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Comment by squidbeak | Hacker News Reader

An AI sidebar doesn't bother me. But it should be an extension, not an inescapable part of the browser.

I'd love to be able to open up an arbitrary web page in this sidebar. It would be super valuable for research. They can obviously do it, since the AI sidebar also loads a web page, but the functionality is locked for some reason, and vertical splitting extensions are pure jank.

I really wish Mozilla would focus on addressing some of the numerous user feature requests, rather than whatever the current trend is.

I was looking for something like that and haven't found a good solution. I like having Claude easily accessible in the sidebar, but I'd also like to add pages like my RSS reader, calendar, maps, etc. rather than having to open them in a new tab or window.

> I'd love to be able to open up an arbitrary web page in this sidebar.

Vivaldi has that. (When Opera got bought out by some Chinese company, one of the original founders created Vivaldi. It's Chromium-based, so Chrome extensions work, and Chrome extensions not using Manifest V3 might end up not working soon).

If you want to stick with Firefox, then I'd recommend Zen[0]. It has the tiling feature much like Vivaldi, among many other enhancements on Firefox.

[0]: https://zen-browser.app/

You can define a custom "AI" provider via about:config. It takes every webpage.

Bugzilla: Fuck you, closed as wontfix.

You can put two windows on screen at the same time, you know.

Yeah, I lived in the Netherlands for five years, so I switched to Chrome because its translation feature is much better.

Now that I'm back in my home country, I've gone back to Firefox, which I prefer from a philosophical standpoint. But there's one simple feature keeping me from using it full-time: the ability to rename windows.

My workflow relies on having one window per project. I name the windows Project1, Project2, Project3, and so on, so it is very simple to find each one.

There are a few Firefox extensions that allow renaming windows, but the names disappear every time I restart Firefox, and they don’t sync across devices.

So, unfortunately, I’m back to using Chromium.

Maybe tab groups would work for you? Windows/tabs are usually (always) named from the <title> html on the web site, and I’m surprised Chrome lets you change that in any persistent way. Firefox tab groups lets you manage things yourself at a higher level.

Thanks. No, I use tab groups also within the windows.

The tab group work Firefox has done has been mostly great.

The idea that Mozilla doesn't focus on user feature requests seems unfounded? [1]

[1] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/idb-p/ideas/tab/most-ku...

The way they handled JPEG XL support has, in my opinion, provided a solid foundation for said idea.

Would the split tabs feature that they are currently rolling out work for your use case?

https://windowsreport.com/hands-on-firefoxs-new-split-view-l...

Absolutely, 100%. I'm glad they're finally implementing it!

Uhh, why not open two windows?

If you're not fan of vertical splitting sidebar check out Jetwriter AI. It opens up as an overlay modal and you can use your own API Key as well.

Amazing how MDI is rediscovered every couple of decades.

It becomes popular, then a UX counter-effort declares that it should be the job of the window manager and it dies off for a while.

Related: You can already do this on any platform that has a window manager.

Nobody can tell me how MDI is a good design... what if I want to show two documents from different apps side by side?

I think that windowing systems need to be way more flexible. I want to be able to drag fullscreens, workspaces, windows, tabs, MDI sub-windows, and other types of views from different programs into and out of each other. I think Serenity OS has this with windows and tabs.

Not only that, AI providers shouldn't be a hardcoded list.

Firefox used to be the most configurable, everything plugable browser, what happened on that?

If a 1.0 was released today, would they have a hardcoded list of search engines?

The ability to point it to another provider (or localhost) is hidden, see my other comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45614157 on how to get there. I don't know the reason for this, but it's ok for me as it is.

Exactly. Firefox probably owes almost all of its remaining market share to its extension ecosystem, but it is rotting away in neglect.

First-party extensions are a nice way to test out ideas and features without increasing the core product's maintenance burden. I wouldn't even mind if Mozilla heavily promoted their own extensions, because it would help draw attention to the extension library as a whole.

It should if you try to fly off the radar. Not that Tor browser isn't a fucken emmentaler.

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