What We're Working on in Firefox | Hacker News Reader

What We're Working on in Firefox

connect.mozilla.org

90 pointsReadCarlBarks68 comments

crosses fingers Please no AI, please no AI, just security and performance improvements. Please no AI.

> We are approaching the use of AI in Firefox...

Dammit

Nevermind that, I'm just happy that finally they are done with their constant reshuffling and removal of options in the UI.

  > More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker.

...crap...

Yes, I am looking forward to more userChrome.css changes to un-streamline the damn URL bar back above the tabs once again, as well as to undo whatever other obnoxious UI changes they decide to inflict on us. It's become a regular ritual, performed with much cursing and gnashing of teeth.

On a more positive note, the constant stream of UI updates that used to wreck my userChrome.css fixes led me to switch to the TreeStyleTabs extension. Combined with a few extensions to the base TST extension (yes, extensions for an extension), the UI is now quite comfortable, even with a large number of tabs (SimpleTabGroups extension can help when things become unmanageable).

Above the tabs? I need to see that.

Cheap laugh. When you look at the actual example they provide, it seems like a useful feature, and not at all on the AI hype train:

> AI-generated alt-text for images inserted into PDFs, which makes it more accessible to visually impaired users and people with learning disabilities.

Also, they made a point of talking about privacy and saying it was processed on-device.

That sounds like a great feature for those that need it. As long as those that do not can turn it off, I can't see an issue with it.

It specifically says that it will run in-service, I can't imagine that it would do such resource heavy task without user action.

I'd rather have to turn it on than turn it off.

We'll have the option to turn it off until that option is removed for being a maintenance burden. See e.g. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=755593

It seems very much like a nuclear bomb used to go hunting for deer. I'm sure it will be useful to some, but it's the sort of specialized activity that is better left to extensions, particularly when they carry heavy infrastructural burdens that are then paid by everyone.

Chances that someone went "how can I justify playing with the new shiny?" are very, very high. Responsible leadership should take away the toys before they do something stupid.

I dont want my pdfs being scanned by a model to generate alt text of all things

Good thing you’re not the only user with an opinion

Don't use it, I guess. You can disable almost everything on Firefox.

I’d love to have a local LLM in Firefox to summarize pages, generate boilerplate in email responses etc.

They recently added a fully local translation feature and I love it.

Just write your own damn email my word. Imagine you text your friend and an ai model replies. Thats what you are doing to your coworkers.

If you can convince the entire business world to get rid of formalities, please do go ahead! Otherwise, don't patronize people for using tools that make their jobs/lives easier.

English is also not everyone's first language, and sometimes details like a non-awkward salutation or signing off of an email do matter.

Andre Natal and I did the Firefox translation feature. It started as a research project with Mozilla and some EU schools and was called Bergamot. We adapted that for Firefox starting a couple years ago and shipped last year. The technology was a perfect fit for the user feature.

I think the same holds for summarization (a Reader View feature maybe?) and as someone what was on Firefox's A11Y team for almost 5 years, I think there's some work Mozilla could do with image alt text and perhaps fixing up some common quirks that trip up screen readers so they don't have to do that fixing themselves.

There are several places I believe this relatively new tech fits perfectly with web browser use cases. Those mostly aren't monetize-able though, so they're "for users" not "for money" and users don't really seem to be up for grabs these days, too locked into their routines, and so those features may not even be competitive advantages.

Still, doing good for your existing user base by incorporating new tech that fits their use cases well, even if it doesn't make you more money or win you more uses is a good thing and the fact that Mozilla's not chasing growth like FANG and others means they can do more of that unprofitable "good stuff."

I worked on Mozilla for 25 years. It was an amazing ride and knowing what I know about Mozilla I feel confident they'll behave not just responsibly with AI, but as paragons of virtue and a north star for the industry (and perhaps even for governments as the Mozilla Foundation has been working on responsible AI for half a decade and is in regular contact with the US and EU governments on just these kinds of issues.)

Haha. Everyone is working on AI now. It's the latest Blockchain, NFT etc.

Many of these "products" are just hot air. Time will weed out the crap. It's not like we're stuck with nonsense Blockchain features now from the last hype (even though signal and others did work to implement that BS, it's not in the way or even remotely relevant)

Hey, at least it's not Blockchain!

I hope WaterFox/LibreWolf will remove those AI stuff. Or give option to disable.

Andre Natal and I built the first real AI into Firefox starting a couple years ago with Firefox translations. The models are fully local, downloaded on demand, and pivot around English so you only need a few to get pretty good coverage. It's an excellent use of the technology.

15 years ago, machine learning started making its way into Firefox in a big way with the Awesomebar's learning algorithms that get the sites you visit frequently auto-completing easier. That work was mostly Ed Lee in the early days and makes Firefox's addressbar far superior to Chromes (and back then Chrome said it was a superior algo but they couldn't take the 10 ms hit to the Omnibox popup performance so users could just type a lot more to get where they wanted to go).

Come on.. "hey Firefox, can you give me a summary of what's being said on my FB groups ont the side panel, and keep that updated every morning? Ho, and can you show me a boorkmak to start the coffee machine when I browse before 11am?"

> More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker.

Why not just copy and improve Vivaldi and allow users to easily rename/move/delete the menus? You wouldn't know what a specific user's top actions are

especially when you consider that one of FF's target user bases are people who turn off all telemetry

Yeah, though telemetry wouldn't help since this level of attention to UI design doesn't (practically ) exist, and it's unrealistic to expect it from FF, so the next best thing is allow user configuration.

Also you can even have a dynamic sorting section part within some menu based on how often you use a given menu item or depending on which profile you're using etc.

A couple percent of Firefox's user base turn off telemetry. That is a target group, but they're hardly representative.

(I'm not bullshitting. I worked for Mozilla for 25 years, including in the Netscape era. Brendan Eich and I built the Mozilla 1.0 roadmap. I was a co-creator of Firefox along with Blake and Ben. I was Firefox's PM at Mozilla when we deployed telemetry and I was a Firefox and A11Y PM when me and Andre Natal introduced local LLM-based language translation to Firefox a couple years ago (Nightly only, release came last year after I left.) If those credentials aren't enough to make my claim believable, then I don't know what else to say.)

It's definitely believable, defaults are very powerful (I'd expect a higher number, but not a very big one)

Though out of curiosity - if someone turns all telemetry off, how would you know of this use to count?

Vertical tabs are coming back, finally... I still miss this tree tab extension I was using maybe 7 years ago.

Tree Style Tabs extension never left.

One of the reason I'm still on Firefox.

I use vertical tabs with Edge =)

I'd rather have no tabs at all than to use Edge.

sidebery ftw

The thing I would love to see the most is full shortcut management.

1. Configure which shortcuts override web page shortcuts. (Ex: Can't open history on Google Docs)

2. Customize shortcuts arbitrarily (add/remove/remap defaults). Bonus points for vim-style shortcuts being possible.

3. Shortcuts for JS/bookmarkets.

Great news. FFs UI has been falling behind the other browsers lately and vertical tabs is something I really like.

Good that they also want to include tab groups so there’s hope this will work like Tree Style Tabs. That extension is probably the gold standard when it comes to tab organization.

Or they could invest resources in useful things and we continue to use Tree Style Tabs

In what way is the UI falling behind? How advanced can it be? The most advanced thing was probably XUL that they disabled

Vertical/Grouped tabs would be major. All I want after that is a way to switch profiles from the browser like literally any other browser does.

I’ve always thought the long running “Multi-Account Containers” in Firefox was a better implementation of this idea than having to switch profiles and open a whole new window, when often what I need is a tab or two for a profile other than the one I’m in. You can even configure proxies to run on a per-container basis if that’s useful. But I can certainly understand wanting to better separate what your working on then just tabs with colored indicators to remind you which is which at a glance.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

Those are useful but they lack the ability to have profile-specific history and bookmarks. I have a completely different set of bookmarks for Home and Work use and would never dream of mixing the two. Profiles are the only way to deal with that, but profiles are themselves difficult to work with.

Why not have Home and Work directories im bookmarks? That accomplishes about the same.

Sometimes you don't want to sync your work bookmarks with your personal account, but have both on your work laptop... or vixe versa

Recommending containers as a replacement for profiles is a bit like recommending a wheel as a replacement for a car.

Containers do one thing very well and are very useful, but they don't let you have different bookmarks, add-ons, themes, settings, sync, etc.

Containers is not a replacement for profiles, they are completely separate use cases. Those who use multi-profile do so because they want separate bookmarks, settings, etc (e.g. personal profile vs work profile)... which containers cannot do.

In Firefox you can go to about:profiles to easily open new windows using other profiles. I bookmark that page with a keyword for quick access. (Also see about:about for a list of other handy 'about' pages)

A more classic-style profile switcher is available via the '-P' (or '-ProfileManager') command-line switch. If FF is in your $PATH you can run:

  firefox -P

The '-P' switch can also take an argument of a profile name to open it directly.

But yes, it would be nice if at least one of these options were exposed in the UI so it was more discoverable by users.

I currently have a firefox -p shortcut, but it's auch worse experience than on chrome and friends.

That's not user friendly or works on all OS (eg: firefox -P). There are also other issues with Firefox profiles. For example, on macOS, using different profiles mess up Firefox's icons on the dock and profiles always open behind the current Firefox window.

There's no way around this. Profile support on Firefox is bad and it's a shame because they've had them for years.

It's not great, but you can make launchers with profile arguments and about:profiles can be bookmarked.

How about making Firefox compatible with Tab Mix Plus again? As in, open up the API again?

I consider TBP to be the second most important extension that I could possibly install, right after uBlock, but getting it to work correctly is a bit of a slog due to how tabs have been isolated and restricted from the API.

It’s not hyperbole that my entire usage of FF rests upon the functionality of TBP.

What's TBP? TMP?

I also very much miss Tab Mix Plus...

Firefox has a way of organizing bookmarks on its Android version known as Collections. It works really well and I wish they would bring it to their iOS and desktop versions. Bookmark management needs to evolve.

What would dramatically increase my user experience is removing the absolutely pointless keyboard shortcuts from the browser. For example, nobody needs ctrl-s to download the html source of a page. (It’s especially annoying for users like me because it’s reflexive to type ctrl-s when editing large blocks of text.)

But many people need ctrl-s to download pdf files rendered in the browser. Yes there is a button but that is a shortcut after all.

Is that even the default setting? I believe my ff auto downloads linked pdfs

Data files like PDF, JPEG, MP3, etc. are different than HTML pages. It’s sensible to keep the shortcut for those because they are useful files outside of the browser environment.

It’s virtually never useful to have a shortcut to save HTML pages.

You should be able to change this in about:config no?

I use Ctrl-s often to save images.

To my knowledge it is impossible to change this behavior in Firefox. You can hackily override it by adding an extension which injects some js that captures the ctrl-s keys, but that can also break sites that legitimately use that functionality.

Data files like images are a reasonable use of the shortcut. Downloading HTML is nearly always unintended behavior.

What are you suggesting ctrl-s does when editing large blocks of text? In almost every Windows app it saves the document.

Nothing, probably. I could be convinced of something else if it’s a good idea. But the current behavior of interrupting the user with a save HTML page dialog is always wrong UX in that case.

I don't get it then. You expect ctrl-s to do nothing. So why would you press it at all?

Native vertical tabs. About time! I hope they can match Sidebery’s functionality.

Really happy that they are finally improving multi-profile support

Funneling money and resources away from Firefox and towards C-suite's pet projects?

>"More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker."

Oh, so towards making Firefox actively worse, got it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com