[HN Gopher] Orbit by Mozilla
___________________________________________________________________
Orbit by Mozilla
Author : blinky88
Score : 419 points
Date : 2024-12-31 01:20 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (orbitbymozilla.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (orbitbymozilla.com)
| beretguy wrote:
| I'd rather have tab groups.
| easygenes wrote:
| Sidebery is my go to for that.
|
| https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery
| hodanli wrote:
| Definitely makes Firefox irreplaceable for me.
| navs wrote:
| Looks like it's just around the corner. See previous post:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42499693
| stuartd wrote:
| Tab groups are on by default in nightly, and though I haven't
| been on the computer much this past week they seem well
| realised. This article suggests they can be enabled in other
| versions, but I only really use nightly so I haven't tried it..
|
| https://www.ghacks.net/2024/12/03/how-to-enable-tab-groups-i...
| gorbachev wrote:
| What's wrong with the multiple Firefox addons that provide this
| functionality already? I'm not trying to be snarky...I'm
| genuinely curious.
|
| I've been using Simple Tab Groups [1] for many, many years.
|
| 1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/simple-tab-
| gr...
| jsheard wrote:
| For those wondering, this uses cloud-hosted AI models. But it's
| completely free to use so Mozilla is just paying the cloud bills
| out of pocket. Maybe not the best idea given their increasingly
| precarious financial situation?
| janice1999 wrote:
| I never understood why Mozilla doesn't offer paid privacy
| respecting services (outside basic sync that already exists)
| like email, cross platform password storage etc.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Because everyone who cares about it is already using some
| sort of a service like that, and it's incredibly niche market
| so it's not worth the effort to develop and support such
| projects.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| But imagine if Mozilla would have done this before, like
| capturing the market now proton has
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| It's almost like... They're owned by Google and don't really
| compete or something...
|
| Gee, fucking wow, it's almost as if it's plain a day why
| they've sucked as a corp, non profit, and culturally for a
| decade at this point.
| anyfactor wrote:
| Mozilla should have been doing what Proton is doing. But
| considering how far Proton has gone I wouldn't be surprised
| if Proton spun up their own browser at this point.
| Qem wrote:
| I think password storage is covered by Firefox sync.
| mdaniel wrote:
| Only within the confines of web usage, unless you know
| something about Firefox Sync injecting passwords into
| Android apps or environment variables
|
| Also, like it or not, I think Passkeys/WebAuthn is going to
| be pushed more and more, so without a _user focused_ way to
| own them, that 's another reason not to try and use a
| browser (any of them!) as a password store
| flessner wrote:
| Not using services funded by Google is pretty high on my
| personal privacy checklist. Also, they offer some services
| (like VPN, Relay, Pocket) that usually end up as annoying
| bloatware in Firefox.
| koolala wrote:
| Don't worry, the money will gravitate back towards Mozilla
| because AI = Search.
| hu3 wrote:
| I doubt this will ever happen.
|
| The minute Mozilla starts being relevant in search, Google
| will cut their billions USD/year sponsorship, killing Mozilla
| in the process.
|
| The incentives are not there.
| endofreach wrote:
| > The minute Mozilla starts being relevant in search,
| Google will cut their billions USD/year sponsorship,
| killing Mozilla in the process. The incentives are not
| there.
|
| Google needs mozilla more than anyone. It would be a big
| win for the web if google stopped financing mozilla and had
| to deal with the consequences.
| reissbaker wrote:
| Why does Google need Mozilla at this point? Firefox has
| 2.6% market share. Sure, I imagine the cost/benefit ratio
| is slightly positive for Google, but Mozilla _needs_
| Google since that 's the majority of their revenue; the
| reverse is definitely not true.
| likeabatterycar wrote:
| Mozilla is like the legit side business the Mafia uses
| for taxes, group health benefits, etc. and to give an air
| of legitimacy to their operation.
|
| Google needs Mozilla to exist to prove on paper they
| don't hold a monopoly with Chrome.
| scq wrote:
| Safari and Edge have larger market shares, they don't
| need Firefox for that.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Edge is based off of chrome. Safari isn't a browser
| outside of Apple computers.
| hu3 wrote:
| IMO the value is more about market share of the browser
| than the engine.
| mmh0000 wrote:
| It's an anti-competitive ploy run by Google so they can
| point to Firefox and say "look there are competitors
| we're not the only browser."
| endofreach wrote:
| As likeabatterycar said, it's about avoiding anti trust /
| monopoly issues. Just imagine mozilla died and google had
| to cut lose chrome. That would really be interesting.
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| Sounds extremely expensive. How is this paid for?
|
| Also, does anyone know if we'd be able to point it to our own LLM
| instance for the guarantee of our data being secure?
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Out of the funds that should have been used to improve Firefox
| of course.
| mhitza wrote:
| > How does Orbit work?
|
| > Orbit is a Firefox add on that uses AI to summarize and answer
| queries about web content such as articles and videos.
|
| > When a user asks Orbit to summarize or query content, Orbit
| gathers the context (eg. text, images, videos, etc.) of the page
| the user is viewing and provides a summary or answer. Orbit works
| on websites including Gmail, Wikipedia, NY Times, YouTube, and
| more.
|
| > For the current version, we are using a Mistral LLM (Mistral
| 7B) hosted within Mozilla's GCP instance.
|
| It's interesting they're going with Mistral 7B. Is anybody else
| using Mistral 7B in production? And in what role?
|
| I've considered using it for general knowledge type questions,
| and as a way to classify information, but would have never
| considered it for summarization type tasks due to it's limited
| context size (8k).
| pilotneko wrote:
| Mistral 7B has a context window of 32k. I use it in production
| for medical summarization tasks supporting appeals and
| physician advisory services.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Why are you confident to use such a tiny model on something
| so critical?
|
| I would never use anything smaller than a 70B model for
| anything even vaguely medical related!
| N2yhWNXQN3k9 wrote:
| Its summarisation, who cares if its right as long as you
| feel confident after reading it? /s.
|
| In my experience, even GPT-4o is terrible at revealing
| information from things longer than a few pages.
|
| It might be an issue with dimensionality reduction in
| general though. If you think about it, you can't really
| take away much of what is contained within any given amount
| of text with text, unless the source was produced extremely
| inefficiently.
|
| Producing outlines or maybe a form of abstract, it seems to
| be okay at, but you would never really know where it fails
| unless you read the entirety of the source text first to
| begin with. IMO, its not worth risking unless you plan to
| read the source anyway or its not really important.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| Try to walk through a Wikipedia article having an LLM
| summarize every few paragraphs, its often wildly
| inaccurate.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| A key thing to remember in this specific moment in history
| is that the vast majority of people will be as lazy as they
| can get away with being. People want to leave work and go
| home and if an LLM lets them do that faster, who cares if
| it's accurate? It can absorb the blame.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > Why are you confident to use such a tiny model on
| something so critical?
|
| Don't use _any_ LLM for something critical. They can 't be
| trusted innately due to their design, why on earth would
| you use them for something where you need reliability?
| mdaniel wrote:
| > why on earth would you use them for something where you
| need reliability?
|
| As very best I can tell the answer is "because _bags of
| cash_ "
| pilotneko wrote:
| I don't use Mistral 7B alone, this is just a component in a
| RAG-based system. A system that is 1) not clinical facing,
| 2) not used in clinical decision making, 3) provides in-
| line references sources for end users to validate
| information, and 4) is inherently human-in-the-loop.
| HaZeust wrote:
| Hope your prod is being done currently in this political...
| Climate.
| neilv wrote:
| Huge heading:
|
| > _Commitment to privacy_
|
| Buried as the last sentence in a collapsed box at the bottom of
| the page:
|
| > _For the current version, we are using a Mistral LLM (Mistral
| 7B) hosted within Mozilla's GCP instance._
|
| And why is it "...Mozilla's GCP instance", not "We quietly send
| all your data to Google servers, and everyone pinkie-swears
| that's totally privacy-respecting"?
| BadHumans wrote:
| Any revelation that Google is siphoning data out of other
| companies GCP instances would be so earth-shattering I don't
| think it is happening.
| rubidium wrote:
| Dude, the number of times outright lying has been done and
| brushed off in a 24 hour news cycle means it's totally what
| they are doing.
| BadHumans wrote:
| I don't know what bit of news you are talking about. Unless
| you are just talking about the news in general which still
| doesn't prove anything. Any news that Google is stealing
| data out of GCP is not something you could just sweep under
| the rug in 24 hours.
| neilv wrote:
| Even on the linked page, Mozilla is arguably being evasive
| about the fact that they're sending the data out the Internet
| at all.
|
| We don't know whether this is another time that Mozilla execs
| have sold out users, or shipped something half-baked and
| vulnerable.
|
| I'm not saying they're leaking the data (by agreement, or
| negligence), but Mozilla has mediocre credibility in recent
| years, and there's nothing on this page that improves that
| reputation.
|
| Regarding Google, for a long time, their thinking seemed to
| be "We're Google, so of course anything we do is privacy-
| respecting", not as guidance, but to justify whatever they
| wanted to do. Also, every time Google gets caught with their
| hand in the private information cookie jar, it just mints a
| new industry standard practice.
| wobfan wrote:
| > I'm not saying they're leaking the data (by agreement, or
| negligence), but Mozilla has mediocre credibility in recent
| years, and there's nothing on this page that improves that
| reputation.
|
| I think you read too much HN and aren't aware about all the
| stuff going on in the background at Mozilla.
|
| If there's one company I would trust, it would be them.
| Their marketing has been mediocre and I'm not 100% sure
| about if I like their future decisions, but I trust them
| 100%.
| sitkack wrote:
| If you aren't running an encrypted disk on any cloud provider
| you should absolutely fundamentally understand that your data
| has been scanned and that your VM data is "business data" so
| a copy gets sent to whomever wants it, in bulk.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Proof for this claim?
| sidibe wrote:
| Maybe it's good to assume that but at this point that is
| not going to purposely happen at a company like Google or
| Amazon. The risk, which is a near certainty to bear out if
| they have any decent employees among the tens of thousands
| (esp. with the weekly "I'm leaving because I hate this
| company" screeds these companies yield), isn't worth
| whatever little reward they might find in your data.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| Maybe if you are like a high profile target of a state
| actor, but otherwise this is a paranoid take
| hulitu wrote:
| Taking into accout that, the first thing Firefox does, is
| connect to a Google server (e100.net) , i would say it is
| a good founded concern.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| In this case, usually the infrastructure provider owns the
| keys, and if not, they would have easy access to them. So I
| don't see how encrypted disk really solves anything besides
| accidental leakage to a peer infra user, or someone
| sneaking into the datacenter and physically removing the
| disks.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Is there a profit to Google digging around in the information
| people send them?
|
| Are there long and vague terms of service documents backed by
| a pile of lawyers?
|
| There you go, incentive and means. I'm not even confident
| companies would see that as a problem when it was raised with
| them directly, in much the same way that Microsoft hosting
| all the corporate email seems to be just fine.
| antonvs wrote:
| The disincentive is far higher than the incentive, and the
| TOS have been scrutinized deeply by some of the biggest
| enterprises on the planet. GCP is not a consumer service
| like Gmail or Maps.
|
| As the comment above suggested, any information to the
| contrary would be business-destroying for GCloud. Many of
| their enterprise users have strict requirements about
| access to and use of their data.
|
| Re the example of Microsoft corporate email, much the same
| situation applies. If Microsoft were mining that corporate
| customer data and using it or reselling it, enterprises
| would dump them in a heartbeat.
| bloppe wrote:
| Can confirm. I worked in gcloud for years. There are so
| many policies in place to keep customer data secret, even
| when you're on-call and trying to solve customer issues,
| it's actually annoying.
|
| It makes sense. Some gcloud customers are banks. Some are
| federal govt agencies. Some are foreign governments.
| Google would not only destroy it's cloud business, but
| also probably get fined and sued out of existence if it
| was poking around in cloud or gsuite data.
|
| You get what you pay for (in terms of privacy) at Google.
| Regular users never pay Google a dime, so they don't get
| much privacy. Cloud and gsuite users fork over mountains
| a cash directly, and their data is kept about as safe as
| can be as a result.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| Definitely a baseless conspiracy theory to suggest that Google
| is harvesting data from their GCP customers
| todotask wrote:
| Bad marketing header "AI you can trust".
| ericra wrote:
| Info from the FAQ:
|
| - Currently using Mistral 7B, but ability (by Mozilla) to swap
| the model used to another open source at any point.
|
| - Hosted "by Mozilla" on their GCP instance.
|
| - No obvious info about what it will cost them to run this since
| it is free to use.
|
| - No training on user data.
|
| Like others here, I'm very curious about the cost for Mozilla to
| run this service. It may be less than it initially appears given
| the 7B model they chose. I do wish they would focus their efforts
| on creating a very long-term endowment to pay devs for continued
| Firefox development in lieu of projects like this given the
| tenuous situation with their Google funding.
|
| I'm not against this kind of thing in theory, but I hope it's
| being done in a cost-sustainable way.
| Too wrote:
| If you scroll to the bottom of the page it appears like this is
| made by Fakespot, https://www.fakespot.com/our-mission. They
| explain that they make money through ads, for their other
| similar product, wouldn't be far to guess that's the future
| strategy here as well.
| shmerl wrote:
| Is Mistral AI open source?
| benatkin wrote:
| The one they're using is under the Apache 2 license.
|
| Mistral has released Codestral under a new license, but that's
| not the one used here. https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ai-non-
| production-license-mn...
| BadHumans wrote:
| [flagged]
| raincole wrote:
| I don't know how Mozilla even exists financially. Is it just
| that Google keeps them alive to avoid antitrust lawsuits
| against Chrome?
| jsheard wrote:
| Pretty much, about 85% of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google
| in exchange for making them the default search engine. The
| ongoing antitrust case against Googles _search_ business is
| threatening to make that deal illegal though, so ironically
| the attempt to break up one Google monopoly might
| incidentally kill Firefox and make another Google monopoly
| stronger than ever.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Assuming donations would still be legal they have the
| funding structure to get around that through their
| foundation.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| They are gonna need to shed a lot of weight (like this
| project) in order to make donations feasible.
| anyfactor wrote:
| In a separate comment, I mentioned how Mozilla should have been
| more like Proton with their cloud storage, VPN, password
| manager, and cloud office suite.
|
| In fact, they should have done that a decade a ago.
|
| Mozilla has been around since the late '90s and should have
| evolved beyond just being a browser company. They launched a
| VPN service when VPNs were already everywhere, and they did the
| same with a bookmark manager when others were already offering
| similar solutions. Mozilla is always catching up, never
| leading, and that's a common issue with many big open-source
| and free software companies. They often pretend to be a
| business that isn't heavily propped up by big tech donations.
|
| If I were leading a browser company, my focus would have been
| aggressively directed towards small business software. I'd
| create an internet and privacy-focused affordable minimal
| business software suite that lives within the browser -- a
| combination of Proton and Zoho. And I'd strongly avoid building
| things that should be browser extensions.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Some more information from when this was launched 3 months ago on
| the Mozilla connect board:
|
| https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/try-orbit-by-mozi...
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Shit like this is why Mozilla deserves to die. They have
| overstayed their welcome and just drag the rest of us all down.
| sitkack wrote:
| Firefox needs to be forked and owned by the people. I'd pay $1
| a month for a browser run by the people. Management and
| extension options could be rolled out for government, business,
| education, etc. There are so many models where the browser
| thrives, the org that shepherds the browser thrives, and the
| people thrive.
|
| Firefox is like the shitty best option that camps out in its
| niche, it sucks but it is really hard to push out of the way.
| askvictor wrote:
| And who are 'the people'? It's an open source product,
| developed by a non-profit organisation. You want the
| government to release a browser? I can tell you how popular
| that will be...
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >developed by a non-profit organisation.
|
| Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
|
| >The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of
| the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the
| development of Internet-related applications such as the
| Firefox web browser,
|
| >Unlike the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla
| open source project, ... the Mozilla Corporation is a
| taxable entity.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Right, but its board and owners that it is beholden to is
| the Non-Profit.
| dralley wrote:
| > I'd pay $1 a month for a browser run by the people.
|
| You and approximately 5 other people. Paid browsers in 2024
| are not a path to mainstream success, especially if you are
| what Firefox is - a fully independent tech stack down to the
| browser engine and not a barebones reskin of Chrome. A reskin
| of Chrome would have very low development costs. Firefox does
| not.
| mdaniel wrote:
| > I'd pay $1 a month for a browser run by the people.
|
| The bad news is that 12,000 other people would need to
| similarly pay per month to have a dev team of just 10. I know
| Ladybird is lean and mean but finding that big of an audience
| (or, of course, bigger) who would _pay_ for a browser, per
| month, is likely a non-starter
|
| It would be a _much_ more interesting proposal to start a bug
| bounty for the damn near infinite Bugzilla queue, although as
| I understand it some of the hassle of a bug bounty program is
| _evaluating_ submissions. And don 't say "but we'll use an
| LLM" or I'll throw up in my mouth
| HKH2 wrote:
| At least it's more useful than their limited edition themes.
| RadiozRadioz wrote:
| I installed it and it's a giant floating popup that's permanently
| on your screen. You can enable the "minimal" theme in the
| settings to turn it into a smaller-but-still-big pill shape. It
| doesn't look like there's a way to hide it in a context menu, at
| least not one I can see.
|
| I don't fancy having a random floaty object in the way of my
| webpages, no thank you.
|
| Edit: It appears to go away occasionally. This UX is unclear to
| me.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Yeah, I can't imagine what lunatic thought it would be a good
| idea to have this stupid orb floating inside the page. Heck, it
| would be fine if you at least had an option to move it into the
| toolbar where it belongs...
| aabiji wrote:
| If you pin the extension in the toolbar, there's an option to
| "disable" the extension. The floating popup goes away and using
| the extension to summarize still works.
| 93po wrote:
| Same complaint here, uninstalled immediately
| reissbaker wrote:
| Why does Mozilla always spin their wheels releasing random side
| projects? Cloud-hosting an outdated tiny LLM that you can't swap
| out or run locally, to do basic summarization? This just doesn't
| feel like an area of strategic focus that makes sense for
| Mozilla. GPUs are expensive, talent to do inference well is
| expensive, and the actual product they're shipping seems pretty
| marginally useful at best.
|
| If they shipped vertical tabs I'd probably switch back to
| Firefox. But that would require focusing on actual browser UX
| instead of random offshoots. What's their actual product
| differentiation from Chrome these days?
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| > What's their actual product differentiation from Chrome these
| days?
|
| Not being the progenitor and linchpin of surveillance
| capitalism.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| That and Firefox can run a full-grown version of uBlock
| Origin that actually works... at least for now.
| janfoeh wrote:
| uBlock Matrix, not Origin, if you actually want fine-
| grained control.
| minitech wrote:
| *uMatrix is unmaintained, and uBlock Origin can do fine-
| grained control - it just requires the "advanced user"
| setting for some reason, even if you expand the panels
| all the way.
| https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/wiki/quick-
| guide:-popup-us... (see "I am an advanced user!"
| expanding section at the bottom)
| mdaniel wrote:
| And I can actually build and package it from source in about
| 2 hours, unlike the other monstrosity, which surely must
| lower the barrier to contribution. Almost as much as Bugzilla
| raises it, I guess :-(
| hussi wrote:
| Zen Browser is based in the newest Firefox version and does
| have vertical tabs
| likeabatterycar wrote:
| > Why does Mozilla always spin their wheels releasing random
| side projects?
|
| Because some project manager had "AI" on his performance goals
| this year.
|
| Firefox is buggy as hell - which is incomprehensible given its
| age, but older brother Netscape had the same problem 20-ish
| years ago. The Netscape 4.x days were absolute hell and you
| could go hardly a day without the browser crashing.
|
| Despite this, it's packed with nonsense no one asked for like
| Pocket. Which is a coincidence because "AI assistant for
| Firefox" is the dictionary definition for redundant things no
| one asked for, with better alternatives preexisting.
|
| At this point Firefox needs to die and something new and
| manageable - with energetic developers - needs to take its
| place. Maybe Microsoft could open source the original Edge
| engine? The one before they bent over for the long dick of
| Google Chrome.
| brailsafe wrote:
| > Because some project manager had "AI" on his performance
| goals this year.
|
| Same reason Logitech did it, it's a totally arbitrary waste
| of resources
| mdaniel wrote:
| > Firefox is buggy as hell
|
| Don't you worry, I'm sure their new AI Assistant will
| generate a ton of bugfix code!!11 AI gonna take all teh jobs,
| or so I hear
|
| But, as a more serious contribution: the sentiment "At this
| point Firefox needs to die and something new and manageable"
| is the same one which generates the infinite JavaScript
| treadmill akin to: "I don't like all those bloated JS
| frameworks, I want one slim and fast and manegable ... well,
| except this one other feature ... and this other ... oh,
| shit, this needs to die and have something new and manageable
| take its place ..."
|
| It's not that I think Gecko is the bees knees, but I do think
| it has stepped on more than its fair share of real life
| landmines, and the Great Rewrite Theory means someone needs
| to spend all that time re-discovering them
| amlib wrote:
| As a counterpoint I'm a heavy firefox user and haven't had
| crash in many months, and even that was because I was testing
| some experimental webgpu thing which I had to manually
| enable. It has its fair share of odd bugs but what kind of
| big piece of software nowadays hasn't? It's honestly no less
| cromulent than Chrome.
| likeabatterycar wrote:
| I said Netscape, not FF, was crash prone.
|
| I would, however, agree FF has many "odd bugs".
| pier25 wrote:
| It's such a waste of resources. They should just focus in
| making a better browser.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| It should be clear that Mozilla Co has far more interest in
| social issues and galas than browsers.
|
| Truly one of the most self-sabotaging companies I've ever
| seen.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Surely there's an extension that does vertical tabs...
| reissbaker wrote:
| There is, but hiding the tabs on top -- IMO the entire point
| of vertical tabs, since almost all screens have more
| horizontal than vertical space -- isn't supported without
| maintaining your own custom CSS. It's a pain.
| jpeloquin wrote:
| If anyone is curious, the following seems to work:
|
| 0. Install the Tree Style Tab extension (or whatever
| vertical tabs extension you prefer).
|
| 1. Enable userChrome.css: set
| toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets=true in
| about:config.
|
| 2. Set browser.tabs.inTitlebar=0 in about:config so the
| title bar buttons (and, on some OS's, the title bar itself)
| remain visible.
|
| 3. Create =chrome/userChrome.css= in your Firefox profile
| folder and write the following to it:
| @namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper
| /there.is.only.xul"); /* hides the native tabs
| */ #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse;
| }
| nickthegreek wrote:
| I use sideberry. Once you get it set up (not super user
| friendly) it's amazing.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| They seem to feel that they will be marginalized if Google
| stops paying them to set their default search engine to Google
| but, the way they have handled it is to focus on everything
| else other than their browser. At this point since browser
| engines are dominated by Blink and Webkit what exactly does
| Mozilla have? Their market share just keeps on going down.
| echelon wrote:
| They should have become the Rust company and built services
| around it.
| rumdz wrote:
| Whatever happened to Servo?
| jsheard wrote:
| Mozilla laid off everyone they had working on it. The
| project is still going on a volunteer basis, but it's
| obviously not progressing anywhere near as quickly as it
| was when it had people working on it full time.
| dralley wrote:
| Some parts of it, the parts that were production-ready,
| were merged into Firefox years ago and live on there.
| Other parts that weren't production-ready were canned and
| the staff laid off.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Someone will pay to be the default though. Browsers print
| money.
| brokencode wrote:
| Mozilla is almost totally dependent on payments from Google to
| survive. If Google stops the payments, Mozilla probably goes
| out of business.
|
| I think it's pretty clear why they keep on doing this type of
| side project. They are trying anything they can think of to
| diversify revenue.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| > from Google to survive. If Google stops the payments,
| Mozilla probably goes out of business.
|
| > I think it's pretty clear why they keep on doing this type
| of side project.
|
| It's not clear to me. I agree they would have some problems
| if Google declined to pay them because the next best offer
| would be lower.
|
| But the best way to keep these payments, or to increase them,
| is by making a better browser and giving people a reason to
| use Firefox. After spinning off Servo I lost the last hope I
| had.
|
| It seems everyone is stuffing AI summary tools into
| everything, is this something that will retain users or bring
| in new users? I doubt it.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Browsers are a means to an end for other major providers
| excluding for Opera. They can be loss leaders even, as long
| as they do their job of steering users towards proprietary
| ecosystems
| dralley wrote:
| Most non-tech "normies", which is to say 95% of the
| population, barely know what a browser is. They couldn't
| describe the function of one, or discriminate what makes
| one better than another. They certainly won't give a crap
| about Servo, or extremely marginal improvements in page
| load time (at best).
| teruakohatu wrote:
| Given that web browsers are the heaviest application most
| users are running, and they are running them on low end
| 10yr old laptops with 8gb of RAM, I think an ultra modern
| lightweight web browser would be noticeably better.
|
| Web browser crawl on these low end laptops.
|
| This is how Firefox became popular in the first place, by
| being better.
|
| The "we need an alternative to the
| "WebKit/blink/chromium" monopoly is what the majority of
| people will never care about.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Web slowness has much more to do with sites than with
| browsers. Where sites have accumulated Everest-sized
| balls of JavaScript mud, web engines have only become
| more optimized. If you visit "old web" style pages
| (Macintosh Garden for example) on old machines with
| modern browsers there's no speed problem at all.
|
| In the face of all that JS, there's only so far a spiffy
| new browser can improve the situation, aside from maybe
| drop large chunks of legacy web standards but then you're
| breaking large chunks of the web.
| skydhash wrote:
| Most of the new features on the web are corporation
| driven. The only web site I reluctantly give microphone
| access is Google Meet and this should have been a desktop
| app. We have so many layout engines in a browser while
| layout for both documents and GUI have been solved for
| decades. Every new feature is just reinventing the wheel
| to solve a non problem.
| freetonik wrote:
| From my experience observing and interacting with
| "normal" non-tech users, slowness of apps and long
| loading times are simply ignored. I would think "how the
| hell can you live like that?!", and they would at best
| say "yeah it's kinda slow".
| rendaw wrote:
| They also wouldn't use Firefox - they'd use Chrome, Edge,
| or (more likely) Chrome/Safari mobile. People who use
| Firefox are already tech people or the family of.
| _heimdall wrote:
| The least cynical view, in my opinion, is that Google is an
| ad company, which ultimately means they are a data company.
| They don't need Mozilla to build a better browser, they
| need Mozilla to increase the amount of user data Google can
| collect and ad spots Google can sell.
|
| The more cynical view is that Google doesn't care at all
| about Mozilla because the investment is nothing more than a
| hedge against regulatory pressure.
| griomnib wrote:
| A hedge that didn't pay off despite the Mozilla CEO doing
| their part at trial and then promptly retiring on a huge
| pile of GOOG bucks.
| brokencode wrote:
| You bring up a great example. Mozilla poured tons of
| resources and had very smart people working on Rust, Servo,
| and related tech projects to improve Firefox. Where was the
| surge of market share?
|
| We're at a point where the core functionality of browsers
| is very mature. It's unlikely that any amount of investment
| will produce a browser that is significantly faster at
| things like JS execution or rendering compared to Chrome.
|
| So alternative browsers add things like better ad blockers,
| more privacy protections, or maybe LLM summaries to enhance
| the core browser experience instead.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| For some of the stated reasons this seems like a terrible way
| to diversify and add any revenue. What if they take a page
| from Silicon Valley? If the US Government makes Hooli, I mean
| Google, divest Chrome could Mozilla acquire it?
| brokencode wrote:
| That would give Mozilla $20B of debt and an even bigger
| dependence on Google for payments, at least initially.
|
| Though in the long term, maybe they could use the market
| share to make money in other ways.
|
| But if they can't manage to make money in other ways with
| Firefox, I'm not sure that they'd be able to do it with
| Chrome either.
| Duwensatzaj wrote:
| > What's their actual product differentiation from Chrome these
| days?
|
| Providing monopoly protection to Google.
|
| They have no interest in actually competing for market share.
| drdaeman wrote:
| Firefox has only a few percents of market share - how is it a
| protection?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| The swindled their 90% share down to <9%, but Google can
| point to Firefox and try and claim they aren't a monopoly.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| The monopoly protection is provided by Apple and to a lesser
| extent Microsoft. Mozilla is completely irrelevant at this
| point.
| denismi wrote:
| > If they shipped vertical tabs I'd probably switch back to
| Firefox.
|
| about:config, sidebar.revamp = true, sidebar.verticalTabs =
| true
|
| It's getting there.
| afavour wrote:
| I'm sympathetic to the viewpoint but the idea that Mozilla
| would attract more users via vertical tabs than by an AI
| assistant strikes me as flat out wrong.
|
| Mozilla's brand is "pro privacy", it does make sense for them
| to launch an AI product with that brand position. I doubt it'll
| be successful because I don't think enough people actually care
| about privacy, but still.
|
| I feel like it's a common HN sentiment to say "why don't
| Mozilla just focus on the browser?!"... the answer is because
| barely anyone is using it and there's very little they can do
| to move the needle on that. IMO they're an organization looking
| for a purpose.
| dralley wrote:
| Depends. If they start with this and then use it as iterative
| development before going local-only as the models and
| hardware improve, that could be a good move.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| For me, the product differentiation of Firefox is a bunch of
| small convenience features which Chrome in its monolithism
| refuses to provide, such as:
|
| Allowing Backspace to go back a page.
|
| The built-in screenshot tool.
|
| Being able to turn off smooth scrolling.
|
| Support for a menubar, so that I can navigate the features I
| want quickly.
|
| Being able to choose page encodings (I use a non-Latin charset
| language).
|
| A usable/useful bookmark manager with things like sorting,
| tags/labels, timestamps, etc.
|
| "Restore Previous Session" feature.
|
| These are just a few features off the top of my head, I know
| there are many more.
|
| Of course, for certain sites like Google Docs and YouTube, I
| have to use Chrome for obvious reasons, but for most browsing I
| use Firefox (and qutebrowser.)
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Don't forget the option for sane, standard behavior with
| shift+tab. Chrome refuses to let you customize shortcut
| behavior like that
| mrec wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what "obvious reasons" issues have you had
| with Docs and YouTube. I use Firefox for everything,
| including those, without problems. (Though not in any kind of
| advanced way.)
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Depending on how beefy of a machine you're using, they're
| much slower in Firefox.
| wpm wrote:
| I use Firefox on my HTPC, running a 6700K with 24GB of RAM.
| Not new, but not "slow". Clicking a YouTube video will
| cause a three second page load, even if the actual "page"
| says it's finished loading. Videos will start to play audio
| before the page is rendered. Navigating back and forth
| causes issues like this too. Sometimes I can get it to show
| a video but not change the title or comments that it
| renders. If I accidentally click the "Shorts" hyperlink I
| basically have to close the tab to stop it from endlessly
| playing shorts in the background of the SPA.
|
| It's awful. The best example I experience on a day to day
| basis that the SPA as a concept is utterly flawed. YouTube
| is a fucking webpage that fails to work like a webpage and
| an app that behaves like a students rough alpha. An utterly
| painful experience, continually made worse by likely
| skilled devs who are managed by complete bozo losers. But
| at least the progress bar has an ugly pink hue now.
| noirbot wrote:
| Docs just almost entirely does not function for me on
| Firefox on Linux. As in, I've had it crash the entire
| browser while just trying to type in a document. In
| general, Google just aggressively seems to be hostile to
| any non-Chrome browser using any of their sites. I'm sure
| they cloak it in "well Firefox just hasn't implemented this
| spec yet" but when it's functionally enforcing their
| browser monopoly I have to assume malice at this point.
|
| Too many Google sites behave worse on any non-Chrome
| browser for it not to be intentional.
| jackthetab wrote:
| I wouldn't call them "obvious" reasons but I recently
| discovered that in Google Sheets under FF I couldn't
| duplicate a tab or copy a tab to a new sheet. I had to fire
| up Chrome to do that.
|
| Oddly enough, Chrome had somehow lost my settings since the
| previous time I started it a few months earlier, as if it
| were a new install. :-?
|
| I've not noticed any problems under YT Premium so far.
| kid64 wrote:
| > Allowing Backspace to go back a page.
|
| I mostly agree, but whoever came up with this shortcut should
| get choked.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| You may not like it, but I don't think it's a good reason
| to remove the option of enabling it for those who rely on
| it for daily work, which is what Chrome did.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It was added with IE and cross pollinated.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| > Allowing Backspace to go back a page.
|
| Easily solved by https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/go-
| back-with-backsp... their first party webext.
|
| > Being able to turn off smooth scrolling.
|
| Can disable as easily as Firefox -- chrome://flags/#smooth-
| scrolling
|
| Actually, Firefox lately introduced a bug that will reset
| smooth scrolling everytime I remote desktop to my Windows
| machine. Which is annoying AF and they haven't fixed it for
| months.
|
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1912246
|
| > Being able to choose page encodings (I use a non-Latin
| charset language).
|
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/set-character-
| encod...
|
| > "Restore Previous Session" feature.
|
| You can do it since.. forever?
|
| Settings -> On Startup -> Continue where you left off
|
| Or just press Ctrl+shift+T when you restart Chrome to restore
| it manually.
|
| There are some more feature-rich session manager extensions,
| but they're usually available across Firefox and Chrome.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| >Easily solved by
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/go-back-with-
| backsp... their first party webext.
|
| This only works on pages where extensions are enabled, and
| only after the extension is successfully activated, so
| about 30% failure rate for me.
|
| >Can disable as easily as Firefox --
| chrome://flags/#smooth-scrolling
|
| This has not worked for me reliably, and the flag has been
| renamed several times.
|
| For example, on my Mac, it reads "Not available on your
| platform."
|
| >Actually, Firefox lately introduced a bug that will reset
| smooth scrolling everytime I remote desktop to my Windows
| machine. Which is annoying AF and they haven't fixed it for
| months.
|
| I'm blessed to not have experienced this.
|
| >https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/set-character-
| encod...
|
| Same as the other extension comment above, only works once
| extension activates successfully.
|
| >Settings -> On Startup -> Continue where you left off
|
| This is not the same feature.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| I use all the extensions I mentioned for years, claiming
| it has 30% failure rate is bullshit. They don't work on
| internal special pages, sure, but they work flawlessly on
| any "normal" webpages with close to zero load time.
|
| And no, disabling smooth scrolling works totally fine as
| I use it for more than 10 years.
|
| If you're going to exaggerate your points to make a
| statement instead actually trying to find solutions, I
| have nothing for you, then.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| What is more likely that they are lying or it doesn't
| work as well in their configuration as yours? The good
| faith answer is that it is probably the latter.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| Yes, it is more likely he pulled 30% number out of thin
| air, I'm confident about that.
| rendaw wrote:
| Chromium has "restore previous session" - I use it every time
| I start my browser (I've had a session going for months if
| not years).
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| It does not have a command for it. I don't want it to
| happen every time I reopen Chrome, but only when I call the
| command.
| worik wrote:
| > Of course, for certain sites like Google Docs and YouTube,
| I have to use Chrome for obvious reasons
|
| Yes, obvious.
|
| But left unsaid is that those reasons should lead to the
| breakup of the (deeply evil) Google ad machine.
|
| I struck a case where Googe Meet is the only website I have
| found that will not work with Firefox and my headset.
|
| I am so disappointed by Google, I can taste it
| 400thecat wrote:
| > A usable/useful bookmark manager with things like sorting,
| tags/labels, timestamps, etc.
|
| which bookmark manager can do that ?
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Firefox's built in bookmark manager can do that, Chrome's
| is very basic.
| bee_rider wrote:
| What are vertical tabs? Firefox has some tab reorganizing
| extensions, FWIW.
|
| Agreed that it would be nice if they had better focus though.
| mouse_ wrote:
| Google doesn't pay them to be competition. Only to appear as
| such to keep regulators distracted.
| askvictor wrote:
| I've been using Zen recently - it's a fork/skin of Firefox that
| includes vertical tabs.
| batata_frita wrote:
| Looks like money washing lol
| devvvvvvv wrote:
| Sidebery does vertical tabs on Firefox better than any other
| browser/extension imo
| nixosbestos wrote:
| Well, you're in luck, sort of. Mozilla has vertical tabs in a
| new sidebar experience. It's the worst implementation of
| vertical tabs and a sidebar I've seen in a browser. Complete
| with typical Firefox UX, it's completely inconsistent and
| unintuitive to disable. A complete farce compared to Sidebery.
| keerthiko wrote:
| For me:
|
| - continued support for manifest V2 (primarily because ublock
| origin would stop working if forced to V3 only)
|
| - the firefox address bar is _way_ smarter for any given string
| i type in than chrome 's. it's ability to surface the most
| relevant deeplinks from my history, vs top level site, vs
| perform a web search, is night and day difference from the
| randomness that other browser search bars offer.
|
| - I have the opportunity to use Zen (a Firefox fork) [0] and
| it's 100% interoperable with my vanilla Firefox instances
| across devices -- i can even send tabs from my Firefox Nightly
| on Android to my Zen instances on Windows or Mac. BTW Zen has
| vertical tab support, (more) first-party multi-profile support,
| and preserves the address bar behaviors of vanilla Firefox.
|
| [0]: https://zen-browser.app/
| wpm wrote:
| Their product differentiation is that they aren't fucking
| Chromium.
| yonatan8070 wrote:
| Sidebery does just that, and works super well!
| notatoad wrote:
| Building a browser is hard. Building a proof of concept of the
| current tech fad is easy and fun. Sometimes developers need to
| do easy and fun things to keep themselves motivated and happy.
|
| You could build an AI Assistant, or you could spend a month
| bikeshedding some design details of vertical tabs.
| chamomeal wrote:
| Yeah I doubt this took a huge amount of resources away from
| other development. It's a fun little optional feature that
| might end up being cool.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| >Sometimes developers need to do easy and fun things to keep
| themselves motivated and happy.
|
| I tried this line on my boss. Didn't fly. Back to
| bikeshedding with the rest of the team. I wonder if the
| difference is we have to earn our money, and our customers
| expect an roi. Or, at least something that doesn't mess up
| what already exists.
| jckahn wrote:
| This would be great if users could configure it to use a self-
| hosted LLM.
| DeepYogurt wrote:
| Mozilla please stop.
| JBiserkov wrote:
| mozilla.exe has crashed
| Sephr wrote:
| A hosted service for this is underwhelming, especially with
| Chrome shipping on-device AI models and APIs that can also handle
| summarization.
| binarysneaker wrote:
| Installing the extension enables a floating widget in the
| webpage. Horrible implementation. Couldn't it have been
| integrated into the browser better, like the Reader button?
| ripped_britches wrote:
| That would require actual engineering effort
| drdaeman wrote:
| I guess I'm really not this extension's target audience, because
| somehow Mozilla managed to make me uninstall it in just a few
| minutes.
|
| First, they have forced telemetry. Okay, it's an early release,
| it's very basic information, they want to understand how they're
| doing - I don't like it, but I can understand it. Sets a wrong
| vibe, though - I had to check if it was from Microsoft and not
| Mozilla. ;-)
|
| Then, I figured there is no option to use locally-hosted LLMs,
| which can be something as minimal as simply allowing to configure
| custom API URL. Somehow, less and less things about Firefox are
| tinkerer-friendly than they used to be.
|
| That made me wonder if Mozilla used OpenAI-like API, or if they
| invented their own unique thing for some reason. So I went to
| look and according to the extension page, it's proprietary ("All
| Rights Reserved") and I'm too lazy to bother deminifying code
| from the xpi or remembering how to debug extensions.
|
| Finally, '00s have called and said they wanted their weird
| floating round thingy UI back, and so I had to return it to the
| store. (I'm kidding, I don't really mind the visual style. The
| real issue with that thingy was how it floats on the page. Like,
| why on Earth it isn't normal right-click menu option that doesn't
| obstruct the view until it's needed? Or a menu on that toolbar
| button? It's not even a paperclip to be worth it.)
|
| And then I realized I somehow missed the big "AI you can trust"
| header, which should've already been a huge red flag.
| likeabatterycar wrote:
| > I'm kidding, I don't really mind the visual style. The real
| issue with that thingy was how it floats on the page.
|
| Finally someone admits that BonziBuddy was 25 years ahead of
| its time.
| ajcp wrote:
| > For the current version, we are using a Mistral LLM (Mistral
| 7B) hosted within Mozilla's GCP instance.
|
| Based on this I would assume they are using GCP Vertex AI as
| that's going to be WAY cheaper than rolling it all themselves
| and hosting the model on a GCP server instance. I would also
| assume they'd be using the gcloud SDK for Vertex AI/Model
| Garden, which I believe means they can't just provide for a
| different endpoint and payload shape if you had a service
| elsewhere.
|
| Eitherway, at the (presumed) scale they'll probably also be
| using GCPs API management service, so I would expect further
| abstraction between what the extension is sending and what the
| model/Vertex AI expects as a payload. This means providing that
| kind of "bring your own endpoint" experience would require more
| bespoke build-out time.
|
| BUT who knows? Maybe this is just straight up hitting the out-
| of-the-box GCP Vertex AI REST API directly from the extension
| like some hobby project.
| block_dagger wrote:
| That announcement was painful to read. I had AI summarize it.
| nipperkinfeet wrote:
| What a horrible web site. My eyes hurt. I'll need Orbit to
| summarize it.
| mattl wrote:
| Mozilla has one job: make the standards compliant browser and
| work with the relevant groups to foster those standards.
|
| Everything else is a waste of time and money and energy.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Given the broader Mozilla foundation's political biases, will
| these assistants be censored or heavily curated? I am reminded of
| when Mozilla chose to ban Dissenter, a free speech plugin powered
| by Gab, from its store. I've never used it but I found it
| distasteful that a company working on a basic utility program
| decided to become political. I don't understand why they cannot
| just focus on the basics and get those right. Still waiting for
| proper vertical tabs.
| JaDogg wrote:
| What is a free speech plugin? were there political discussions
| in these threads? If so it seems like they did the correct
| thing removing such political plugin right?
|
| > basic utility program decided to become political
|
| looks like they wanted to avoid it, isn't it?
| quickslowdown wrote:
| God damnit, all I want is one nook of the Internet where AI isn't
| being foisted on me.
| hu3 wrote:
| Related. This is the bookmark I use to summarize websites using
| ChatGPT:
| javascript:window.open('https://chatgpt.com/?q=summarize this
| page in 100 words:
| '+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href),'_blank');
|
| Basically it opens a new tab on chatgpt.com with the prompt:
| "summarize this page in 100 words: URL"
|
| Tested on Firefox and Chrome.
|
| Some websites block ChatGPT and can't be summarized this way.
|
| Works in incognito/anonymous mode and doesn't require a ChatGPT
| account.
|
| You can probably use another AI service with this idea.
| mdaniel wrote:
| I was surprised about the "doesn't require a ChatGPT account"
| part but when I tried it from an incognito window their "4o
| mini" gave back
|
| _I cannot access external links directly. However, if you
| provide the text or key points from the page, I can help
| summarize it for you!_
|
| and clicking the model selection drop-down produced "Log in to
| try advanced features"
| hu3 wrote:
| interesting so it didn't work for you unfortunately. Give me
| 2 minutes I'll try it and screenshot the result in both
| browsers.
|
| edit: you're right it requires the user to be logged in to
| crawl websites. Somehow in my test while writing it I was
| logged in. My bad.
|
| So while it's handy, it's not perfect.
| simonw wrote:
| Here's a version of that which should work for any page,
| whether or not they allow ChatGPT URL access:
| javascript:window.open('https://chatgpt.com/?q=summarize this
| page in 100 words:
| '+encodeURIComponent(document.body.innerText),'_blank');
|
| I swapped window.location.href for document.body.innerText
| hu3 wrote:
| Nice! Thank you!
|
| I just wonder if browsers will limit the amount of characters
| in URLs.
|
| If memory serves me, there was a limit. But it might be high
| enough to work fro most pages.
| gloosx wrote:
| It's around 8KB now - so text bigger than 8 thousand
| characters will return: "414 Request-URI Too Large".
|
| Anyway the document.body.innerText contains all things on
| the site, including links, menus, buttons etc just 1 per
| newline. LLM will only recognise if it previously scanned
| the same website and it did not change much since the last
| training set. Some arbitrary websites it will not recognise
| this way and start hallucinating one because innerText
| removes all the structure from it.
| a57721 wrote:
| Modern browsers are not an issue here, e.g. chromium allows
| 2MB; the issue is with web server's limits.
| hu3 wrote:
| Indeed, I'm getting Cloudflare error "414 Request-URI Too
| Large" for this HN post which isn't large.
|
| But the URL bar was not the problem.
| thih9 wrote:
| I'm sure Openai likes this use case, a neat way to access
| data where they are otherwise blocked.
|
| Personally I'd worry about using this accidentally and with
| some sensitive data (eg logins).
|
| I do like the idea though, I'd use this with a local model.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| That only works for public pages. It can't summarize some
| attachment to your email, for example.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I wish they would copy this one
| https://github.com/webmachinelearning/prompt-api and include a
| few options for small self-hosted LLMs using WebGPU or some
| built-in accelerated AI for Firefox.
| tangoalpha wrote:
| Looks like there is no way i can use it without giving up on
| screen real estate. I'd love to have it pinned in the browser
| toolbar and I click it when I need it. But it wouldn't allow
| itself to be hidden and needs to have a floating circle taking up
| page real-estate.
|
| Disabled it.
| amatecha wrote:
| Can I just be blunt here and ask, why the F? No one asked for
| this. No one wants this. We just want a good, standards-compliant
| browser that doesn't eat up 8gb of RAM watching a single YouTube
| video (something that seems to be quite a challenge, though not
| entirely the browser engine's fault but rather the runaway train
| that is "capitalistic motives dictate the browser is now an OS
| and needs all features thereof"))...
| sitkack wrote:
| please fix firefox.
| anyfactor wrote:
| The only useful (or even paid) browser-integrated AI service I
| can imagine using would be a browsing history-aware AI chatbot.
| Essentially, it would just spit out a link from my history based
| on the context or prompt I give. Since privacy will be a crucial
| factor, I can imagine building an extension that reads page
| contents, stores them in a database, and connects to a self-
| hosted LLM.
| bearjaws wrote:
| I really wish I could run this against a local ollama instance.
| xnx wrote:
| Google pays money to Mozilla. Mozilla creates Firefox extension
| powered by Google AI(?). Mozilla pays Google for cloud
| services(?).
|
| Is that the right flow? FAQ link is broken so I can't tell.
| xnx wrote:
| I'm skeptical of a lot of Firefox side quests, but I encourage
| this one. Orbit could be a stepping stone to an Open Source
| version of Google Project Mariner. A n un-nerfed built-in AI
| could turn browsers into true user agents that work on your
| behalf.
| usernomdeguerre wrote:
| I'm encouraged that they're actively exploring this and not
| shying away from experiments. It seems clear to me that there are
| areas of Mozilla[0],[1] pushing closer and closer to great local
| AI integrations doing the kinds of things that I, a browser user,
| find useful. I went to some of the articles on the hn frontpage
| and had questions (and followups!) that begat reasonable starting
| points for further learning.
|
| Hopefully they continue to iterate on this with better
| integration (for instance, moving to a toolbar icon instead of
| persistent badge on every page) and then make it ~truly privacy
| respecting by moving locally.
|
| [0] https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile [1]
| https://github.com/mozilla/translations
| sergiotapia wrote:
| such a random product. uses an old tiny model, they are paying
| the gcp bill, and it's to summarize content?
|
| why not use their technical expertise to built an in-browser
| "https://big-agi.com/" of sorts where users can paste in their
| API key and use bleeding edge models in combination with the
| browser's data which they could expose and manipulate as the
| creators of Firefox!
|
| this product seems really random and quite frankly weird.
| sionisrecur wrote:
| At least it's an add-on and not built into the browser.
| silisili wrote:
| Mozilla will spend any amount it takes to do anything but build a
| better browser.
| nophunphil wrote:
| In my opinion, the browser has been much better since
| 2017/2018. Have you used it in the last few years? Complaints
| about Firefox aside, the Manifest V3/uBlock Origin issue should
| be a major concern for tech-savvy Chromium-based browser users.
| silisili wrote:
| I was a hardcore Firefox user for many years. Today, Chrome
| just blows it away. Platforms are Android and Gnome Desktop.
|
| I tried Firefox again about once a year, up until about 2022,
| and left disappointed again each time. Rust was important.
| Servo too. I'm not just hopping on the 'Mozilla blows money'
| train for no reason, I'm sad to see the browser languish
| while they blow money on things that don't matter. This
| doesn't matter.
|
| I use Brave now, which has a whole host of haters, some for
| good reason. But it blocks ads and runs circles around
| Firefox on every platform that I use.
| bayindirh wrote:
| You didn't use Firefox in the last three years, and you
| claim that Chrome/Brave (still) blows it away.
|
| Interesting.
| silisili wrote:
| Fair. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 12 times or so
| shame on me. /s, kinda.
|
| The OP claimed it got better in 2017, and it didn't meet
| my standards. But I'm honest that I haven't tried it in 2
| years.
|
| If some news or person came out to suggest something big
| changed and I should try it again, I will. Otherwise I'm
| just wasting time for no reason.
| bayindirh wrote:
| As a person who never used Chrome in a capacity to
| replace Firefox (I just refused to give up), I'll just
| share this [0].
|
| As I understand, no amount of words can convince you
| because I neither know what your standards are, nor I
| have the right words to convince you to try Firefox
| again. So, you have to give it a try and see it for
| yourself.
|
| As a matter of principle, I'd never use a browser which
| is funded by an advertisement company which lives off my
| data to show me ads and rob me of my privacy and
| cognitive capacity.
|
| In my book, Brave is even worse on that matter.
|
| Edit: To clarify: I still have Chrome installed for the
| odd, unmaintained site which happens to require something
| Chrome specific, but I just don't open it, since Firefox
| works for everything and works _very well_.
|
| [0]: https://arewefastyet.com/win11/benchmarks/overview?n
| umDays=6...
| KORraN wrote:
| I just checked these benchmarks results few days ago - am
| I reading this wrong or (apart from Assorted DOM) Firefox
| loses in most of the tests?
| bayindirh wrote:
| The problem is, benchmarks are never a fair game. It's
| the nature of the benchmark as a genre. You can always
| bias a benchmark towards some code path to show that
| you're superior.
|
| Also, there are other factors to consider:
|
| - Some of the benchmarks are "lower is better", so
| reading Y axis is important.
|
| - Some results are very close (e.g. speedometer), but the
| zoom makes difference bigger, so reading the Y numbers
| again is important.
|
| So, Firefox beats Chrome on WebAudio, StyleBench,
| AssortedDOM. However, this is still "benchmarks", The
| real world performance is very, very close.
|
| The bigger picture is, when you look at longer histories,
| the performance is still being tuned and improved. So,
| Firefox people are not sitting on what they have.
|
| Lastly, Firefox is way more sensitive to DNS response
| time when compared to Chrome, and a crowded site makes
| tons of requests. A fast DNS makes a ton of difference,
| which is way overlooked.
|
| I used to run a DNSMasq instance when my ISP DNS was very
| slow. Now, my routers have their own tuned DNSMasq
| instances, so DNS is instant, so Firefox is as well.
| bowsamic wrote:
| > As a matter of principle, I'd never use a browser which
| is funded by an advertisement company which lives off my
| data to show me ads and rob me of my privacy and
| cognitive capacity.
|
| You can't use Firefox either then
| bayindirh wrote:
| I can disable all its telemetry, and change my search
| engine. It becomes a box which receives but never emits.
|
| Plus, I don't use its Mozilla build, but its Debian
| build.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Sure but you specifically said "funded by" and Gecko dev
| is funded almost entirely by Google
| bayindirh wrote:
| How many daily-driveable browser engines we have today?
| - Blink: Chromium and their friends. - Webkit:
| Safari specific, on iOS and macOS only. - Gecko:
| Firefox and its a few forks.
|
| First two are forks of KHTML, which is dead by the end of
| KDE5 era.
|
| So? You have a cross platform evil and lesser evil (by
| judging the development financing). What you do?
|
| On the other hand, I don't finance Google by using the
| browser itself, so that's another plus in my book.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Yeah they're all funded by Google, so by your explicitly
| stated principle you can't use any of them
| bayindirh wrote:
| At least, I'm not feeding Google directly with my every
| keystroke, so that's a plus. At least in my eyes.
|
| Sometimes we have to be pragmatic, especially if being
| pedantic is detrimental to our aims.
|
| Happy new year.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Sure I do think we need to be pragmatic which is why I
| was questioning your original principle, but you don't
| seem willing to abide by your stated principle at all.
| I'm just not sure why you said it if you have no
| intention to stand behind it
| peppers-ghost wrote:
| if you use Linux you can run Gnome web which also uses
| Webkit as it's engine. You can also build webkit yourself
| if you want to run it on Windows.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Still upcoming (already in Nightly), but I'm very excited
| about vertical tabs, tab grouping, and a better profile
| UI. And proper uBlock Origin support is table stakes for
| me.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Considering the Profile UI is basically the same since
| Netscape days, a revamp of this is a bit overdue. Just a
| bit though. :)
| Vinnl wrote:
| Absolutely. It's looking really good in Nightly though.
| slightwinder wrote:
| Better does not mean good. Quantum indeed fixed many of their
| old performance-problems, but at the same time they lost so
| many in terms of ability, and performance still feels second
| rate compared to Chrome. But to be fair, this also depends on
| what you do with them. And yes, I do use them both.
| 4k93n2 wrote:
| if make a better browser was a nice comfy bed, Mozilla would
| sleep on the floor
| dageshi wrote:
| Firefox is genuinely fine, great even, I've used it for years
| and have no complaints.
|
| But you notice in all these threads, everyone who theoretically
| ought to use Firefox comes up with their own little list of
| nitpicks that justify them not using it.
|
| "I can't use it because I was disgusted when they dropped
| feature x"
|
| "I won't use it because they spent their money on feature y
| instead of just doing z"
|
| Meanwhile Chrome doesn't give a fuck what you think and does
| whatever it wants and people keep using it regardless.
|
| Firefox is doomed to be left with the niche audience of people
| who ignore the 95% of what it does right to focus on the 5%
| that it does wrong.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| You're right in a way. The problem is that Mozilla seems
| unwilling to accept that that's their audience, so they keep
| trying to appeal to the 95%. If they would just double down
| on the "power user" audience they could make a killer
| browser. But instead they alienate those nitpicky users with
| pointless UI changes, breaking extensions, and so on.
| dageshi wrote:
| I don't think there's any real future in catering to the
| most demanding users, most of which are completely
| unwilling to actually pay for a power user browser.
| manjalyc wrote:
| Ignoring 95% of a uniform market to target the 5% of users
| who all have niche and conflicting preferences is a
| ridiculous strategy for stability, growth, and
| profitability.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| To paraphrase an observation from politics: nerds fall in
| love, everyone else falls in line.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| People just like to justify their choices. Whether it Windows
| or Chrome they will shout from the rooftops about how the
| open source/privacy respecting thing doesn't do X, but then
| totally absolve the massive company for doing another anti-
| consumer/anti-privacy thing. The conclusion is that privacy
| and software freedom are just not important to the majority
| of people.
| zargon wrote:
| > Meanwhile Chrome doesn't give a fuck what you think and
| does whatever it wants and people keep using it regardless.
|
| As a Firefox user since 2002 who has never switched away,
| this part of the situation feels insane. People nitpick over
| Mozilla and decide they'd rather be steamrolled by Google.
| What?
| IshKebab wrote:
| Their browser is fine. But so is Chrome, and Chrome wins by
| default because it's installed by default on Android and
| Android really pushes you to it. Once you're using Chrome on
| Android and have all your passwords saved there, Firefox is a
| difficult sell.
|
| I can't think of a single Firefox feature that's better than "I
| don't have to faff around with passwords". Maybe if they
| allowed adblock on mobile, but last I checked they were
| fannying around requiring nightly builds and whitelisting
| extensions...
| cafeinux wrote:
| uBlocK Origin is natively supported on FF mobile, and to me
| this is the only feature without which I couldn't live.
| ksenzee wrote:
| I agree with your logic but I think the facts lead to the
| opposite conclusion, because uBlock Origin is now both easy
| and painless to use with Firefox on Android. That's why every
| Android user should now have Firefox installed. And if you're
| using Firefox on Android, why not use it on desktop too with
| Firefox Sync? I don't actually know how good the Firefox
| password manager is (I use 1Password) but it's on both
| desktop and mobile, just like Chrome's is. And it's really
| nice to send tabs back and forth from mobile to desktop.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Ah I didn't know they've finally done that. I'll have to
| give it another try. If the password manager works well
| (e.g. with apps) and I can make the app drawer search open
| in Firefox then I'll probably switch.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > make the app drawer search open in Firefox
|
| Curious about you mean here. On my android phone the
| "search for more apps" link in the app drawer search goes
| to the Play Store app. Why would you want it to open a
| browser?
| IshKebab wrote:
| After investigation it's actually a feature of the Pixel
| launcher. In the app drawer there's a search bar that
| searches apps and the web. It opens search results in the
| "Google" app, and when you click one by default it uses
| Chrome.
|
| I found you can make it use Firefox by disabling the
| setting "Open web pages in the app".
| morjom wrote:
| IIRC Firefox still doesn't have their Site Isolation
| (Fission, currently marked as P3 aka Backlog on Bugzilla)
| ready, which is the reason I don't use it on Android.
| zamadatix wrote:
| If you're one of the ~72% using Android and you're one of
| the ~43% who install an extension of any type and if you're
| the ~20% that choose to have uBlock origin installed when
| you do then you're one of the ~6% for whom this is but a
| single reason to consider one browser over another for all
| of your devices.
|
| https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-
| share/mobile/worldwide/...
|
| https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
|
| I love uBO, you love uBO, most of HN loves uBO, actual
| users either don't care enough or prefer built-ins like
| Brave over manual customizations and extensions. When
| specifically discussing mobile users who care about ad
| blocking also consider many prefer whole phone solutions
| rather than managing per app solutions, even if it means
| slightly worse ad blocking in certain apps.
|
| Also remember Firefox let those specific Android users rot
| on the old, poor performing, and battery eating engine for
| 2 years longer than the desktop version. Then when they did
| update only some of the users who picked Firefox for
| extensions had support. To this day it still hasn't had
| basic TLC like site isolation implemented. I.e. most
| Android users who were willing to give Firefox a run
| already had a bad experience anyways, even if they did care
| about uBO specifically.
| wongarsu wrote:
| To me, firefox is a much easier sell on mobile. I use it
| religiously on mobile because of ad blocking, while on
| desktop I switch between Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Opera
| without feeling too much of a difference
| worksonmine wrote:
| > Maybe if they allowed adblock on mobile, but last I checked
| they were fannying around requiring nightly builds and
| whitelisting extensions...
|
| uBlock origin has been one of the allowed extensions for
| years. As far as I know it's the only browser allowing
| extensions on phones. It's a shame the allowed extensions is
| limited compared to desktop but I use uBlock everywhere
| anyway. What adblocker are you trying to install?
|
| You shouldn't use your browser as your password manager,
| sometimes you might need them in another context and that
| creates friction.
| freehorse wrote:
| > As far as I know it's the only browser allowing
| extensions on phones
|
| In iOS, Orion browser allows both chrome and firefox
| extensions. Not all of them actually work, but ub:o does.
| Prob the only way to run ub:o on an iphone.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Their android browser is kind of terrible. It's significantly
| more sluggish than chrome, bordering on unusable on some
| websites. Maybe there's a state of the art flagship phone out
| there somewhere that can run firefox android and see it
| perform well, but I've sure never seen it run well.
| navlelo wrote:
| I have used ff on android with ublock for 5 years on an
| s20. It has been superb for me. The only complaint from me
| is that the bookmark page as "tile" doesnt work.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah it does seem rather more sluggish than Chrome in
| scrolling. Adblock works though which is nice.
| slightwinder wrote:
| Firefox loses, because they are doing barely anything to be
| better than chrome. Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, they all build and
| sell their own unique identity and seem to be successful
| enough with it. But Firefox? Basically just exists. Something
| about privacy and not being the big kraken, but so are all
| other now too. In the meanwhile Mozilla is just continuing
| wasting money on pointless projects which do nothing to
| solidify their cash cows future, while adding nothing of
| worth.
|
| Yes, the default Browser wins (which BTW is not always
| Chrome), and Mozilla does not put up a fight to change it.
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| on mobile I would not know. On Desktop I want and need 'full-
| screen-api.ignore-widgets'. I want my full screen to match
| the browsers window instead of taking my monitor.
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| Tbf, they can take all the time they need as Google with Chrome
| is doing more _for_ Firefox than Mozilla itself, i.e. Manifest
| V3.
| i_love_retros wrote:
| What's wrong with Firefox?
| DoctorOW wrote:
| It could have been nice to see the Rust rewrites finished
| instead of shelved due to costs. AI is very expensive so if
| they have the money for this, they could've probably started
| that up again. Firefox is generally good feature wise but
| Google gets to almost usurp the W3C because pretty much every
| other browser is using the Chromium codebase over Mozilla's.
| i_love_retros wrote:
| What value would a rewrite in rust bring?
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| It was sold as supporting a much more concurrent
| rendering engine, which they felt was basically too hard
| to write correctly/safely in C++, but presumably would be
| considerably faster.
| mdaniel wrote:
| My interest in a rust web engine is absolutely memory
| safety, because it's a fun game at work to post the "RCE
| o' the week" seemingly caused from exposing literally
| millions of lines of C++ to the wild Internet https://chr
| omereleases.googleblog.com/search/label/Stable%20...
| mentalgear wrote:
| I'm reading a lot of criticism here, some I understand, but
| honestly, this sounds pretty good for a free LLM service: "Orbit
| doesn't require account creation or save your session data."
|
| Maybe we shouldn't be too critical of Mozilla for providing a
| privacy-first LLM service - for free. The other big privacy-first
| LLM provider is Apple, which requires users to have their
| devices/subscriptions to use, and definitely uses advanced
| telemetry by default.
|
| Not to speak of all the other providers who are either paid or
| free-but-mine-your-data.
| FireInsight wrote:
| A very similar service is https://duck.ai/ from DDG.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Definitely like DuckDuckGo - I have recently moved from
| Google to DDG as I noticed it serves the same, and even
| better plus privacy-first, results. Yet what you provide is
| not quite the same: An AI Chat Website vs a Browser Extension
| (Orbit).
| pixxel wrote:
| When the Bing API went offline a short while back, the DDG
| website was a blank page. No fall back, nothing. A Bing
| wrapper with 'trust us' privacy marketing.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| How often does the Bing API go offline? Meanwhile, every
| single google search I carry out includes, right at the
| top, 'AI' generated nonsense which is sometimes wildly
| inaccurate. DDG never does that.
| pixxel wrote:
| > How often does the Bing API go offline?
|
| That's not the point.
|
| Use any search engine in a terminal to strip the shit.
| Welcome to Hacker News.
| makingstuffs wrote:
| There's also Leo from Brave: https://brave.com/leo/
| kome wrote:
| [flagged]
| mentalgear wrote:
| Agreed, I also often get that feeling of a double standard.
| vasco wrote:
| Mozilla's problem for me is they wasted their market
| dominance by hiring grifters as their leaders and allowed bad
| actors to come in.
|
| I have nothing to base it off other than the results, but
| someone with a tinfoil hat would wonder if Google chose or
| influenced the choice of Mozillas leadership to allow Chrome
| to grow by destroying it from the inside. They were already
| basically bankrolling the whole company so it's not a big
| stretch.
| Y_Y wrote:
| I didn't have the impression that HN was fine with all those
| things. Supposing it was, wouldn't it be ok to continue
| criticizing Mozilla, while also criticizing the bad behaviour
| of the others?
| rpastuszak wrote:
| > Mozilla only problem is being transparent about telemetry.
|
| It's far from that:
| https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/defaults-matter-dont-
| assume...
|
| (I still think FF is one of the best choices privacy wise,
| it's just that we don't have that many choices left)
|
| > HN is fine with tracking, smartphones, and every
| surveillance capitalist trick in the book
|
| (meta comment, thinking aloud here, feel free to skip) You
| might be conflating two different groups of users, each vocal
| about different subjects. That said, there's a big group of
| people on HN, who just enjoy being annoyingly contrarian.
| Then some people derive pleasure from pointing out some
| "moral fallacy" on whatever they perceive as the opposite
| part of their political/ideological spectrum ("you think my
| flashlight app collecting fingerprinting data from your phone
| is evil? well, your browser doesn't block all cookies by
| default you hypocrite!"). Life's too short for
| psychoanalysing the orange site, so I'll stop here.
| sltkr wrote:
| You're assuming there is a single HN hivemind. In reality
| different companies cater to different audiences with
| different values, and you'll hear from a different subset of
| HN users on each topic.
|
| Mozilla users care more about privacy than e.g. Microsoft or
| Google users do, so when Mozilla adds tracking to one of
| their products, they get more criticism from their users than
| their competitors would. This isn't unexpected or
| hypocritical of those users.
| ksec wrote:
| >HN is fine with tracking, smartphones, and every
| surveillance capitalist trick in the book,
|
| You must be reading a very different HN to mine. Every single
| submission that reach front page has comment against all the
| thing you stated. With little to no support for it.
|
| Ads are all evil and there shouldn't be any has been the
| theme in just a very recent thread.
| slightwinder wrote:
| HN in general is not fine with tracking and surveillance. But
| this is irrelevant for Mozilla specifically, as most
| companies/projects are not selling themselves on high privacy
| and rescuing the internet. They are making goal and promises
| which they repeatedly fail to reach, and people are
| outcalling them for this. And the worst part is, they are not
| even not holding up to their own standards, they even ignored
| and broke them multiple times, and people remember.
| rtpg wrote:
| > Maybe we shouldn't be too critical of Mozilla for providing a
| privacy-first LLM service - for free. The other big privacy-
| first LLM provider is Apple, which requires users to have their
| devices/subscriptions to use, and definitely uses advanced
| telemetry by default.
|
| There is a very fundamental critique here: a service being
| offered for free like this is being subsidized, messing with
| the general market dynamics that really should be making all of
| these tools cost way more money to begin with.
|
| Of course Apple is also doing similar things, but for Mozilla
| to be doing it is quite frustrating.
| mentalgear wrote:
| I do agree with your sentiment on cost, especially regarding
| exploding co2 emissions for LLMs, but it sounds like you're
| putting the blame mostly on Mozilla for what is market
| dynamics in capitalism, with most of the contenders being
| heavily VC-funded, and where Mozilla maybe just tries to
| signal that "AI" can be done responsibly also. If they don't
| try, people will blame them for "being late to the game/out
| of touch/ irrelevant" - so better to do it according to your
| principles and in-time I think.
| caoilte wrote:
| people will blame anyone for anything.
|
| mozilla is a non-profit so doesn't need to respond to
| market signals.
|
| it would do a lot more and a lot more sustainably if it
| focused on the core mission of its browser.
|
| but these costly "big swings" justify outrageous
| compensation packages for its executives and so it lets its
| browser wither.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| > it would do a lot more and a lot more sustainably if it
| focused on the core mission of its browser.
|
| Some numbers to put things in perspective:
| https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/defaults-matter-dont-
| assume...
|
| FF is still a solid choice, privacy-wise (with some
| manual tweaking), but just in the past few years 80-90%
| of their revenue came from adtech partnerships, so expect
| a series of rug pulls like the recent ones.
| legacynl wrote:
| > so expect a series of rug pulls like the recent ones.
|
| I think it's rather the other way around; i.e. it is you
| that should lower your expectations from a free tool
| provided by a non-profit company.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Unless I misunderstood your comment completely I think
| we're saying the same thing:)
| mentalgear wrote:
| Being a non-profit that does not have a share-price, I'm
| curious if you have evidence for validity of your
| assessment of "big swings resulting in compensation
| packages".
| caoilte wrote:
| I can offer a rationale that I hope that will be
| interesting. Evidence is more effort than I'm willing to
| invest in a random internet conversation. I hope that's
| okay. I don't mean to cause offense, but neither do I
| like having an interesting discussion shutdown.
|
| Executive leadership compensation tends to be based on, -
| the size/prospects/complexity of the company - the
| compensation received by executives in similar roles at
| other companies - the amount/type of oversight by the
| board
|
| This incentivizes executives to increase the complexity
| of their role in order to justify greater remuneration.
| The classic example is turning a widget factory into a
| widget financial services provider. In this case, by
| behaving like Silicon Valley companies chasing the latest
| fad the executive leadership of Mozilla get to demand the
| same remuneration packages.
| quesera wrote:
| I don't think this is relevant here.
|
| Mozilla's executive compensation is famously disconnected
| from any realities -- economic, industry fad, or
| otherwise.
| cge wrote:
| Orbit by Mozilla is a product of the non-non-profit
| Mozilla Corporation [1], not the non-profit Mozilla
| Foundation.
|
| [1]: https://orbitbymozilla.com/terms
| caoilte wrote:
| It's a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation.
| As far as I can tell this is (like most complicated
| things in life) purely a tax dodge.
| serbuvlad wrote:
| > mozilla is a non-profit so doesn't need to respond to
| market signals.
|
| No? They, just like every other entity, will have to
| achieve it's investors goals using the least amount of
| costs possible.
|
| It just happens to be the case that Mozilla's investor's
| goals aren't more money.
|
| For example, if a non-profit wants to build a bridge to a
| small island to provide the children of that island
| access to the mainland's schools; that non-profit would
| still be very susceptible to market signals regarding the
| most cost-efficient materials for bridge-building.
|
| It is precisely because of current market signals that
| this move is a bad move for Mozilla. If GPUs were a dime
| a dozen and an AI engineer cost a thousand times less to
| employ than a browser engineer, Mozilla offering an LLM
| service would be a lot less objectionable than in the
| current economy.
| caoilte wrote:
| > No? They, just like every other entity, will have to
| achieve it's investors goals using the least amount of
| costs possible.
|
| The Mozilla Foundation is funded by donors not investors.
| The fiduciary duties of non-profit directors do not have
| to include using the least amount of costs possible.
|
| The Mozilla Foundation's stated goals are "to advance the
| vision of the future of the internet and technology".
|
| You might reasonably argue that this means copy catting
| every other product by slapping AI on itself, but I would
| counter that this actually demonstrates a lack of vision.
| mschild wrote:
| Fair enough. However, first of all, it's still in beta.
| They're likely using it to gather feedback on its
| performance. Also, there's nothing on the site that says it
| will remain free. Considering Mozilla has introduced paid
| services like VPN, and given the cost of running LLMs, it's
| unlikely it will stay free.
|
| Also consider that some free use, for example 5 summaries per
| hour or whatever, is a pretty basic offer for any kind of
| software, not just LLMs.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Offering beta services for free is industry standard and
| legit, as are free capped tiers, I do not see an issue
| there.
|
| Honestly, I'm all on board for a privacy-minded company
| like Mozilla to offer paid services like VPN or email
| aliases. They have earned their trust, and if paying means
| contributing to the sustainability of their mission and the
| open internet, than that's even sweeter.
| wyclif wrote:
| Does Orbit not work with Firefox Developer Edition? I had
| the browser open, but after downloading the extension it
| didn't seem to detect it or install it.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| Does open source not itself severely mess with free market
| dynamics by having billions and billions of dollars of work
| being done for free?
| serbuvlad wrote:
| There is a fundamental difference between a "regular" foss
| project and a "free" service in this sense.
|
| Once a foss project has been written, the cost of one
| additional user is almost zero (some small amount of
| bandwidth to obtain the package).
|
| I think it's legitimate to worry even about how the funding
| occurs for those comparatively small costs: the costs of
| running GitHub (subsidized by M$) and distribution
| repositories.
|
| But with an LLM service, or any other service which does
| not run locally, the cost of one additional user is very
| real. It has to be paid by someone.
| rtpg wrote:
| I'm not a market fundamentalist, I just don't like players
| dumping huge piles of cash in ways to get around market
| dynamics (especially for AI summaries, which is the
| computer equivalent of speed reading lessons)
|
| At least open source can outlive the entities that create
| the thing, and in theory is more about sharing process
| rather than trying to stomp out smaller players.
| cdata wrote:
| It is overly generous to describe this as "privacy first." This
| looks like it's one ToS change away from being a privacy
| violating service.
|
| In Apple's case, they are putting some amount of work into
| making their privacy claims verifiable. Good will is no longer
| good enough. Verifiability should be the bar for trust in 3P
| privacy claims.
| mentalgear wrote:
| This might be true for any run-of-the-mill service, but I do
| give Mozilla upfront credit as an entity and Firefox's
| privacy-leading track record. I haven't read the fine print,
| but I would be very surprised if there wasn't a robust layer
| of privacy/anonymisation involved. (Side note: I think the
| future is in-browser LLM (a la Gemini Nano), so I suspect
| they will eventually move there.)
|
| Also consider that Apple has the big pockets to build their
| own server hardware, to claim multiple layers of privacy -
| but also remember that when they first introduced
| "differential privacy" and claimed it would be totally
| anonymous, privacy researchers soon found out that Apple set
| the epsilon so low that even after a few requests to their
| service, the user could be de-anonymized.
|
| source: "Apple has boasted of its use of a cutting-edge data
| science known as "differential privacy." Researchers say
| they're doing it wrong." https://www.wired.com/story/apple-
| differential-privacy-short...
| nulbyte wrote:
| Mozilla's privacy-leading track record includes making
| Google the default search engine, running opt-in-by-default
| privacy-violating experiments, such as the Mr Robot
| fiasco[1], and opt-in-by-default collaboration with
| advertisers[2].
|
| I still use Firefox, but I try to stay aware of changes,
| precisely because of Mozilla's privacy-leading gaffe
| record.
|
| 1. https://itsfoss.com/firefox-looking-glass-controversy/
|
| 2. https://www.pcmag.com/news/firefox-mozilla-data-
| collection-f...
| legacynl wrote:
| If those are the only examples of privacy-tarnishing
| theyve done, I think that would speak for Firefox and
| Mozilla.
| mort96 wrote:
| They literally have Google Analytics which sends
| telemetry data to Google integrated into the Firefox UI.
| smarnach wrote:
| Can you substantiate this a bit more? Do you have a link?
| politelemon wrote:
| > The other big privacy-first LLM provider is Apple, which
| requires users to have their devices/subscriptions to use, and
| definitely uses advanced telemetry by default.
|
| By definition then, Apple's is most certainly not privacy first
| by any stretch of mental gymnastics.
| Kuinox wrote:
| This is a local device LLM, outdated of a whole year, which is
| massive for LLMs, running on servers. Privacy side, there is
| little reason to run this on servers, a Pixel 6 could run 7B
| models at 5 token/s a year ago.
|
| It's bad by incompetence, 7B models of a year ago were terribly
| bad. It's not privacy-first enough, as it's possible to run the
| AI directly in the browser, but for some reason they didnt do
| it.
| mentalgear wrote:
| It's unlikely that they are doing only a plain old LLM query.
| It's probably a more advanced setup (RAG, Page/LLM Summary
| Result Querying, maybe even some sort of Summarization
| validation checking).
|
| Also consider accessibility for low-end devices and
| development countries.
| Kuinox wrote:
| I don't see any indication that they use any RAG. It still
| doesn't explain why they use an old model.
|
| More recent models can run on any phone and have better
| quality than the model they are currently using.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > it's possible to run the AI directly in the browser, but
| for some reason they didnt do it.
|
| Perhaps this is a proof of concept and they will have
| optional Firefox integration at a later time. Firefox uses
| local AI for webpage translation already.
| freehorse wrote:
| A locally run 7B model would consume a lot of resources for
| most people, but it would be nice as an option.
| ksec wrote:
| >Maybe we shouldn't be too critical of Mozilla for providing a
| privacy-first LLM service
|
| It is just Mozilla have a tendency of chasing hype rather than
| focusing on what they are doing. During early smartphone era
| they spend most of the resources trying to write an OS with
| Javascript ( Firefox OS ) that works on a $35 Smartphone.
|
| Now they are doing it again with AI. Although this time around
| Firefox is in fairly good shape I guess this isn't too bad. But
| they need to figure out a way to generate revenue rather than
| relying on Google. And LLM service isn't it.
| facialwipe wrote:
| _During early smartphone era they spend most of the resources
| trying to write an OS_
|
| Most of Mozilla's resources have always been spent on
| Firefox. There was never a cycle where most of Mozilla's
| resources were spent on FirefoxOS.
|
| _But they need to figure out a way to generate revenue
| rather than relying on Google._
|
| The percentage of revenue from Google has fallen every year
| since 2016. Mozilla Corporation had a 33% profit margin in
| 2022 (The latest data on Wikipedia).
|
| It's a fantastic business model.
| idoubtit wrote:
| > The percentage of revenue from Google has fallen every
| year since 2016.
|
| "Fallen" is too strong a word: Google still provided 81% of
| Mozilla's revenue in 2022.
|
| This share probably decreased in 2023, but that's mostly
| because the revenue increased by $40M thanks to financial
| operations (see "Interest and dividend income" in Mozilla's
| annual report for 2023).
| daeken wrote:
| I don't think the Firefox OS team was ever bigger than maybe
| 100 people at the absolute most, and I feel like it was
| closer to half of that. Admittedly it's been over a decade
| since I left, so my recollection could be wrong, but it was
| never "most of the resources" by any metric.
|
| It was a tiny percentage of the overall staff; I traveled to
| the Toronto office to work with some of the graphics devs
| (the area I primarily worked in) and the floor we were on
| easily had 200 people in that one -- relatively small --
| location.
|
| B2G/FFOS gets a lot of well-deserved hate -- I quit after a
| year -- but its impact has been wildly blown out of
| proportion.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| As a user I always wished Firefox OS had stuck around - I
| think it would absolutely be practical today with so many
| PWAs around these days, and KaiOS seems to have done
| surprisingly well on its Firefox OS base.
| philistine wrote:
| But that's the thing, KaiOS is exactly the best that
| Firefox OS could have hoped to achieve: installs on most
| feature phones. Sure, it's hard to find a phone with
| KaiOS in the West, but Firefox OS could have never hoped
| to be an alternative to Android.
| Groxx wrote:
| There are still some things I like better about FFOS than
| iOS / Android. It had a lot of polish needed even near
| the end, but some of the foundational bits were very
| solid.
| reubenmorais wrote:
| Firefox OS was around 600-700 people strong at the largest.
| callahad wrote:
| FxOS at its height was an absolutely huge resource and
| personnel commitment; I seem to recall it being half of
| MoCo, maybe more.
|
| Mark Mayo, then SVP Firefox, was quoted in a 2017 interview
| with Walt Mossberg:
|
| > _Mayo says [FirefoxOS] took the focus off of Firefox. "It
| was close to a bet-the-farm effort"_
|
| Cite: https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/25/14376710/walt-
| mossberg-mo...
| oliverchan2024 wrote:
| I like Firefox OS, but unfortunately, I rarely saw any
| smartphones actually running this system. I feel deeply
| regretful about it.
| sofixa wrote:
| > But they need to figure out a way to generate revenue
| rather than relying on Google
|
| Like by trying other things? Such as a mobile OS, "read
| later" app, LLM service which they could embed in Firefox?
| People criticise Mozilla a lot for even trying, but in the
| same breath say they should figure out alternative income
| sources. What do you think they're doing? LLMs are part of
| the hype cycle, yes, but maybe there's still a market for
| them even after it's blown over?
| Sephr wrote:
| Privacy-first generally entails designing the service on a
| technical level to be unable to leak personal data. A promise
| not to store your data is not sufficient.
| 67n76n67n6 wrote:
| That is always how this stuff works. Capture people with nice
| features and a friendly approach and then rug pull. There is
| zero chance I ever use this BS. I don't trust Apple either. I
| do not want LLM integration period because no corporation can
| ever under any circumstance be trusted with privacy in regards
| to it.
| aforty wrote:
| All this costs money though and the eventual question is if you
| aren't paying for it then who is?
| mentalgear wrote:
| Hopefully Mozilla will eventually come up with a local-AI in the
| browser model, like the one currently being explored by Google
| Canary called Gemini Nano (which Google of course doesn't seem to
| want to make available in Chromium though).
| butz wrote:
| Just keep it as optional extension and that will be perfectly
| fine. They should make it compatible with other browsers too.
| Considering llamafile project, maybe there will be an option for
| offline assistant, where user will be able to select their
| preferred model?
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| Finally I can gaze at my orb and browse at the same time
| andhuman wrote:
| Related, I made a small extension for chrome that talks to
| ollama: https://github.com/tobias-varden/llama-explain-extension
| wwqrd wrote:
| How long till it gets added to https://killedbymozilla.com/?
| PeterStuer wrote:
| This is the 4th time this has been posted here.
| yabatopia wrote:
| And it still doesn't work on on Firefox Mobile. Disappointing.
| breakingcups wrote:
| So, I'm reading there's a free, anonymous Mistral endpoint
| somewhere with the bill being footed by Mozilla.
| thiht wrote:
| Such a weird domain name, why not orbit.mozilla.com? This looks
| like a phishing attempt
| traspler wrote:
| Yeah, I really don't understand why companies on one side try
| everything in their power to teach people to be vigilant of
| phishing and then do stuff like this. Azure does it too with
| www.microsoftazuresponsorships.com I always feel like one of
| these days I will get phished if those are the domains they
| force me to use :(
| thiht wrote:
| Oof, www.microsoftazuresponsorships.com is terrible, it even
| looks like phishing... at this point I have to ask: are you
| sure it's NOT phishing? :D
|
| The fact it doesn't even work without www. feels suspicious
| as well
| meindnoch wrote:
| When your organization is so broken that it's easier to buy a
| separate domain for your team, than to go through the process
| of putting it under the main company domain.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Mozilla is like that ADHD child that will do anything except to
| work on what made company successful in the first place -
| browser.
| goobert wrote:
| This move makes sense for Firefox adoption, as Chrome has AI
| features built in now such as Lens
| spzb wrote:
| I don't want AI features in my browser. I want to browse the
| web with it.
| wiseowise wrote:
| You know what would make sense for Firefox adoption? iOS
| Firefox that actually works. People complain that every
| browser is a reskin of Safari on iOS, but somehow only
| Firefox, native iOS app, manages to lag worse than any
| webview wrapper app I've ever used.
| sunshine-o wrote:
| Interesting product, very relevant in our time and age.
|
| My guess is this could be useful to many "knowledge workers" who
| constantly have to crawl, translate and find the meaning of the
| sugar coated landfill that has become most of the web.
|
| We are right in the middle of the Tower of Babel story.
|
| Seriously if it works reasonably well on legal fine prints I am
| in.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Am I the only person who isn't hugely interested in summarizing
| emails? I don't _want_ emails summarized because that bypasses a
| tell-tale sign that said email isn 't worth reading in the first
| place.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I kinda want to run some of our CEOs emails through
| summarizing, because I feel that there's a very real chance
| that I'll just get a black page back.
|
| Other than that, I'm with you. The need for summarizing is a
| symptom of our increasingly poor communication and degrading
| writing skills. That, and SEO optimization which attempts to
| hit as many keywords as possible.
|
| We're heading in a direction where people will use LLMs to pad
| their writing, so it will appear more substantial then it
| actually is. The receiver will then parse it though another
| LLM, because the writing has now become to convoluted, or they
| simply don't have the time for a ten page essay (in which case
| the none padded draft would have sufficed).
|
| Admittedly I have found a few useful cases for LLMs, mostly
| related to text parsing and information extraction, which can
| be seen as summarizing I suppose, but mostly I have a pretty
| negative view of LLMs. Part of it may be me getting older and
| not fully understanding how they work, partly it's also their
| deployment in areas where I believe communication should be
| human to human.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| [Obligatory cartoon](https://marketoonist.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2023/03/230327.n...).
| dingaling wrote:
| > The need for summarizing is a > symptom of our increasingly
| > poor communication and degrading > writing skills.
|
| Whilst I agree there is a societal decline, there has also
| always been a corporate tendency towards verbosity and
| opaqueness.
|
| The old rule from the days of memos still seems to apply:
| ignore first paragraph, get positive / negative gist from
| second, learn about the impact in the third, ignore
| remainder.
| bluehatbrit wrote:
| Honestly, I don't receive any emails which are even worth
| summarising. I unsubscribe from marketing emails, and the
| humans who email me aren't writing more than a couple
| paragraphs at most. It becomes more effort to hit a summary
| button, wait for it to generate, and then read something of
| roughly the same length.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| I agree, I've read about lots of LLM-based services for
| summarising content, and I really wonder whether that's because
| this is something so many people want, or if it's just because
| it's something LLMs are good at so they are easy to build and
| then they get hyped because LLM.
|
| Anything that can be expressed in a few sentences, should be,
| and I tend not to read media that doesn't abide by that rule.
| If I'm reading long-form content it's because I am looking for
| detail and nuance that would be lost in a summary.
|
| I do think a reliable video summary generator could be useful
| occasionally. Interestingly Orbit seems to work on YouTube,
| presumably by parsing YT's auto-generated transcript.
| standardUser wrote:
| I'm vehemently against the whole Apple Intelligence feature of
| summarizing _personal_ communications, like the AI-generated
| break-up text summaries that were floating around. But I 've
| found most other AI summarizing to be pretty useful. The
| problem is the lack of trust and reliability, so even when
| those summaries seem to save me time, if the topic is of any
| actual significance or value I'm forced to read the original
| materials anyway, which ultimately results in spending _more_
| time consuming the same information.
| Sateeshm wrote:
| Honestly never needed to summarise emails in my life. It's a
| useless use case.
| nullc wrote:
| Just seeing the title as announcing some new mozilla service my
| first thought was "What personal data does this new mozilla
| feature send to cloudflare?" -- turns out the answer was emails
| and documents but to their own google cloud accounts rather than
| cloudflare.
|
| Of course, no option to use a local model even though the one
| they're using is small enough that its perfectly reasonable to
| use locally. Even on a cell phone.
| ph1lw wrote:
| Unfortunately no BYOLLM. Brave supports bringing your own LLM
| e.g. through Ollama
|
| Besides that I'm using AI Summary Helper plugin for Chromium-
| based browsers https://philffm.github.io/ai-summary-helper/ which
| also allows using Ollama (or OpenAI / Mistral), asking questions
| to articles and inserting summaries right into the DOM (which is
| perfect for hoarding articles / forwarding them to Kindle)
| JFingleton wrote:
| > Brave supports bringing your own LLM e.g. through Ollama
|
| It's a shame Brave is so far ahead of the game but no one seems
| to notice.
| serbuvlad wrote:
| I use Librewolf (based on Firefox), but about once a year I open
| Chrome for some shitty website that only works on Chrome. And I
| use Chrome for a few minutes.
|
| It shocks me every time just how fast Chrome is. It is
| legitimately a superb piece of software. Going to Librewolf after
| feels like going back ten years in hardware.
|
| Can we please start spending some money to make Firefox better?
| Instead of whatever Mozilla is currently doing?
|
| Firefox Quantum was great. But why stop? Just keep doing that!
| It's the only thing you should be doing!
| Qem wrote:
| Same number of tabs open and add-ons installed on each?
| serbuvlad wrote:
| Damn. Thanks a lot for the comment.
|
| uBlock Origin on both (wouldn't browse the web without it).
| Vimium and Dark Reader on Librewolf. But turning Dark Reader
| off does speed it up by _a lot_.
|
| Chrome still seems faster but now they're both playing in the
| same league.
|
| Never thought about it.
| roter wrote:
| When running Orbit on the comments in this page:
|
| > The Orbit add-on by Mozilla is a new AI-powered tool that
| summarizes and answers queries about web content, including
| articles and videos. It uses a Mistral LLM (Mistral 7B) hosted on
| Mozilla's GCP instance. The add-on is free to use and works on
| various websites, including Gmail, Wikipedia, NY Times, YouTube,
| and more. However, some users have raised concerns about the size
| of the model and its privacy implications, as well as the fact
| that it requires an internet connection to function.
| Additionally, some users have suggested that Mozilla should focus
| on improving the browser itself rather than developing new add-
| ons.
| usr1106 wrote:
| In the same area of privacy-aware AI there is Jolla Mind2. It's
| your own computer, so probably even more trustworthy than Orbit
| by Mozilla?
|
| I have not studied either product in depth, so I am unable to
| comment on commonalities or differences.
|
| Jolla has a mixed track record: They supported some phones over
| 10 years with decently working software (typing on one of those).
| They also failed at least once to deliver a crowd-sourced tablet
| to most of the backers. Not a risk-free choice, but at least
| someone trying to do the right thing.
| i_love_retros wrote:
| Why so much hate for Firefox in these comments?
|
| What's a better browser that isn't basically advertising spyware
| (i.e. chrome, edge) ?
| pluto_modadic wrote:
| I think someone put it best: make your competitor depend on
| your evil thing (in this case, google donates to
| firefox/mozilla and makes deals about default search). In
| addition, people intentionally go to firefox because it /isn't/
| chrome, but that only works SO LONG AS they don't copy
| everything google does (e.g. opt-out ads in the browser, AI,
| etc)
| legacynl wrote:
| I think Mozilla is doing a great job.
|
| I really don't get the comments that they should not focus on
| anything else than the current browser.
|
| If other browsers start adding llms, I bet those same people will
| start complaining that Firefox is outdated compared to those
| browsers in about a year.
| zaep wrote:
| There is a (to me very surprising) typo in the section 'Focus on
| what matters.' where the AI summary states "... 11 out off[sic]
| 100 products ..."
|
| I don't think I've ever encountered a typo in any of the LLM
| output I've seen, seems like the exact sort of thing an LLM would
| be more or less perfect at. Am I wrong to take this as an
| indication that this text is actually written by a human as a
| concise marketing example?
| mort96 wrote:
| I have to ask: why, exactly, does it make sense for Mozilla to
| invest heavily into running expensive servers to run vanity chat
| bots for people? What's the path here to something which improves
| their financial situation or browser market share? How isn't this
| just yet another random service they'll throw money into for a
| couple of years before shutting down?
| j45 wrote:
| Because Firefox has to do things to try and grow itself along
| with their mission.
|
| If they aren't trying things, they would also then be accused
| of languishing in obscurity.
|
| AI being built into browsers isn't new. Summarization isn't
| novel. It's not early in the game where resources are crazy
| high.
|
| Summarization could run with a basic low powered model
| privately hosted.
|
| Market share changes based on what browsers do well.
| likeabatterycar wrote:
| A car with square wheels doesn't grow itself by adding three
| horns and a bubble dome...
| altairprime wrote:
| Firefox the browser doesn't make any money. Doesn't matter
| if the wheels are square or round if no one's willing or
| able to put gas in the tank. As many prior rounds of
| Mozilla on HN have pointed out, it's completely
| unacceptable to consider having to pay Mozilla for Firefox,
| and anyways a few million dollars will barely hire enough
| coders to keep afloat on CVEs (unlike e.g. Let's Encrypt,
| who has a much simpler organization to operate!).
|
| So we're now in the timeline where Mozilla is the liquid
| metal terminator in T2 trying to escape lava by
| shapeshifting, as you say, three horns and a bubble dome.
| Accurately put! And a hilarious image too.
|
| We'd best hope that the antitrust lawsuits don't kill the
| Google money that's keeping their car fueled.
| quesera wrote:
| > _Firefox the browser doesn't make any money_
|
| Firefox the browser is responsible for the vast majority
| (81%?) of the money that is injected into Mozilla
| annually.
| altairprime wrote:
| What % of the money that is injected into Mozilla
| annually is paid by Google?
| Groxx wrote:
| Does it matter? Without it, there would be no money from
| Google.
|
| You're moving the goalpost rather substantially. "It
| makes no money" and "it costs millions to maintain" -> it
| pulls in _hundreds of millions_ per year, the majority of
| their income. They can afford to focus on it.
| j45 wrote:
| Comparing the Homer mobile to Firefox is a stretch.
| binkHN wrote:
| > If they aren't trying things, they would also then be
| accused of languishing in obscurity.
|
| They are languishing into obscurity not because they aren't
| trying things, but because their browser functionality is
| languishing behind the others.
| j45 wrote:
| Firefox doesn't have a profit model to sell ads or user
| browsing behaviour like other browsers as far as I know.
|
| I appreciate the languishing comment, at the same time
| Firefox has features that seem to be a little unique to it
| out of the box. Spaces comes to mind.
|
| Getting really good at one thing might be beneficial.
|
| Ai summarization seems to be more and more common in a
| browser. Maybe they'll add it as a local feature once a
| model can comfortably run.
| mindcrash wrote:
| Because if they don't they will not have feature parity with
| Chrome (Gemini) and Edge (Copilot).
|
| And while not all people are fond of AI, there are shit tons of
| people out there who do. Which means you automatically diminish
| your market share if you don't (because your most important
| competitors do)
| knallfrosch wrote:
| In 2-3 years, devices will run this locally.
| dingnuts wrote:
| Oh, they will? Someone else on this site told me they would
| be running locally in 2-3 years, back in 2022.
|
| Someone on this site also assured me ten years ago that we'd
| have full self driving by 2020.
| andypants wrote:
| It feels very resistant to doing anything other than summarizing.
| Even when you ask questions for details, the answer is always in
| the form of a simple summary.
| freediver wrote:
| From a product standpoint, I am curious if sidebar is the right
| way to integrate AI features in the browser? Did anyone see any
| better integrated solutions?
| dankobgd wrote:
| Stopped reading after "AI you can trust"
| ssivark wrote:
| I don't understand all the pessimism.
|
| - It's clear from user share graphs that Firefox as just a
| browser is tending towards irrelevance. No amount of "improving
| the browser" is going to solve the problem.
|
| - More fundamentally, the browser is just _one_ portal to the
| internet / world wide web. With technology _outside the browser_
| getting increasingly sophisticated, Mozilla necessarily needs to
| expand their mandate beyond Firefox in order to serve user needs
| and influence the landscape. Otherwise we might easily end up in
| a future where the browser becomes irrelevant and everybody
| interacts with proprietary large models.
|
| - As far as innovation in browser features goes, this seems like
| a breath of fresh air. Internet users at large deserve access to
| AI services in a secure and privacy-friendly, and as a pillar of
| the free web Mozilla is well-placed as a distribution channel to
| serve these needs. Therefore, this seems like a very good
| stepping stone / experiment for Mozilla.
|
| There will be execution challenges that need to be figured out.
| AFAIK Mozilla doesn't have the talent+budget for training large
| AI models, or even for doing intensive product research. So
| they're going to have to team up with some other AI expertise --
| either explicitly or implicitly, by depending on open source
| models. Regardless, IMHO this is a risk they have to take and
| figure it out as they go along.
| pyaamb wrote:
| I wonder of this or something like it can be extended to
| "unclickbait" videos/article titles by spawning a background
| crawler that reads the article / watches the video and comes back
| with a resolution to the curiosity bait they used to get you to
| click. Would save countless hours and make the web less shitty
| IMO. Plenty of examples available just scrolling through youtube
| for training data.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Mozilla will do anything but work on their browser.
| tonymet wrote:
| Funny how "orbit summary" of the Long Board Email is still
| vacuous
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