Hopefully I don’t get many downvotes for this, but it isns’t necessary to deny anything related to AI and bombard Mozilla for this. Sure, Copilot is a disaster, because it is a service and will call home to M$ and collect your data. But all of what Mozilla offers us is on-device AI, which is exceptional. I’ve been waiting so long for on-device AI-based webpage translation, so people don’t need to rely on external services like Google or Bing to translate any more.
Same, their local translation tech is absolutely great! If they keep working “AI” features that are pretty much quality of life ML stuff I’m all in for it.
We are approaching the use of AI in Firefox — which many, many of you have been asking about
Which one of you was it, who asked for AI in Firefox???
AI actually can be very good at translating things locally while keeping tone and intent, and thats what mozilla mentions here. I’m fully down with AI powered local translation tools native to firefox, it’ll put it way above the competition
Some LLMs are low enough in resource usage to do this on weak and older PCs
Can’t wait for vertical tabs
I’ve heard a lot of people talk about vertical tabs but personally I don’t see the appeal. Can you explain to me what is desirable about vertical tabs?
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You can have tons of tabs open while still being able to read what they are
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Moving the tabs to the side of your browser window frees up more vertical real estate which better matches the webpage layout of most websites, which otherwise have wasted space on the left and right sides of the page when viewing them on a computer
Im a simple man, less browser UI = good. I only want to see what I need to see. I’d hide the address bar if it wasn’t cumbersome to use with hover (as in hover at the top of the browser window to show the address bar).
It’s more efficient to stack wide elements on top of each other than next to each other.
Especially with websites that are optimised for mobile which means they use only the middle 60% of the whole 16:9 screen, not to mention ultrawide. So vertical space is needed more than horizontal space.
In addition, you can have the vertical tabs hide the text, so you can only see the favicon, unless hovered over. I basically have a 50px bar on the left and top. So this (without the right sidebar, I’m not at my PC so I stole the photo from Reddit :P) :
Thanks for the response! I guess it’s still not for me. I often have several tabs from the same site or tabs from websites who’s favicon I don’t recognize so the text is relevant to me.
When I want more real estate I just go full screen with F11.
As for focusing a hidden address bar, doesn’t ctrl-L do the trick?
“At Mozilla, we work hard to make Firefox the best browser for you. That’s why we’re always focused on building a browser…”
You don’t need to lie to us. We are just happy you are finally working on browser features.
I’m looking forward to reducing ui clutter and profile improvements.
I only need Firefox to load pages faster than Chrome
Good luck convincing people to switch to it based only on “it loads pages faster than Chrome” though. It’s a good goal to have, but getting tunnel-visioned on it when their current speed in real world use is pretty comparable is definitely not a good long-term plan.
Soon, Firefox can block ads better than Chrome. Ads are annoying. I see Chrome losing at least a 5% of the market, if not more, to Firefox, just because they’re going to break uBlock Origin, and Firefox isn’t.
You really overestimate how many people use an ad blocker. I wish it was that many.
I’m not talking about pulling more people. I’m talking about my issue as an existing and looooong term user of Firefox. I started using a very low end phone recently, and Firefox vs Chrome on it is night and day difference. I don’t notice it on my galaxy phone, but on low end devices it’s torturous.
I still use it all the time exept when a page crash. Wich unfortunately happened too often with Firefox lately. I have a Pixel 8 and it crashes/freeze when scrolling heavy pages or PDF.
It’s annoying that the browser I want to use is crashing so often. But I won’t use Chrome unless I’m forced to, wich the only reasons I was forced to was Firefox freezing.
