Just an FYI for anyone who is interested, I’ve also been doing the same for Waterfox.
Mozilla have taken into consideration doing things locally, such as tab organisation and the likes (one would assume pre-GPT era and with regard to features not utilising LLMs this would’ve been branded as ML functionality) but I’m not fully convinced this still won’t open up potential security issues in the future[for users of AI browsers].
For Tor users this seems even more of an issue as one would expect nation-state actors targeting undesirables would look for any potential weak spot to exploit.
Separately I suppose this brings into light how utterly crazy it seems having AI features in the browser chrome versus limited to the website content process/sandbox. It seems like a privacy and security nightmare and now everyone and their gran are releasing “AI browsers”, even the Firefox-based ones inspired by browsers such as Arc and Dia which seem like absolute privacy nightmares.
Seems like slick branding and marketing gets you a pass today when in the past such egregiousness would receive a load of flack cough Avast “secure” browser cough…
Either way good job to the Tor team, I sympathise with how much extra load this adds to each rebase.
What else does Waterfox remove? Does it still support signining in with a Mozilla account to enable sync features? Would be nice to see a comprehensive list somewhere; I couldn't see anything on the Waterfox homepage or the GitHub README.
You can see here[1], I'll avoid pasting again. But yes, can still use a Mozilla account and the website is getting a refurb - I will add a third hard thing in computer science.. letting people know all the things you've actually built :')
Thanks for maintaining Waterfox. For me it has been working without issues, basically Firefox but with reasonable defaults, and I don’t have to constantly look for and manually disable “features” like these.
Similar to the “AI should be an assistant programmer, not an independent dev”, having Claude there and being able to ask questions about specific topics while I read is fantastic. Especially for scientific papers that are outside my specialty (i.e. all of them.)
Not mentioned is the ability to setup custom prompts. [1]
I enjoy reading technical blogs from the global south and the slavic world. I've found that LLMs do a far better job at translation than Google Translate/DeepL, etc. in these niche domains, so I added a translate prompt to my context menu and that converted me over to using it.
Thankfully they are unconnected by default. Unfortunately the sidebar can get triggered accidentally with keystrokes from muscle memory (Emacs) and then one has to deal with the side bar. It would have been nicer if by default nothing existed in the first place.
I have a Gemini sidebar, it just appeared out of nowhere one day, but I find it useful though. You can give it a URL and it can summarize it or whatever.
It's super useful for power users. You can connect any model you like through ollama (or similar services) and use your own pre-defined prompts to run against the selected text on websites simply from right click context menu.
I hope Orion (from Kagi) gains more traction and follows through w/ open-sourcing everything. Privacy-first, 0-telemetry, performant, capable... just not OSS (yet).
Orion is a WebKit fork which is nice to have but Linux support seems so far off (is there a modern project that builds WebKit on Linux or windows at all?)
I have been satisfied with moving to Zen, a Firefox fork that behaves like the late Arc browser
I use it on my iPhone because I can actually get ad blocking but it is also the glitchiest browser I've ever used. Worth it for no ads, but that's kinda Apple's issue.
Generally, this seems an obvious and correct decision for Tor.
Barring integration with a locally run LLM, AI doesn't make sense for the Tor security posture - you don't want to be routing content to unintended/insecure third parties, period.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
Yes, however it still means that the browser is phoning home to somewhere. To be able to make use of that API key, it has to send some data out. Is that data routed over TOR? Does it even matter given that an API key can be used to deanonymize you?
I do not want nor need AI in every single aspect of my life. I mean, I've seen AI hygiene products out there. How does that even work? Don't answer that ... I know it's a marketing scheme, akin to the "HD" craze of five to 10 years ago.
Every microwave turns off when the timer reaches zero. It'd be better to have AI that turns it off when the timer reaches one so that I don't have to quickly stop it before the bell goes off. Better yet, a mute function would do the same thing.
It feels like we are going to need a lot of volunteer effort to help remove all the AI garbage out of all these projects that insist on jamming AI into themselves.
This week the GZDoom project forked into UZDoom after a maintainer force-pushed AI-generated code into the repo. Thankfully, it failed to compile and other maintainers caught it before it made it out, but the decision to fork came down pretty quickly.
Agereed. Sadly, we're on the wrong planet, my friend. AI will be shoved into every available orifice and more. It's a great tool for "them" to gather even more info on you to sell to anyone with a handful of nickels.
The last thing any of these masters of the universe will do is leverage AI to make everyone's life better.
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Mozilla have taken into consideration doing things locally, such as tab organisation and the likes (one would assume pre-GPT era and with regard to features not utilising LLMs this would’ve been branded as ML functionality) but I’m not fully convinced this still won’t open up potential security issues in the future[for users of AI browsers].
For Tor users this seems even more of an issue as one would expect nation-state actors targeting undesirables would look for any potential weak spot to exploit.
Separately I suppose this brings into light how utterly crazy it seems having AI features in the browser chrome versus limited to the website content process/sandbox. It seems like a privacy and security nightmare and now everyone and their gran are releasing “AI browsers”, even the Firefox-based ones inspired by browsers such as Arc and Dia which seem like absolute privacy nightmares.
Seems like slick branding and marketing gets you a pass today when in the past such egregiousness would receive a load of flack cough Avast “secure” browser cough…
Either way good job to the Tor team, I sympathise with how much extra load this adds to each rebase.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43206110
Deleted Comment
fr Tor did a good job
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ai-chatbot
Seems to be unconnected to any model and off by default.
Similar to the “AI should be an assistant programmer, not an independent dev”, having Claude there and being able to ask questions about specific topics while I read is fantastic. Especially for scientific papers that are outside my specialty (i.e. all of them.)
I enjoy reading technical blogs from the global south and the slavic world. I've found that LLMs do a far better job at translation than Google Translate/DeepL, etc. in these niche domains, so I added a translate prompt to my context menu and that converted me over to using it.
[1] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/advanced-configur...
[1]: https://github.com/n4ze3m/page-assist
Dead Comment
I have been satisfied with moving to Zen, a Firefox fork that behaves like the late Arc browser
> The easiest way to run WebKit on Windows is via Playwright.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45366867#45487157
Barring integration with a locally run LLM, AI doesn't make sense for the Tor security posture - you don't want to be routing content to unintended/insecure third parties, period.
I really wish Mozilla would focus on addressing some of the numerous user feature requests, rather than whatever the current trend is.
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...
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.
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).
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.
https://windowsreport.com/hands-on-firefoxs-new-split-view-l...
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?
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.
I do not want nor need AI in every single aspect of my life. I mean, I've seen AI hygiene products out there. How does that even work? Don't answer that ... I know it's a marketing scheme, akin to the "HD" craze of five to 10 years ago.
The last thing any of these masters of the universe will do is leverage AI to make everyone's life better.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment