Orbit by Mozilla(orbitbymozilla.com) |
Orbit by Mozilla(orbitbymozilla.com) |
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.
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.
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)
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.
They are languishing into obscurity not because they aren't trying things, but because their browser functionality is languishing behind the others.
Someone on this site also assured me ten years ago that we'd have full self driving by 2020.
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.
If you want privacy first AI in the browser here are the tools
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.
Is that the right flow? FAQ link is broken so I can't tell.
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.
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.
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
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.
That's pretty much accurate. Mine's been up and running on my clunky old home machine for 6 months, and I just this morning overheard a couple coworkers talking about the local llms they're running. Right now a substantial minority of PCs could run useful models. Usage is at the stage where it's small and growing rapidly. Early adapter phase, but all you need is a relatively modest years-old GPU to handle something like this model.
What isn't done, and probably won't be for a while, is a nice generic framework so we can tie their local llm into all sorts of local apps and processes. The big players all want us to use cloud services.
It works.
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.
Google needs Mozilla to exist to prove on paper they don't hold a monopoly with Chrome.
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.
Firefox the browser is responsible for the vast majority (81%?) of the money that is injected into Mozilla annually.
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.
https://www.ghacks.net/2024/12/03/how-to-enable-tab-groups-i...
I've been using Simple Tab Groups [1] for many, many years.
1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...
1. Using latest models (gpt-4o & claude-3.5) which show major improvements in quality
2. Extensive prompt engineering focused on distilling surprising insights vs. pure summarization
3. Structured output format that's easier to parse
Re: transparency - you're right, we need to add more details. I'm new to this and still learning how to communicate this.
Btw, it's free to use 1x/day, and here's an example: https://nuggetize.com/n/claude-shannon-wikipedia-47ca5e5b
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!
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
> basic utility program decided to become political
looks like they wanted to avoid it, isn't it?
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...
Yes, the default Browser wins (which BTW is not always Chrome), and Mozilla does not put up a fight to change it.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
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.
I mostly agree, but whoever came up with this shortcut should get choked.
which bookmark manager can do that ?
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
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.
> 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.
Providing monopoly protection to Google.
They have no interest in actually competing for market share.
about:config, sidebar.revamp = true, sidebar.verticalTabs = true
It's getting there.
Truly one of the most self-sabotaging companies I’ve ever seen.
- 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.
You could build an AI Assistant, or you could spend a month bikeshedding some design details of vertical tabs.
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.
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.
Same reason Logitech did it, it's a totally arbitrary waste of resources
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
Not being the progenitor and linchpin of surveillance capitalism.
Agreed that it would be nice if they had better focus though.
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.
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.
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.
If Wikipedia can do it, a browser can do it.
Anyway, at this moment in my life I don't have the emotional energy to launch this project, but if someone does then please tag me and let me know
This project seems especially ripe for success because it doesn't need product market fit, it doesn't need requirements gathering, it just needs execution and a non-retarded bug tracking product
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Also consider accessibility for low-end devices and development countries.
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.
Running a year old model, if it's power efficient and economically constrained makes complete sense to me.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Prices have been dropping very rapidly due to technological progress. I feel like a lot of threads recently have had people confused about costs because they either are stuck on prices they learned about 6-12 months ago, or because they're failing to project further rapid reductions of price (I can't predict the future myself, but I'm not gonna bet on inference prices stabilizing all of a sudden.)
I mean, it definitely costs more than FREE. But I think it's closer to free than many commenters realize, and continuing to go that direction faster than many commenters realize.
By definition then, Apple's is most certainly not privacy first by any stretch of mental gymnastics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
> 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.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/try-orbit-by-mozi...
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.
javascript:window.open('https://chatgpt.com/?q=summarize this page in 100 words: '+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href),'_blank');
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.
javascript:window.open('https://chatgpt.com/?q=summarize this page in 100 words: '+encodeURIComponent(document.body.innerText),'_blank');
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.
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.
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"
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.
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
> 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"?
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.
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.
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?
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)
Also, while it's nice to have a service option for those without any spare compute, I think it's a bit of a shame on the model considering how even at the 7B class, models like Llama 3.1 8B, Qwen 2.5 8B or Tulu 3 8B, Falcon 3 7B, all clearly outclass Mistral 7B (Mistral 7B is also very bad at multilingual, and is particularly inefficient at multilingual tokenization).
The current best fully open weights (Apache 2.0 or similar) small models currently are probably: OLMo 2 7B, Qwen 2.5 7B, Granite 3.1 8B, and Mistral Nemo Instruct (12B)
There's been a recent launch of a "GPU-Poor" Chat Arena for those interested in scoping out some of the smaller models (not a lot of ratings so very noisy, take it with a grain of salt): https://huggingface.co/spaces/k-mktr/gpu-poor-llm-arena
It's a shame Brave is so far ahead of the game but no one seems to notice.
Disabled it.
After pinning the extension, click on it and deselect the "enabled" option (the line with the purple X). This will kill the floating orb UI but you can still click on the extension in the toolbar to use it.
> 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).
I would never use anything smaller than a 70B model for anything even vaguely medical related!
Everything else is a waste of time and money and energy.
The fact it doesn't even work without www. feels suspicious as well
What's a better browser that isn't basically advertising spyware (i.e. chrome, edge) ?
Not Firefox but forks based on it such as Tor Browser, Mullvad Browser or LibreWolf.
- 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.
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?
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.
Too many Google sites behave worse on any non-Chrome browser for it not to be intentional.
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.
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.
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;
}I would, however, agree FF has many "odd bugs".
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?
I found you can make it use Firefox by disabling the setting "Open web pages in the app".
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.
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.
You metnion GCP Vertex AI, is that something like MS Copilot Studio?
Finally someone admits that BonziBuddy was 25 years ahead of its time.
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.
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.
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.
More recent models can run on any phone and have better quality than the model they are currently using.
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.
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.
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.
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%.
Not sure what people expect, every bold new idea (I.e. mobile OS) is chasing something. And they are trying to do it while being open.
You’d think this HN crowd has never tried to create a sustainable business reading the comments.
Only because Google decide to pay more for less. Despite Firefox losing marketing share and users.
But which of those did generate extra revenue? And mobile Os and LLM also happen to be CapEx intensive.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting.
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.
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?numDays=6...
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.
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.
"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).
That’s not the point.
Use any search engine in a terminal to strip the shit. Welcome to Hacker News.
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?
As very best I can tell the answer is "because bags of cash"
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Microsoft Copilot Studio[2] (formally Power Platform Power Virtual Agents) imho is unique in it's enterprise AI offering. I truly think Copilot Studio is going to be Microsoft's "killer app" when it comes to companies utilizing AI at scale internally, and not it's Azure service.
Worth noting that the comment closing the issue mentions:
> You can disable Google Analytics in about:addons by setting your Do Not Track status to on.
> Again: this only affects users who visit the page with Tracking Protection on (which automatically enables DNT) or who manually set their DNT status to on.
but Firefox removed the DNT control last month (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1928087), though it kept the Tracking Protection control and privacy.donottrackheader.enabled is still available in about:config.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can’t use Firefox either then
Plus, I don't use its Mozilla build, but its Debian build.
Mozilla's executive compensation is famously disconnected from any realities -- economic, industry fad, or otherwise.
- Blink: Chromium and their friends.
- Webkit: Safari specific, on iOS and macOS only.
- Gecko: Firefox and its a few forks.
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.
Sometimes we have to be pragmatic, especially if being pedantic is detrimental to our aims.
Happy new year.
- Not funded by an advertising company / data broker, etc.
- Not chromium based.
- Not a Firefox fork.
- Works on Linux & MacOS natively.
- Daily-driveable (i.e. functionally equivalent with Firefox).> 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.
That is what YOU said. All you've been doing is against your own quote. I think the quote is stupid, for the reasons you pointed out. I'm just trying to show you that you're the one who said it, but you seem to be totally unwilling to admit that you did, even though it is clearly publicly there