84
Orbit by Mozilla
(orbitbymozilla.com)
How is Duck AI then when it comes to privacy? I use it a lot.
Could you run Mistral 7B on a consumer grade desktop ?
Yes. Depends on the actual hardware, parameters used, and model quantization, you can get 2~10 tok/s.
Well, at least Mistral is open source I guess :/
Does Mistral actually provide the training datasets, or are they using the fake definition of """open source AI""" that the OSI has massaged into being as megacorp friendly as possible?
We discussed this briefly a few days ago. No one understands why Mozilla likes to waste their time and money on random sideprojects that nobody likes or asked for... Instead of something useful, or the things lots of people ask them to do.
And summarization is among the worst things you can do with LLMs. I'm not against AI, but they're really not good at this specific thing. I'm not sure if people will use it anyways, but I think this project is a waste of resources.
Literally every single non tech person I know uses these kind of tools. Everyone who searches google gets an AI summary of the results. Microsoft builds this into all their products.
Having an extension that users can CHOOSE to install to do content summaries is a good thing. Either Mozilla does it or OpenAI, Google, Apple, Microsoft do it. Personally id rather people be using a tool made by Mozilla.
its not like they arent focusing on their browser they just released a new address bar packed full of changes and feature to their beta branch.
Thank you. At least someone lives in the real world.
Whether Lemmy users like it or not, this is becoming an expected feature now, and Firefox shouldn't be exclusively chasing people on Lemmy who already use Firefox.
And I'd rather have it be implemented in a way that's pretty private, with the option of tying in a locally installed LLM (although it's a bit convoluted to do right now by the looks of it), and the entire thing be an optional extension, than it forced upon me.
My point is, we already have several local LLM tools and chatbots. This is just yet another one (which isn't ever there yet). I think you could as well use ollama for that.
While for example I still need to use Google Translate because Mozilla has a completely local translation tool for some time already. It's just they promised to add more languages, but they don't do it. Instead they use their time to get yet another addon to the prototype stage.
And you should try it. The (AI) translation is really good. It just needs a bit more polish and like 5 more languages... That'd help people massively. And it's also in demand, I heard Reddit and a few other platforms have added translation as well. If you want to help people and offer privacy, I'd argue you focus on that. And this would be something useful.
Summarization however, is not useful. I get people use it anyways. I just hope they have a look at the quality of the results. Because all I've seen are summaries that are between misleading and wrong. And that's by the market leading products like ChatGPT and Claude... I'm not here to dictate people's life. But they should be aware of it to make an informed decision. I think it's sad that Mozilla just has shiny advertising online for a product that has quite some caveats and is unlikely to ever work well. And I think misinformation is a big issue of today's world. It's marginally better to generate it while respecting people's privacy. Yes. But I'm not sure if that makes it a good thing.
And please continue working on the browser, the translation, Thunderbird and the dozens of other useful Mozilla projects. I think unless Mozilla has infinite money and developer resources, they should focus on products that work well for their users.
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.
By that logic, Mozilla could as well stop developing their browser.
They shouldn't stop developing their browser, and I'd never advocate for that. I'd have to go to Chromium, yuck.
It has dropped to a marketshare to like 2.5% [...], 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.
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?
What's anti-power user about developing this extension?
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.
I feel like Mozilla are in a difficult position. They're reliant on Google to exist, it seems. When they try to do something else to make an alternate revenue stream everyone says to stick to the thing they do that nobody in the world pays for.
I recently started donating to Mozilla. They have been delivering a good product for a very long time, the least I can do is pay for it.
I genuinely don't know what people expect from Mozilla.
People simultaneously want them to give up their search engine payments, but also get angry at them for trying to make revenue any other way.
Web engine development costs hundreds of millions per year. It's a phenomenally complex and expensive endeavour, with no obvious path to revenue unless you hoover up user data, which Mozilla doesn't want to do.
Neat project, but it's a bit odd that this extension that's focused on privacy doesn't allow you to use your own local LLM instead of connectign to their servers.
Edit: added a couple things to enable it on desktop (Linux)
Go to: about:config
Set
browser.ml.enable true
browser.ml.chat.enabled true
browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost false
Then go to: about:inference
You can set the endpoint to your localhost or any server.
Open sidebar and select AI chatbot. Select localhost option and follow prompts
Note: I will never use this, I just wanted to know. Anyway, here are the docs
https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/ml/index.html
https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/ml/api.html
screenshots This is on nightly on mobile
Awesome, thank you
this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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