t even have a formal grammar.
Yeah I pretty much stopped playing competitive games completely. I really like playing with friends so I play a lot of coop. A way out and it takes two were some excellent coop games. Escape simulator and escape academy as well, if you’re into puzzles.
I think I would’ve used the philosoraptor instead to make this meme. The idea guy isn’t typically used to ask questions. [Edit: I see it’s been changed to philosoraptor, nice !👌]
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