AI assistant in a browser...it's getting ridiculous.
Ridiculous maybe, but by no means pointless. “AI” will be the end of ad blockers and a whole host of measures to secure a remnant of privacy on the net.
On the contrary, I feel like AI--even if it doesn't advance much further than the level we already have achieved--is putting us at the cusp of finally being able to have good end-game fully-working ad blockers: I'll just have an AI in my browser read / look at / watch / "experience" your content and then launder away any and all ads in its presentation to me... I can even have it make extreme edits if required, rebuilding the audio and video, to remove subtle bias your content wants to infect me with due to sponsorship deals.
What is fighting to prevent ad blockers is not AI... it is pervasive DRM: if we live in a world where the tech platforms continue to side with Big Content and prevent us from being able to capture and alter media as we see it on devices they insist we "buy" and yet never "own"--and where the business models of the most powerful companies rely on proving that an end-user human affirmatively was on the other side of an interaction (and thereby might have been infected with paid propaganda)--we are stuck inside of a dystopia :(.
[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/02/dont-fall-latest-chang...
If only. This wave of AI integrations is primarily focused on pleasing (potential) investors.
This wave of AI integrations is happening in a context/framework for normalizing naked avarice so that preposterous power can be concentrated in the hands of the rich and dubiously ethical.
for example, I don't want to see yuppie shit on news.ycombinator.com. right now, I have a userscript that filters out links from the worst offenders (e.g. newyorker), but every day, there are many more that shit up the front page and waste my time and attention. this could be solved with a very low parameter LLM by asking it to evaluate whether the text is related to science and technology or not.
hell, even images could be filtered with vision models, including local ones. I'd fucking love to hide a few broad categories of images from my sight, e.g. clickbaity youtube thumbnails (DeArrow helps to a degree)
FWIW, I once used naive Bayes classification solely on HN headlines and it worked reasonably well for solving the problem you're describing.
I summarize the transcripts of 20+ min. long youtube videos to get the gist, which is what I am interested in anyways. Saves me time. (this is something I built custom for my use, maybe there are other options for this)
It is not an obsession. I always wanted something, someone that could do this for me, and now we have it.
If the AI is summarizing files the user downloads, why couldn't this be done with external tools?
In general though, why does the browser itself need to be "smart"? Its primary, and perhaps only, goal should be to render web pages... I feel like this push to integrate AI features into browsers is done so that companies can promote their own (completely unrelated) AI services, and pull people even more into their ecosystem. It's obnoxious.
Most AI tools I've seen however can't seem to get away from the classic "prompt -> response" chat UI.
I can't say I will use every ai feature, but so far they've been helpful. I don't feel more ignorant. What I think makes people ignorant is outsourcing labor tasks like a cleaner for the home, a gardener for the yard, or handyman for basic repairs. I don't think those are necessarily wrong to outsource though.
Anyway, now that this sort of technology exists, Microsoft is missing a great opportunity to bring back clippy and cash in on some nostalgia. I miss that lil guy.
It's pretty interesting! They do basically the same thing for core Chromium, applying a (big) set of patches[1].
Incidentally, I'd be interested to hear any ideas/approaches to this problem. I'm guessing if there was something clearly better, Brave would be doing it, but it seems like there should be a better way even if I can't think of one.
i have rafts of bookmarked pages, but i don’t know which of the 45 postgres-related pages contains a helpful sentence or phrase about indexing that i think i remember reading a few months ago.
That's when I quit.
(It was a simple sheet. I said "list the names of all items where [column name] is false". There was about 60 rows)
So according to Brave, using their AI leaks:
- your searches
- What you're viewing
- What you're typing
Did Brave just turn into the Chrome that it once so hated? I guess it is just orange chrome.
Also I think they have loads of funding, and are factoring all of this into user acquisition costs
Yes, it defaults to enabling their advertising features, but that's just it, a default setting, it isn't hard to disable if you don't want to "take part of the experiment".
It does not, you have to opt in.
You are right in the rest of your comment thought. And in general, when you compare default configs, Brave does far more to protect your privacy than Firefox does.
Well maybe due to the multiples bad things that brave did in the past.
Eich bad
What you'll notice more often is a folder we have called `chromium_src`. This directory mirrors the directory structure for Chromium under `src` and the build system will look for matches. If there's a file with the same name under `chromium_src`, it'll prefer that one. That file then does what it needs to differently and then includes the original file.
This approach helps keep things much more lightweight - but it has challenges too. If code fails to apply (file that `chromium_src` is matching gets renamed, etc) it can be hard to detect. This is where you'd want to have a test to catch that.
Another person shared - but here's a link to our patching documentation: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Patching-Chromiu...
You'll notice the actual patching itself is introduced with the caveat:
> When other options are exhausted, you can patch the code directlyThey document how developers should "rebase" chromium:
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Chromium-rebases...
And it looks like way more work than doing it with git via
git rebase chromium/masterOllama /JUST/ recently added some (fast) embeddings models: https://ollama.com/library/nomic-embed-text
(note: not OP)
open source AI and browser/OS companies are going to provide an answer soon anyway.
The only issue I have is that the sync between my iphone, macbook, windows can sometimes get out of sync.
Yes it has Tor built-in, but you don't ever need to use it - it's just there in case you do (I have never needed it myself).
I don't think I'm part of a cult, but I've used FF as my default browser for over a decade and I guess I don't know what else people want from a browser.
I guess I'm in this cult. But one of the big reasons is what else is fighting the chromium monopoly? Safari? Just imo there's not too big of differences between browsers and people just exaggerate these differences.
I know what you're gonna say, but forgetting everything else there's one important factor you should consider. Chrome has a (near) monopoly and resolving that monopoly requires using non-chromium browsers.
But on top of that, Firefox is fast, secure, has privacy in mind, and a rich set of add-ons. But most of that is true for any browser you pick. There really aren't big differences between browsers and often we're making mountains out of mole hills when we compare. But I'll say, firefox has ad-blocking on mobile (plugins on mobile, like 800 exist)
Haven't had Chrome installed on any of my machines for ~5 years at this point.
Not the biggest fan of Brave (especially considering this latest AI crap, and all the weird crypto stuff), but I'm satisfied with it overall. FF still remains #1 in my eyes and usage, but has to be tweaked to my liking.
A tip I found recently in about:config
browser.compact.show=true to bring back the compact layout option, results in very good use of space on laptop along with vertical tabs and also Firefox allows the vertical tabs to be moved to right side which is nice.
I work for Mozilla (speaking for myself, of course), so I'll leave you to guess which I'd recommend :P
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-oppos...
I haven't had issues with uBlock Origin - very occasionally an ad will seep through on YouTube, maybe once every 6 months, but when that happens I refresh the page and the ad is gone.
Safari is the new IE and Firefox I've always found to just be alright - for sure not as big of a fan of Firefox dev tools over Chrome dev tools. And Firefox scrolling behavior can be annoying.
For all personal browsing and projects, I generally used Firefox, but switched over a couple years ago to using Brave on the phone, and am kind of half-transitioned from Firefox to Brave on desktop. I've been a Firefox user forever, but it's slowly losing me.
Cromite has a desktop build, but it's a bit more experimental than the mobile build, so you can use Ungoogled Chromium[1] instead. Ungoogled is also a privacy-oriented open source patchset on top of Chromium. Check the beta flags to enable some more interesting features like getClientRect anti-fingerprinting measures (unfortunately breaks some React-based sites that go into infinite re-render loop).
Both of these browsers selectively include patches from Brave, but they are community-oriented builds so imo more trustworthy than Brave, which continues to package various shady anti-features and always will because it's backed by a for-profit company.
LibreWolf[2] is the nicest Firefox-based one for desktop, I think. It's pretty hardcore, though, I most only use it to visit mainstream social media sites.
I tried a bunch of the Firefox-based ones on mobile and none of them clicked for me. Cromite is just too slick on Android. Put the address bar at the bottom and off you go. Only downside is no online syncing of tabs and bookmarks, but meh. You can save all open tabs to bookmark bar in one hit then export your bookmarks, send the file through whatever E2EE channel you want to your other device, import and reopen them again.
[0] https://github.com/uazo/cromite
[1] https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
I tried using Firefox on and off, but it's sadly technically inferior to Chromium, and that gap has gotten worse. It still has things that it does better than Chromium browsers, like history sync actually working, or reader view. But those are few and far between. And Multi-Account Containers, one of its apparent advantages, comes with the caveat that Firefox doesn't have usable profiles and the security for its extensions is worse (e.g., no click to activate, no ability to disable extensions in certain containers).
What finally pushed me to Chromium is the poor PWA support in Firefox. On Android, it has bugs that haven't been fixed for years (never mind the poor performance that's well known), and on desktop they've basically dropped the ball.
I use several PWAs. If it's a chat app, I use it as a PWA. Also Spotify, since you mentioned it ... as I like having better sandboxing and ad-blocking in my apps. On Android, too.
But with manually editing .patch files you need to manually find out how to resolve the conflicts, while in a rebase git at least shows you the merge conflicts.
Incidentally, that was also the event that seemed to start Firefox's long decay.
i called it tinydesk.ai, and it's free
Even if I had this functionality built-in, I would still prefer to use something else. Even if that's slightly more cumbersome, though there will probably be extensions for this sort of thing, if they don't exist already.
But, to each their own. :)
Brave failed to tell the user that the people they donated BAT to won't receive the money if they didn't sign up to Brave Creators [1]:
> In December 2018, British YouTube content creator Tom Scott said that he had not received any donations collected on his behalf by Brave.[42][43] Two days after the complaint, Brave issued an update to "clearly indicate which publishers and creators have not yet joined Brave Rewards so users can better control how they donate and tip"[44] and in January 2020 another update to change the behaviour of unclaimed tips.
Brave (by accident? or so the company said) automatically added referral codes to cryptocurrency site URLs in the address bar [1]:
> On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave inserts affiliate referral codes when users navigate to Binance.[47][48] Further research revealed that Brave also redirected the URLs of other cryptocurrency exchange websites.
In Firefox it used to be you needed to like create your own little mini-addon or something like that, and these days they have "smart bookmarks", but it's such a weird name and doesn't really work the same.
At any rate, I have 100 different little shortcuts defined like for example "tren" which takes the given text, puts it into a translator, and auto-detects language and translates to English. Ditto "sven", "ensv", "trsv", then I have "wiki", "wikise" (Wikipedia Sweden), "wikt", "aw" (ArchWiki), etc., etc.
I use these hundreds of times a day, and when I tried converting to Firefox (before I eventually landed on Brave) I couldn't find a simple way of moving these from my Google Chrome profile to Firefox and have it work like I expect it to. Perhaps that's possible now?
It works great but is poorly advertised and not particularly discoverable... They're stored as bookmarks so it should be possible to import them.
(If you do still want to use e.g. Google for search, you can use !g.)
E.g., I use a bookmark of:
https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_elements_%s
caniuse
caniuse div
https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_elements_divAnother user mentioned ddg's bang commands, and that's how I name things. But also built in there's "^ " (need the space) for history, "* " for bookmarks, "% " for tabs and "> " (disabled by default?) for actions.
I really don't see how this is meaningfully different from chrome. Aren't you performing the same actions? Or actually less? "navigate to url, right click, add, (optional) click cog, supply additional shortcut(s)"
You’ll get notification badges on the Brave Rewards URL bar icon, but it isn’t active until you click on it and go through the BAT onboarding.
Regardless, whataboutism doesn't make Brave's scheme any less of a grift.
You can also disable them. I did. Although when I had them on actually got some pretty good deals. Anyways, I just use safari these days and brave lives for YouTube for me to bypass ads and download for offline viewing.
Network -> Web Environment Integrity -> HDCP. No room in there for an AI middleman. :(
Please drink verification can to continue
Unless perhaps people boycott, but that sure ain't gonna happen (in anywhere near large enough numbers to make a difference), Apple, Google, and Microsoft will build it into their platforms, and anyone not on the big three will be unable to consume more and more as time goes on, including most web browsing. It won't happen overnight. It will be an iterative/progressive encroachment where just a little changes each day. Boiling frogs and all that.
On the one side: Big tech. E2E DRM, Chromium is the only browser engine sites will respond to, unavoidable and unblockable ads, siloed content and whitelisted domains only. Verified real identities. Linux clients and VPN IPs completely banned or pushed to captcha hell.
The rebels: Fediverse, the small web, fringe projects, experimentation, perhaps some "indie" ads. (And the problems that come with it: Spam, scraping, etc.)
I know which part I'd like to participate in.
Ehh sure, but then websites have no incentive whatsoever to publish content. The future you're describing is one where:
- Only the big players operate (more centralized)
- Only walled gardens, because who would publish content publicly for everyone to ingest and then modify, with no gain whatsoever?
- More arms race to create DRM to prevent ad blockers, or deals with browsers not to tamper with specific sites (so, more centralization)
What you're proposing makes no sense, and will only deteriorate things further in the long run.
...with two (small) exceptions: you fail to analyze a world where we all end up having to just pay for content as we access it--which is what I want: I also pay for all of the electricity I use and somehow the world doesn't end in the hell people insist microtransactions would cause--and (as I detail in another comment in this thread) I think technological solutions to DRM actually will have a hard time winning vs. AR passthrough ad block technology (though I then think the DRM war continues using legal means like expansions of Section 1201 to make it further illegal to traffic in circumvention tech... which is also bad).