Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements
serverhost.com403 points by shaunpud 11 hours ago
403 points by shaunpud 11 hours ago
Please let whoever steers Thunderbird development and road map also steer Firefox.
Thunderbird is at the moment the pinnacle of user-centered, focused and down-to-earth development of open-source software.
That’s because Thunderbird is no longer part of Mozilla but an independent, community-developed project.
Thunderbird has been re-added to the products steered by the Mozilla Foundation. https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/11/the-untold-history-of-t...
Apart from the UI which is crap since their last major update. There are menu options everywhere, two ribbons on the top, a hamburger menu on the right and another on the left. For a long time you opened Thunderbird and it didn't default on the last message that you received but somewhere in the middle of the heap.
> Apart from the UI which is crap since their last major update
But when they updated the UI, they
- Added options to use to make it very close to the old layout
- Set those options for you if you had it customized like that in the previous version
Which is IMHO much better than how Mozilla handled the redesign - you can get the old style in a GitHub repo thanklessly maintained by one person[0], enable userchrome support in about:config (until they decide to take it away one day!), and enable compact mode (also gated behind about:config and called "Compact (not supported)". Oh, and remember to update the userchrome every few updates because they keep breaking it.
That's the difference between user-centric and not user-centric.
It's hard to be in charge of a project like this. You're criticized no matter what you do.
The old UI was criticized by some for being outdated, a mix of old and new styles, didn't fit well with new OS/app styles, etc. It was crap. So they update the UI and it's still crap... for other users. Damned if you do and damned if you don't.
the people still using a fat client are likely doing it because they don't like change
edit: I say this MYSELF as a thunderbird user!
I don't want an "new experience" every 9 months, and having to explain it to my parents
And I use a fat client because I like having all of my email addresses aggregate to one place, and I like it when that software gives me a modern look and feel ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As a longterm thunderbird user I find this annoying. I appreciate it being maintained more actively again but I really liked the fact that the UI stayed stable for years. Changing things to make them "more modern" is just annoying. No one asked for this.
You must be joking. The Supernova UI redesign is an unmitigated disaster. They unnecessarily butchered the look and feel of Thunderbird to the point where people are switching to forks.
Can I replace Outlook yet?
I don’t buy the “oh well, kinda sort of for like 60% of mail features and possibly a read only calendar in Two Weeks”
I switched away from Thunderbird to Outlook TWO FULL DECADES AGO, and in that time they have never once given me a possibility to switch back.
Like it or not, business runs on Office/Outlook.
I ended up switching over to Betterbird. It's easier to setup and more stable.
What are you talking about? Thunderbird has barely any progress in the last years. It's more busy with breaking and fixing things. Sure, there are reasons for it, but as a user, all I see is stalemate, while one addon after another is dying. Thunderbird Mobile is nice, and I hope Thunderbird Pro will be something good, but so far none of them are the big breakthroughs.
The page seems to be a copy from the original Mozilla press release from February 2nd: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/ai-controls/
It was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46858492
This is great news. I recently updated AMD Adrenalin, and the "minimal" version doesn't let you change the distribution of unified RAM on Strix Halo. I installed the "full" version, and it wanted me to install a 10GB "local AI assistant" to "help" me configure it. When I opened the program, it showed me a non-dismissable fake chat that occupied 25% of the screen, prompting me to click it and replace it with a real one.
I remember when every other software prompted you to install Bonzi Buddy or some other intrusive search bar. This AI push is even worse.
Where are the AI features in Firefox? Looking around right now the only one I see is right click tab -> Summarize page (NEW). I googled a bit and see they have some grouping of tabs feature I've never used/seen (or want). The only other maybe AI feature I remember seeing is the odd left hand bar that is there on fresh installs and I usually remove to declutter.
Are those the features this kill switch removes or was there a deeper issue here?
Firefox mentions the following ones:
"- Translations, which help you browse the web in your preferred language.
- Alt text in PDFs, which add accessibility descriptions to images in PDF pages.
- AI-enhanced tab grouping, which suggests related tabs and group names.
- Link previews, which show key points before you open a link.
- AI chatbot in the sidebar, which lets you use your chosen chatbot as you browse, including options like Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Le Chat Mistral."
I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar. Isn't a chat bot in a tab good enough?
And calling translation "AI" seems like deceitful retroactive rebranding. Why is machine translation suddenly "AI" now? It was never branded as such before. Is "AI" here just used to mean machine learning?
The word artificial intelligence was coined in a 1955 research proposal [1] which listed seven aspects of the "artificial intelligence problem". Computers using languages was one of them. Another is "neuron nets", which would indeed encompass a large part of ML and at least Google Translate since circa 2016 [2].
This is also perfectly in line with how the word AI was used until circa 2022. The weird thing is this narrowing of AI to only mean transformer or diffusion based neural network approaches.
And many translation approaches would even fall under that, so not sure how narrow you perceive the term to be now. How do you even define AI to include everything OpenAI calls AI but not include modern translation approaches
1: https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmo...
2: https://web.archive.org/web/20180507195240/https://ai.google...
> This is also perfectly in line with how the word AI was used until circa 2022.
show me a screenshot or link of one website or app using AI to mean machine translation from prior to 2022, AI has re-entered the lexicon covering anything from an algorithm to Sora. if anything its broadened, not narrowed in scope. me and you might mean transformer when we say AI, but the average speaker doesnt make that distinction. they call video sites "social media", so can you really be surprised they dont quite use AI correctly either?
Here you go: https://web.archive.org/web/20200929085743/https://en.wikipe...
Admittedly I don't think this uses the term AI, but "deep learning" and "artificial neural network" are indeed AI, and if you follow those links in the Wikipedia article you will indeed find them described as such.
IMHO no. Every chatbot has so much wasted space, it really doesn't need to be full-width. Also, what's easier?
Option 1: Being on a tab, copying the URL of the tab, switching to the chatbot tab, pasting the URL and writing some instructions about what to do with that tab.
Option 2: Clicking on the "summarise page" button (whether from the sidebar or from right-click context menu), and having the browser pre-fill the prompt with the URL + the reader view version of the content on that page.
Option 3: don't
Then you right-click on the AI button and click on "remove", but that's a whole different discussion than what you asked in the previous comment.
It's also why I really don't understand the need for a kill switch to begin with (other than pleasing annoying users), you don't need to wait for it. You can already get rid of the chatbot integration, there's a remove button already. It's also kind of annoyingly easy to misclick it, so they're just gonna remove it from those places and put it away in settings and those same annoying users will consider that a win.
Because what people want is not an opt-out, like Mozilla have given, but an opt-in.
This is the grudging half-measure.
Many would have preferred the updates to come with a form asking for on or off. It didn't, so they complained, and this was the answer.
Frankly I don't really even want an opt-in. If Mozilla wants to go build an AI browser, they can do that, but it should be a separate project; don't transition Firefox into being an AI browser. I don't want to use an "AI browser with AI features disabled", whether through an opt-in option or an opt-out option.
Why can't you people who want a ChatGPT sidebar just add that as a plugin?
"You people"? Take a look at my comment history and see my takes on AI please, but this is like the least harmful way of integrating it and yet "you people" are the loudest about it.
Can you do the same on Windows? Is it tucked away in settings on macOS? Can you disable it on Google? Can you disable it anywhere else? Why are you the most vocal about the integration that is literally the easiest to turn off? You need two clicks to do it right now, you're gonna need at least three once this kill switch is in settings.
The AI boosting from the likes of you is the reason Mozilla is sinking Firefox by turning it into an "AI browser". I don't want anything to do with that.
I would've been equally outraged about Windows becoming an "agentic OS" if I had been a Windows user. I don't like what Apple is doing to my phone and laptop, but at least they haven't promised to make the iPhone an "AI phone".
More than one thing can be bad at a time, and right now, this conversation is about Mozilla. We can have a conversation about other bad things some other time.