Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

This post is very thin on details. A better source is in the Firefox Nightly News blog post titled “Experimenting with AI services in Nightly”. [1] This is currently opt-in.

Some excerpts from that post [1]:

> To start, this experiment will only be available to Nightly users, and the AI functionality will be entirely optional. It’s there in case it’s helpful, but it is not built into any core functionality.

> In the first experiment that you can try out this week, you will be able to:

> Add a chatbot of your choice to the sidebar, so you can quickly access it as you browse.

> Select and send text from webpages to.

> Summarize the excerpt and make it easier to scan and understand at a glance.

> Simplify language. We find this feature handy for answering the typical kids’ “why” questions.

> Ask the chatbot to test your knowledge and memory of the excerpt.

> To activate the experience:

> Go to Settings > Nightly Experiments and turn the AI Chatbot Integration experiment on.

> Choose your preferred chatbot from this list of providers: ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, Le Chat Mistral

> Then, as you browse, select any text, right-click it, and choose the Ask chatbot option to send the text, page title, and prompt to your provider.

[1]: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/06/24/experimenting-wi...

> Add a chatbot of your choice to the sidebar, so you can quickly access it as you browse.

Hey Mozilla, while you're working on putting things of my choice in the sidebar, how about letting me have my browser tabs over there without a bunch of jumping through userchrome hoops to hide the top tab bar?

I'm not going to complain about them adding whatever features they want... so long as they implement first the things that people have been asking for years.

Side tabs, proper tab groups, they said these features are coming "this year". But how come it takes them longer to do these things over AI which no one really asked for.

Seriously, proper tab management can't be such a gargatuan task that they can't get it out of the way faster than AI implementations.

It just boggles my mind that they haven't done it already. More niche browsers had official sidebar tabs ages ago, and so have Firefox add-ons (but as mentioned it's become a huge pain to set this up properly). But beaten to the punch by Edge?

Someone must have made a decision 10-15 years ago that this was a "power user" feature and with their sliding market share it wasn't worth chasing that small segment of users. But then who are they trying to get as new users?

Or maybe they figured having add-ons like Tree Style Tabs was sufficient, and don't care that no normal person will be able to hide the top tab bar and set it up as a proper UI. But again, less customizable than Edge isn't a great look.

That's being worked on too! https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re...

Yay! Thanks for the link.

Another important part from the article you linked:

> Nightly can be configured by advanced testers to use custom prompts and any compatible chatbot, such as llamafile (discord), which runs on-device open models, including open-source ones.

> To start, this experiment will only be available to Nightly users, and the AI functionality will be entirely optional.

There are at least two ways of reading the scope of the initial qualifier, but, given Mozilla's fondness for trying to force certain features they like on users (cough Pocket cough Mr. Robot cough), I don't like that "the AI functionality will be entirely optional" is preceded by "to start."

I like these features.

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