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Orbit by Mozilla
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this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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Yes, you could research local LLM tools, find Ollama, see if it's trustworthy, install it, configure it, research which model to use, download that, then run it. Or you could let Mozilla do the hard part for you.
The typical browser user does not go searching for GitHub projects.
Don't get me wrong, lots of tinkerers will do the above, and they still can. But this is a more user-friendly way for the average person.
I use an Ollama-based program on my PC called Alpaca (available on Flathub for any Linux users reading this), and it's pretty great and straightforward, but even that is more fiddly than simply installing a Mozilla extension.
And yeah I've tried Mozilla's offline translation, it's pretty great, I'm sure they'll expand the language list in time.
I wish I could agree, but I don't think I can. By that logic, Mozilla could as well stop developing their browser. It has dropped to a marketshare to like 2.5% by somewhat official statistics, maybe about 5% if we're generous. That's less than the ratio of Linux users. So I'd argue it's for tinkerers, too. Seems people aren't educating themselves, downloading Firefox, installing and configuring it either. I don't really know what to make of this argument.
But it's not my main point, anyways. It's been more than a year since the translation feature got added officially to the browser. They've promised to add more languages from the start. But we've only seen small changes since then, like how you can select text. Ultimately, that translation project is from 2022. I doubt they're actually working on it. I think it's a shame. We'd need some good AI tools.
They shouldn't stop developing their browser, and I'd never advocate for that. I'd have to go to Chromium, yuck.
I never said it wasn't for tinkerers, just that they need to attract people that aren't. And how does this move harm tinkerers? Not only can you tinker with this extension (such as by pointing it towards a local Ollama instance), but it's optional. You don't have to install it. What's anti-power user about developing this extension?
I'd also disagree massively with the idea of "well, they have a low market share, so they should forget about attracting more people and focus on tinkerers".
When you have a low userbase, you should seek to grow it, not simply double down on a small amount of people that already use your software anyway – especially not when, let's be honest, the tinkerer crowd on Lemmy and niche Reddit subs are the most fickle and hard to please bunch in the world. Mozilla could do everything they ask and that crowd would still complain.
Doubling down on a tiny amount of people is fine when you're Rolls Royce or Bugatti, and you can charge any amount of money to a small amount of people, but that strategy won't work for Mozilla. They need broad appeal, and they won't get that if they're lacking things that average people have come to expect.
Linux in the 90s and very early 2000s was impossible to use for any normie. Distros started focussing more on the average person rather than simply appeasing tinkerers who already use their software, and they've benefitted from that approach greatly – desktop Linux has never been in a better state! Why shouldn't Mozilla do the same?
My argument against that extension is just that it takes money and developer hours to program it. Resources that are taken away from other (more useful) things.
And I like some of the Mozilla products very much. And I think as a company, they're not too well off. They have a limited amount of money and developers. They can now choose to invest that time in useful things, or things that attract money, or start 500 random side-projects. But then they can't complain if that takes away from like Thunderbird and the translation tool I would like to see some attention given to.
I'm not opposed to this addon, I just don't think it's a wise decision to invest the limited resources in that.
I wholeheartedly agree with the rest of your comment. Linux has come a great way since then. But that means people have put in a lot of work to polish things. Directly opposed to what happens here, starting more half-baked projects and adding features, without polishing the existing ones and making them more useful or attractive to regular people.