This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Can I disable all local AI features? Or better yet not have that functionality installed?
Tab grouping, nice! Finally back after they removed then years ago..
Profile management
Fucking finally!
The fact that you had to use external applications or manually go to an internal Firefox menu to change from one to another sucked!
All great changes! I've been using Floorp to have vertical tabs, but I'd gladly switch back to Firefox when its implemented. Profiles have always been a great feature, but had a bad user experience, glad to see its being improved.
Really interested in the local AI. Firefox has been doing interesting work with that recently.
Sidebery is a great FF extension that provides vertical tabs, trees, and groups.
tab grouping
Sure, okay.
vertical tabs
To each their own.
profile management
Whatever, it's fine.
and local AI features
HOLLUP
I tried one of their test builds. Seems like the AI part just means the browser can integrate with llamafile (Mozilla’s open source solution for running open source llm’s with just one file on any platform)
We’re looking at how we can use local, on-device AI models -- i.e., more private -- to enhance your browsing experience further. One feature we’re starting with next quarter is AI-generated alt-text for images inserted into PDFs, which makes it more accessible to visually impaired users and people with learning disabilities. The alt text is then processed on your device and saved locally instead of cloud services, ensuring that enhancements like these are done with your privacy in mind.
IMO if everything’s going to have AI ham fisted into it, this is probably the least shitty way to do so. With Firefox being open source, the code can also be audited to ensure they’re actually keeping their word about it being local-only.
Don't you need specific CPUs for these AI features? If so, how is this going to work on the machines that don't support it?
With it being local it’s probably a small and limited model. I took a couple courses on machine learning years ago (before it got rebranded as “AI”), and you’d be surprised at how well a basic image recognition model can run on the lowest-spec macbook from 2012.
Tbh the inversion of typical intuition that is LLMs taking orders of magnitudes more memory than computer vision can mess people unfamiliar up on estimates of the hardware required
Yeah that’s very true.
Nope, they can use your NPU, GPU or CPU whatever you have.. the performance will vary quite a bit though. Also, the larger the model the more memory it needs to run well.
The feature will obviously just be disabled on machines that don't support it.
Awesome news! Really miss the tab groups from Chrome, really the only thing haha
Ever since I was an avid Lynx text only browser user, I've been asking for a complicated ~~privacy invasive (if the AI is remote)~~ (hey neat, it's local!) browser that interacts with me in a nedlessly conversational way. Thank goodness someone is finally cramming AI into my simple web lookups. (/Sarcasm)
How do you log into lemmy on lynx? I've been trying to find a text browser I can use for lemmy, with no success so far.
People that wanted vertical tabs must be really excited
Its honestly the only reason i use brave and edge over Firefox. Can fully commit to FF now.
Anything to fill all that absolute wasted space from every website formatting things to fit phones and not desktops. Ultra wide really sucks ass for a lot of things.
