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Comment by dzikimarian | Hacker News Reader

I want this. I'm Firefox user for years btw.

Most prominent thing is chat in sidebar. It's iframe + a few shortcuts. Optional, harmless, using zero resources. Actually quite convenient.

Another is perplexity being one of the search providers. This is literally config not code. I wonder how many people actually removed or even looked at the list of the default search providers before that.

I think only real one is ml naming for tabs. Just meh.

Honestly people who deny any usefulness of AI are getting dangerously close to flat-earthers by now.

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Way to move the goalposts. The argument is not about the usefulness, it's about baked-in on by default features for what are obvious extension workflows. About the only marketing advantage FF has at this point is customizable and lack of dirty tricks. Mozilla seems confusingly desperate to sell out here asap

Why this is obvious extension workflow and vertical tabs or FF Sync aren't?

How do you propose they finance development if we consider simple integrations with zero privacy or customization impact "selling out"?

Those are also obvious extension workflow.

They would need to finance a lot less development if they stopped changing things and just worked on maintaining a limited core functionality including a nice extension system. That's it. Most of their "development" over the last 10 years has been a total waste of time.

You really think these things are requiring significant development budget, compared to keeping up with things like wasm, webgpu, grid/flex layouts?

Can you really say with a straight face, that not doing vertical tabs or chat shortcut would allow them to operate on much smaller budget?

I don't know, do you have evidence to the contrary?

Either way, all I'm saying is when I look at the UI changes that have been made to Firefox over a period of years, I believe their value to me is closer to zero than their development cost is.

The recent change that allows you to easily customize the top bar UI layout in insanely useful. We can now have an out of the box 2 row layout with no CSS.

Agreed; I wish they would expose how to set your own chat provider more easily than about:config, but the sidebar chat is easily my most used unique "UX" Firefox feature.

I'd like to see (opt-in) automatic grouping. The kinda-sorta grouping it does still requires you to manually engage with it.

Any reason why extensions couldn’t fill these niches?

Personally I don't care - it could be first-party extension.

But you could bring up the same argument about vertical tabs, tab groups, Firefox Sync or many other things that interfere with the browser on much deeper level than shortcut to open page in the sidebar.

Is there argument to single out this specific feature apart from "AI bad"?

> Honestly people who deny any usefulness of AI are getting dangerously close to flat-earthers by now.

What made you jump to that conclusion? My guess about someone who's using a non-mainstream browser and figuring out how to configure it to their liking is that they're likely also using AI in more ways than the standard Chat-Webinterface, eg Agents, CLI tools, MCP,... To give an analogy, rolling your eyes over brainrot memes isn't denying the usefulness of smartphones or messengers either. The underlying sentiment is being critical of things that get pushed down our throats through A/B-optimized patterns that ultimately serve other interests than your own, profits or darker.

Making a very simple feature and enabling it, with option to disable it is no pushing down the throat, nor dark pattern.

Please don't compare it to Google or Microsoft products that give you "Enable now/Remind later" or just no option at all.

It's the beginning, A/B-testing takes time...

How much time do you expect? People complain at least since FF4 release, which was 14 years ago. Today this is still most customizable browser on the market.

Much of this thread is people complaining about on-by-default features and hard-to-find configurations. We're really just talking about a continuation of a trend.

> Honestly people who deny any usefulness of AI are getting dangerously close to flat-earthers by now.

This is a remarkably useless argument; "any" could be anything whatsoever, for example that the fuzzy logic of some prior AI craze ended up in certain rice cookers, while ignoring that the remaining 99.8881118881118883479075520881451666355133056640625 (or so) percent of AI is some combination of grift, wishful thinking, or both.

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