[mrklol]

Firefox mentions the following ones:

"- Translations, which help you browse the web in your preferred language.

- Alt text in PDFs, which add accessibility descriptions to images in PDF pages.

- AI-enhanced tab grouping, which suggests related tabs and group names.

- Link previews, which show key points before you open a link.

- AI chatbot in the sidebar, which lets you use your chosen chatbot as you browse, including options like Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Le Chat Mistral."

[mort96]

I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar. Isn't a chat bot in a tab good enough?

And calling translation "AI" seems like deceitful retroactive rebranding. Why is machine translation suddenly "AI" now? It was never branded as such before. Is "AI" here just used to mean machine learning?

[wongarsu]

The word artificial intelligence was coined in a 1955 research proposal [1] which listed seven aspects of the "artificial intelligence problem". Computers using languages was one of them. Another is "neuron nets", which would indeed encompass a large part of ML and at least Google Translate since circa 2016 [2].

This is also perfectly in line with how the word AI was used until circa 2022. The weird thing is this narrowing of AI to only mean transformer or diffusion based neural network approaches.

And many translation approaches would even fall under that, so not sure how narrow you perceive the term to be now. How do you even define AI to include everything OpenAI calls AI but not include modern translation approaches

1: https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmo...

2: https://web.archive.org/web/20180507195240/https://ai.google...

[input_sh]

IMHO no. Every chatbot has so much wasted space, it really doesn't need to be full-width. Also, what's easier?

Option 1: Being on a tab, copying the URL of the tab, switching to the chatbot tab, pasting the URL and writing some instructions about what to do with that tab.

Option 2: Clicking on the "summarise page" button (whether from the sidebar or from right-click context menu), and having the browser pre-fill the prompt with the URL + the reader view version of the content on that page.

[throwawayk7h]

I saw someone else using this feature. It does more than just be a chat bot. You can direct it to automate tasks like go to a web page, search for stuff, etc. -- I asked it to go to pinterest and download the top ten images for "cyberpunk," and it succeeded. Nifty I suppose.

[lynndotpy]

"AI" is a term which means a dozen things and has changed a dozen times. It's about as meaningful a signifier as "smart".

If I were to draw a line, I'd say AI is anything with a transformer model powering it.

As exhausted by 'AI' as I am, translation is one of the things neural networks (and especially transformers) have been constantly improving SOTA on.

[AndrewDucker]

They use a Neural Network engine to power it. That definitely counts as AI:

https://aclanthology.org/P18-4020/

[Dwedit]

I've run an AI translation tool under a debugger just to see what it did.

It tokenized your input, fed it into a model, then ran the model. Literally the same thing as any other local AI software. Except the model was for translation.

[jeppester]

> I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar. Isn't a chat bot in a tab good enough?

If it wasn't because I find myself using the AI-sidebar all the time I would probably have shared your opinion.

I guess it's just quite convenient to have it separated from the "regular" tabs and their history.

[nsvd2]

The transformer architecture that powers large language models was designed by Google for the purposes of machine translation. As others have said, ML and AI have always been closely related if not synonymous.

[johnnyanmac]

Wouldn't be the first time. Google gave an option to turn off gemini in Gmail, and suddenly the inbox tabs they had for over a decade decided to disappear.

[stonogo]

Firefox's translation specifically is from Project Bergamot: https://browser.mt/ It's a set of language models in the style that people currently call AI.

[AdmiralAsshat]

It is annoying. LLMs are not AI, and on-device translations are one of the few genuinely useful features Firefox has shipped in the past few years.

[badsectoracula]

> AI chatbot in the sidebar, which lets you use your chosen chatbot as you browse, including options like Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Le Chat Mistral."

When i saw this i expected something more... integrated, but when i tried it with a local LLM (using koboldcpp) after enabling the option to show localhost as an option (it is hidden by default for some reason) all it did was to local whatever webpage was running on the localhost URL (even though koboldcpp also provides an OpenAI compatible endpoint, which is what i expected Firefox to use to provide its own UI). It seems to have some sort of heuristic to find the input box where you type in queries and autofills that with the page text or parts of it (if you have it selected) and that's all.

I kinda expected it instead to use the API endpoint, have its own chat UI, provide MCP tools for accessing and manipulating the page's content, let you create reusable prompts, etc. The current solution feels like something you'd throw together in a weekend at most.

[skywhopper]

The chatbot providers don’t allow any cleaner integration unless you are using pay-per-request API rates.

[Spixel_]

They all seem like great features.

[mrweasel]

On paper yes. The problem is that they clutter the UI, they trigger at weird times and they turn out to be less useful that they may appear.

Then there's also people, like me, who just want the browser to browse the web. I don't want link preview (annoying feature), Firefox isn't my PDF viewer, I don't have that many tabs that I need to group them and I don't use AI chatbots.

So having a single button to disable all of these features is pretty great. I still want a Firefox Lite, that just does browsing and allows me to add the few extension I want to whatever feature I believe is missing.

[MallocVoidstar]

I started clicking a 'next page' link before I'd actually finished reading something (so I kept holding the mouse buttown down), and a couple of seconds later Firefox popped up a 'link preview' box informing me that I was clicking on a link to a web forum. Wow, thanks, couldn't have figured that out myself. (It did not actually summarize the next page in any way.)

[techwizrd]

Whoa, I have been looking for AI-enhanced tab grouping for a while. This is actually pretty awesome.