Tab groups how? Bunched up into 1 tab so you can’t see anything or are they replacing the Simple Tab Groups extension. And what’s different from the current profile manager.
Changes are all well and good until they force me to change my workflows even a little; then technology has gone too far!!!
And what’s different from the current profile manager.
From a usability standpoint, what current profile manager? Having to web search to find out how to open it puts it beyond the reach of most users.
I wish it was harder to find in Gnome, where its right below “New Private Window” in the right-click context menu. I accidentally open it almost every time I try open a private window. Thankfully I don’t need private windows as much now that I use the Multi-Account Containers extension.
wait, really? For me on Windows 11 the launcher right-click literally just has one entry: Firefox. Nothing for recent/frequent/open tabs. Nothing for opening a new tab or window. Nothing for Private. Just that one entry that does the same thing as just clicking the launcher. There’s a separate start menu item for private browser window, I could pin that on the taskbar next to the regular launcher.
Here’s mine
Well color me jelly. That’s like actually usable and shit.
Don’t feel too jelly though, the actual profile manager has been in need of some care for a while, now…
…and it’s apparently getting it soon! No way they’ll hide the button after they polish it up, right? Happy times to come for all, I hope :^)
Might be a Linux thing because I have the same function under KDE as he describes it, which I wasn’t even aware of (I don’t really use that right click launcher functionality, like ever). Either way, I think opening it should be part of the main menu of the browser and the actual profile manager (not the profile manager page) should also have proper functionalities.
Tab grouping, nice! Finally back after they removed then years ago…
I wish they’d backpedal on the floating tabs too. I still fucking hate them and they never really used them for anything like they said they would. They’re just as shitty as they always have been.
Eh, I honestly don’t notice it. There’s a very small (like <5px) gap between the tab and the next bar down, and it’s only noticeable when I’m looking at it, which is pretty much never. I’ve attached a screenshot for reference (I use the built-in dark theme, Container Tabs, and shrunk my tabs in about:config).
Aside from the fact that this is way more than just 5 pixels, it’s also not just the bottom but also the top, doubling the wasted space. Followed by another gap before reaching the toolbar at the bottom, and another gap at the top above the tabs.
I use container tabs, which fills the space at the top on most of my tabs. In my screenshot, that is literally the top of my screen, there’s no extra space above it. Here’s a slightly bigger screenshot just above my extensions:
I used a screen measuring tool, and the black gap (the floating part) between the tab and my extensions bar is 2-3px (hard to tell exactly). The tab itself is ~30px (give or take 1-2px). So if Firefox used non-floating tabs, it would save about 2-3px. That’s it.
Chrome doesn’t have floating tabs, and it takes up more space than Firefox, here’s a screenshot comparing the two:
Brave has floating tabs, and is also bigger, here’s a screenshot comparing Brave and Firefox:
This is on my Macbook Pro, so YMMV on Windows, but it looks very similar to what I have on my Linux devices. At least for me, Firefox is plenty compact and more compact than its main competitors.
You’re conveniently ignoring the huge spacing within the floating tab. lol That’s about 8 pixels, plus the 3 outside the tab we’re already at over 10 pixels of empty space, on both sides, making it over 20 pixels in total.
In my FF it is worse though. It’s a total of 16 pixels from the icon to the top, 19 pixels to the address bar (excluding the 1 pixel border of that). It’s like 85 pixels before I reach the website content area. https://i.imgur.com/0MxEcW5.png
No idea why you bring other browser into this when the comparison was with older FF designs. I really don’t give a shit about any chromium browser to be honest.
I showed the other two since they’re popular, and what others would be comparing against. Firefox (on my machines) is more compact than them. So it’s not like Firefox is especially wasteful here. One has worse floating tabs, and the other has worse non-floating tabs. So it could be way worse.
Removing all the space would make it super cramped, and I don’t think it’s worth it for 10-20px. On a typical 1080p screen, that’s like 1-2% of the vertical resolution.
That said, it should be configurable. You can probably get what you want with the userChrome.css or whatever it’s called.
“Others do it just as bad / even worse” is just not a good argument for making your own software worse imo.
Floating?
Hi,
We bring a modernized and differentiated look to tabs since Firefox 89 in order to create a signature Firefox look and experience. This major redesign will help us enable more use cases and features in the future.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1338169
Before this, tabs were clearly separated and were directly connected to the rest of the browser UI, while also using much less space & padding. It was one of the major enshittification updates for Firefox and to this day they have not given us any of those mentioned “use cases and features” that would make use of this redesign.
It was one of the major enshittification updates for Firefox
That’s not what that term means. That term specifically and explicitly means “making a service worse for the user in order to wring more money out of it.” It doesn’t mean “feature or design change I didn’t like.”
If you’re here because of the AI headline, this is important to read.
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.
They are implementing AI how it should be. Don’t let all the shitty companies blind you to the fact what we call AI has positive sides.
There are a lot of knee jerk reactions in the comments. I hope few of those commenters have read the article or, at the least, your comment.
thats most of the internet, just reacting to headlines.
AI has become truly meaningless term for everything and nothing.
Not to mention all the justified hate it received. It’s probably time to kill it once again and delegate it to the future like usual every 10 years or so starting with Deep Blue
They are implementing AI how it should be.
The term is so overused and abused that I’m not clear what they’re even promising. Are they localizing a LLM? Are they providing some kind of very fancy macroing? Are they linking up with ChatGPT somehow or integrating with Co-pilot? There’s no way to tell from the verbage.
And that’s not even really Mozilla’s fault. It’s just how the term AI can mean anything from “overhyped javascript” to “multi-billion dollar datacenter full of fake Scarlett Johansson voice patterns”.
there are language models that are quite feasible to run locally for easier tasks like this. “local” rules out both ChatGPT and Co-pilot since those models are enormous. AI generally means machine learned neural networks these days, even if a pile of if-else used to pass in the past.
not sure how they’re going to handle low-resource machines, but as far as AI integrations go this one is rather tame
AI generally means machine learned neural networks these days
Right, but a neural network traditionally rules out using a single local machine. Hell, we have entire chip architecture that revolves around neural net optimization. I can’t imagine needing that kind of configuration for my internet browser.
not sure how they’re going to handle low-resource machines
One of the perks of Firefox is its relative thinness. Chrome was a shameless resource hog even in its best days, and IE wasn’t any better. Do I really want Firefox chewing hundreds of MB of memory so it can… what? Simulate a 600 processor cluster doing weird finger art?
I use my local machine for neutral networks just fine
i mean, i’ve worked in neural networks for embedded systems, and it’s definitely possible. i share you skepticism about overhead, but i’ll eat my shoes if it isn’t opt in
I don’t doubt it’s possible. I’m just not sure how it would be useful.
We’re also using machine learning for the local site translation. The AI buzzword is doing more damage than good PR.
Local AI, or also, how AI should be. Actually helpful, instead of a spying and data gathering tool for companies
One of these things is not like the other
I do not know why browser makers like Opera or Brave(and now apparently Firefox) is going hey ho over AI. I don’t see a proper benefit of integration of local AI for most people as of no
As for vertical tabs, Waterfox got it just now. It is basically a fork of Tree Style Tabs and very basically implemented. I am honestly happy with TST on Firefox and while a native integration might be a bit faster(my browser takes just that few extra seconds to load the right TST panel on my slow laptop), it’ll likely be feature incomplete when compared to TST.
It depends. I really liked Mozillas initiative for local translation - much better for data privacy than remote services. But conversational/generative AI, no thank you.
AI-generated alt-text for images inserted into PDFs
Sounds more like classification so far. Things like summarising web-pages would be properly generative, LLMs in general could be useful to interrogate your browsing history. Doing feature extraction on it, sorting it into a graph of categories not by links, but concepts could be useful. And heck if a conversational interface falls out of that I’m not exactly opposed, unlike the stuff you see on the net it’s bound to quote its sources, it’s going to tell you right-away that “a cat licking you is trying to see whether you’re fit for consumption” doesn’t come from the gazillion of cat behaviour sites you’ve visited, but reddit. Firefox doesn’t have an incentive to keep you in the AI interface and out of some random webpage.
Mozilla actually had a project for that: https://memorycache.ai//
They just suck at naming things, and unfortunately it’s not getting much of the necessary dev time it needs to get out of the POC stage.
The biggest thing I want is local only models that use my activity & browsing history as a way for me to recall or contextualize events and information.
I hope it won’t end up like Chrome. Suddenly my tabs were opening in different weird groups and I couldn’t find anything.
Profile management
Fucking finally!
The fact that you had to use external applications or manually go to an internal Firefox menu to change from to another sucked!
“AI”, more like A-eyeroll 🙄
There’s AI and there’s AI. I really like that Firefox has local models for translating content. Them adding AI that describes images for visually impaired people is pretty cool.
Yeah people forget that AI isn’t just the garbage generators of late. It’s all machine learning based software. There are lots of perfectly valid applications of AI that have been used for decades. The term has just become tainted recently by LLMs.
I kind of hate how machine learning and LLM and a whole bunch of other things are thrown together into “AI” to leverage the hype cycle but that’s tech life.
Ok that seems like a good idea. But since when did we need “AI” to translate text? I think this is my big problem. It feels like a lot of “Here’s an AI to wake you up at the right time before work!” When shit like that has existed for years with a bunch of “if” and “else” statements. It’s not hard to create a series of conditions to do a lot of the things I’m seeing AI uselessly shoved down our throats.
Since a decade or more? Machine learning-based text translation is the reason we get such fantastic automatic translations these days.
It’s not an LLM. LLM is AI but not all AI is LLM.
tab grouping
Sure, okay.
vertical tabs
To each their own.
profile management
Whatever, it’s fine.
and local AI features
HOLLUP
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?
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.
Running AI models isn’t that resource intensive. Training the models is the difficult part.
The feature will obviously just be disabled on 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.
You only need lots of precessing power to train the models. Using the models can be done on regular hardware.
While I dislike corporate ai as much as the next guy I am quite interested in open source, local models. If i can run it on my machine, with the absolute certainty that it is my llm, working for my benefit, that’s pretty cool. And not feeding every miniscule detail about me to corporate.
I mean that’s that thing. They’re kind of black boxes so it can be hard to tell what they’re doing, but yeah local hardware is the absolute minimum. I guess places like huggingface are at least working to try and apply some sort of standard measures to the LLM space at least through testing…
I mean, as long as you can tell it’s not opening up any network connections (e.g. by not giving the process network permission), it’s fine.
'Course, being built into a web browser might not make that easy…
Sums up my thoughts nicely. I am by no means able to make sense of the inner workings of an llm anyway, even if I can look at its code. At best i would be able to learn how to tweak its results to my needs or maybe provide it with additional datasets over time.
I simply trust that an open source model that is able to run offline, and doesnt call home somewhere with telemetry, has been vetted for trustworthiness by far more qualified people than me.
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)
Focus on “local”. Mozilla is working since a while on that.
I wonder when tech companies are going to start calling AI something different to deal with the luddites. Like skyscrapers whose floors are labeled 12 and 14.
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.
I’ve tried a few extensions, but they haven’t felt as integrated as the one’s in Floorp, due to firefox limitations. The main reason I want vertical tabs is to save vertical screen space by removing the horizontal tab bar, which can be done with userchrome.css, but thats inconvenient to do on multiple devices. I appreciate the recommendation though, I haven’t used that one and it looks very powerful.
I want fewer built-in features, not more of them. All of these things should be extensions, not built into the browser core.
I mean, I’d be perfectly happy for said extensions and more to be shipped by default – it would be good for Firefox to come “batteries included” even with adblocking and such, and that’s most likely the way I would use it. But I just want it to be modular and removable as a matter of principle.
I remember how monolithic Mozilla SeaMonkey got too top-heavy and forced Mozilla to start over more-or-less from scratch with
PhoenixFirebirdFirefox, and I want it to stick close to those roots so they don’t have to do it again.We need modular browsers. It is hard for Mozilla to keep the track to the W3C and all the nonstandard stuff that Google, Microsoft and Apple add to their browsers. If those elements were modules, it would be easier for people to collaborate and for Google and Microsoft to be obligated to add support for other browsers.
You’re talking about a modular rendering engine, which is a different thing than what I’m talking about. I’m talking about stripping down the UI until it resembles XUL Runner, then adding the functionality back as extensions.
You’re not wrong that it’s important for the engine’s code to be organized well for developers’ benefit (and ideally for the engine as a whole to be self-contained – it’d be great if Gecko were as easily-embeddable as Blink), but I’m not so sure that users need to be able to add or remove pieces of it in a way similar to what I’m talking about for UI features.
More concretely:
I think Firefox should ship by default with all the functionality it currently has, plus uBlock Origin and some other things. But I want it to be designed such that if you went into the extensions manager and disabled everything, things like tab support, bookmarks, history, and maybe even the address bar and back button would be gone. It would still be capable of fully rendering a web page, though.
If they do that, normies will start yelling that Firefox has removed their beloved features and will immediately download Chrome. I have a strong suspicion that a majority of people don’t use extensions at all.
Did you miss this part of my previous comment?
I think Firefox should ship by default with all the functionality it currently has, plus uBlock Origin and some other things.
Okay. Replace core features as extensions. Kind of like the suckless philosophy.
While it’s a good idea, I think extensions are purposefully made weaker, that is, they don’t/can’t have the same capabilities of core features. It will require a huge rework which I just don’t see happening.
Something like a deeper integration of an addOn/extension would be nice.
Modularity could be a way to do it.They are probably extensions, just like pip, pocket, screenshot upload, languages, search engines, themes, etc.
Shipped by default, handled like extensions internally but not exposed to the user. You see it in the extension*.json files in your profile folder.
In that case, I want them exposed just like user-installed extensions, so it’s more obvious how to get rid of them if you want.
The default experience when people Google “install Firefox” should absolutely provide as much feature parity with other major browsers as possible. 99% of users will want them or not mind them. And for that last 1%, I guess I’m not sure if it’s worth the development headaches for them to bake in a configuration change that power users could get by forking the codebase anyway.
So Tree Tabs built in? I’ve used them for so long, I don’t know how other manage without them. Yet I know no one else who uses them, even after I show them. Be interesting see how well the new built in ones work.
I tried, but I already use TMP in full page vertical view.
I never got the hang of tree style tab in the sidebar. I think I just don’t like the sidebar.
I tried, but I already use TMP in full page vertical view.
I never got the hang of tree style tab in the sidebar. I think I just don’t like the sidebar.
Ever since I was an avid Lynx text only browser user, I’ve been asking for a complicated privacy invasive 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.
I belive there are standalone TUI lemmy clients
Yes, there’s a really great one called Neonmodem Overdrive.
Which currently doesn’t display anything on lemmy. I already opened an issue and the developer is looking into it. But for now, there are no options to read and post on lemmy from the console, and I’ve spent a day researching alternatives.
Browsh doesn’t work cause it doesn’t receive mouse clicks from GPM due to a bug. All the l*nks browsers don’t support whatever Javascript is needed to log in.
If you have another option, I’m all ears.
That’s all fine and good but Firefox on Android is currently in a sorry state. No per-site process isolation, buggy, can’t keep tabs open, slow, choppy, drains battery. Had to uninstall it on my brand new Galaxy S24+ and my Pixel 6 Pro because it was draining so much battery. When are you going to finally stop ignoring Firefox Android, Mozilla?
slow, choppy, drains battery
Sounds like you don’t have an adblocker.
I ran Firefox Android with uBo and AdGuardDNS.
I heavily use Firefox for Android on multiple devices since many years. It HAS annoying bugs. The most annoying for me is the tab view keeps forgetting the last tab you were on, when for example closing a tab from tab view or moving between tabs by swiping the address bar.
I think every person’s bugs depends on how they use the software.
edit: quick word order fix.
I’m experiencing a similar issue on my phone and I’m using ublock, it is draining the battery very fast and making the phone hot.
I wonder if there is a good alternative/degoogled chrome for Android?
Nope. He’s right. There are similar threads on reddit too every single week about the mobile version. It’s simply bad.
Maybe some issue with rendering on specific hardware…?
Maybe. It feels slower than it’s open source forks which feel a bit slower than chromium alternatives. And the group tabbing is so bad and no process isolation.
He mentioned a a Pixel, but I’m running it on Pixel with no problems whatsoever.
And just like there, a bunch of people here squinting and saying “huh what are you talking about it works great?”
Idk, it seems to work fine on my old, crappy Moto G, and it also seems to work fine so far on my new Pixel 8 (just bought it recently).
Maybe Chrome is a little faster, idk, I don’t use it much, but Firefox is completely fine.
Then again, maybe my standards are lower. I just want it to browse the web, and it does that pretty well. The ad-blocker is an absolutely killer feature which is why I don’t use Chrome, so maybe I’m willing to put up with worse performance. But it seems plenty smooth to me.
This is the big thing for me. Any speed gains I might get from Chrome are entirely wiped out by how much the web browsing experience is dragged to a crawl by ads and spyware.
Agreed, there a two years bug still open on Firefox just refusing to load pages.
I have to force quit Firefox multiple tones a day and there are new bugs popping up on the tab picker.
Its hard to go back to chrome and lose addons. I need u block especially on mobile.
Im having a great experience on samsung internet with adguard and blokada 5 (on a pixel 7 if it’s relevant)
I’ve been using it for at least a decade now and haven’t encountered any of the issues you mention.
I use it on a Pixel 7 Pro. Can’t say I have the same issues.
I also have a notorious problem with too many tabs (I am beyond 99)I’ve used it exclusively for a long time and haven’t experienced any of this
Well here’s the drain I was talking about at least. 18% in less than an hour and thirty minutes of use for a web browser isn’t normal. In an hour of use a Chromium browser only drains 6-7 ish % for me. This has been an issue for I guess the past month or so? It drove me crazy so I had to uninstall. And it’s not just me either, there are tons of posts from people with the same problem on Reddit. If you don’t have problems, good for you I guess.That’s not what that means. That means out of all the battery drain you’ve had since the last charge, Firefox was only 18% of that. For example if your phone was fully charged 3 hours ago and you dropped 20% then it would’ve been only 18% of that 20% battery drop. It’s really confusing the way Android shows battery usage now.
Yeah, same. This is bonkers to me. I have dozens of tabs open on my Pixel 7 and my battery still lasts all day.
I want something like XULRunner back.
No, they don’t owe me anything. I just want it back.
