This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Most important part of the thread:
In it's beta stage, Orbit is currently not open-source. This doesn't mean it will remain this way forever. If orbit gains traction and we have the resources and funding to support an Open-Source project, I'm sure things could change.
Press X to doubt.
Has Mozilla done sometime to deserve this skepticism? They were founded on open-source and AFAIK have continued to support open-source. Mozilla is far from a perfect organization, but if this project was a success I think it would be out of character for them to keep it closed-source.
then why make it closed source to begin with?
Believe it or not but it requires resources to open source an internal product, especially one that may have been an experiment where some small team was able to convince leadership could become useful to the masses.
React.js at Facebook is a good example of this. It took a lot of effort to externalize and open source React, and tbh the codebase is still kind of garbage when it comes to contributions from those unfamiliar with its intricacies.
It’s provocative it gets the people going.
Pocket.
That's a pretty good answer. I knew Mozilla had bought it, and were operating it as an independent subsidiary. I didn't know they promised to open-source it over 7 years ago.
Eh, skepticism should be the default.
But I agree with you, nothing they've done is inherently bad, though they've done some abysmally stupid things in the way they handle them.
But I also really wish they'd stop fucking around with half-assed things like this and focus on core utilities.
What core utilities does Firefox need that it doesn't have? Honest question. I've been using it over a decade and never had it fail to do something I asked it to, and I'm a little out of the loop on the web browser development news cycle beyond the recent wave of Google Bad.
Mozilla has firefox and thunderbird. They're the two core utilities. The vpn attempt, the Mastodon server, that kind of stuff is fluff.
I may be using the wrong terminology? It was an offhand comment and that's the word that I picked out of my head, it might mean something different to a developer, I dunno.
But Mozilla, if you ignore what Google pays them, is not exactly a high profit endeavour, and we don't want it to be. So having what funds they have focused onto the things that matter is what I'd prefer they do. Mind you, if the vpn pulls enough in to generate funds rather than cost them, that's great.
Firefox is sustained (biggest funder) by google who needs artificial competitions to not be labeled a monopoly.
Its still the best browser i can think off that isn’t chromium but i would recommend staying skeptical.
Well, that's been the basis for some other products. AMD and Intel comes to mind😊 They both have IP the other need and historically Intel has been the dominant one, but now the tables have turned somewhat.
Has Mozilla done sometime to deserve this skepticism?
Yes, their "privacy friendly ad measurement" that's opt out is a faux pas that I just can't forgive. I used to donate to the fuckers.
That feature (more) they've been getting all that negative press over for the past two days is an absolutely gigantic non-issue. Like most anti-Mozilla stories end up being.
The whole thing is an experimental feature intended to replace the current privacy nightmare that is cross-site tracking cookies. As-implemented it's a way for advertisers to figure out things like "How many people who went to our site and purchased this product saw this ad we placed on another site?", but done in such a way that neither the website with the ad, nor the website with the product, nor Mozilla itself knows what any one specific user was doing.
There are definitely things that can be said about this feature, like "Fuck ad companies, it should be off by default" (my personal take). But the feature itself has virtually no privacy consequences whatsoever for anybody, and Mozilla is at least trying to build a system that would legitimately improve the privacy situation on the internet created by companies like Google.
It does not affect you if you use an adblocker, this feature is meant to allow websites to have ad analytics without tracking.
User JohnFen on ycombinator's hacker news said it nicely and I'm lazy, so:
PPA means that my browser is doing the spying instead of a third party directly. That's certainly a privacy improvement, but I don't consider it sufficient.
"Sufficiently private" is a subjective call. I don't want to be spied on. Whether or not there are technological "privacy preserving" features baked into it doesn't alter that fundamental fact.
All that said, this isn't a bad enough move to get me to stop using Firefox, as long as I can keep it disabled. It does mean that I have to view Firefox with suspicion, though. I can't consider the browser to be my "user agent" anymore.
Well, since you copy-pasted, i will likewise share my favorite take on thr situation.
After reading about the actual feature (more), this seems like an absolutely gigantic non-issue. Like most anti-Mozilla stories end up being.
The whole thing is an experimental feature intended to replace the current privacy nightmare that is cross-site tracking cookies.
As-implemented it's a way for advertisers to figure out things like "How many people who went to our site and purchased this product saw this ad we placed on another site?", but done in such a way that neither the website with the ad, nor the website with the product, nor Mozilla itself knows what any one specific user was doing.
The only thing I looked for but could not find an answer on one way or the other is if Mozilla is making any sort of profit from this system. I would guess no but actually have no idea.
There are definitely things that can be said about this feature, like "Fuck ad companies, it should be off by default" (my personal take), or "It's a pointless feature that's doomed to failure because it'll never provide ad companies with information as valuable as tracking cookies, so it'll never succeed in its goal to replace tracking cookies" (also my take). But the feature itself has virtually no privacy consequences whatsoever for anybody.
I'm absolutely convinced there's a coordinated anti-Firefox astroturfing campaign going on lately.
They said they'd open source Pocket and they didn't. In fact, they've simply allowed it to rot and just removed features. So here I think the skepticism is warranted.
It is very privacy friendly [...]
What makes you believe that? The most information I could find about this is that it doesn't "save your session data." The Orbit privacy policy also seems a bit bare, and I can't decide if that's a good thing or not.
Either way, you're still sending data to a third party service to process. Might be worth it for some people.
No association with any account. Therefore, no profiling.
Facebook and Google profile you with no account. Accounts aren't required for tracking.
So mozilla is paying the server costs for this, what's the business model?
AI
I’m just glad it’s an add on/extension. A lot of the crap baked into browsers these days is just bloat nobody wants or uses.
Probably not for me as I'm not interested in a summarizing tool, but I'm not against AI in general.
OAN, I think over time, the community will see that AI was a bubble, but in the same way that the internet was a bubble back in the day.
OAN, I think over time, the community will see that AI was a bubble, but in the same way that the internet was a bubble back in the day.
Surprised to see this opinion on Lemmy haha. Yep, totally agree with ya here!
Everyone wants a Her style personal assistant — as in one that is personal-context aware, can simplify, and generally enrich their lives (not for emotional support) — but if most people knew how unintelligent AI is, how spectacularly it fails, and how dangerous it is to integrate it into information systems and (especially) give it any ability to act ... Literally nobody would want to give it access to all their data, or use it beyond an advisory role.
Perhaps I'm a luddite - but I unequivocally do not want an assistant like that. I dislike even the basic commands of google assistant. I can do the tasks better and faster than than the assistant can.
Amen to that. I'm not a busy CEO of four companies, I don't need or want an assistant, digital or otherwise. I want to read through articles and watch videos, I can scroll/fast-forward through myself if I feel like it. And while we're at it, I don't really need or want personalized anything - just give me ALL the search results and I'll sort through them myself. Luddite? Maybe, but I literally cannot think of a case where this would be useful or helpful to me...
The general tone in this thread seems so very different from when "Mozilla is working on AI" was first announced
Ooh, I just tried it out and I can tell I'm going to love it - if not this specific plugin (the UI needs some work) then this general concept of a plugin.
I just popped over to Youtube and went to a ten-minute video of something or other, clicked the "summarize transcript" button, and within a few seconds I had a paragraph-long summary of what the whole video was about. There have been sooo many Youtube videos over the years that I've reluctantly watched with a constant "get to the point, man!" Frustration. Now I'll know if it's worth it.
Hm...could be useful for those times you want to read a guide but can only find one in video form
Indeed. And after generating the summary, there's a chat field below that where you can ask the AI to elaborate on particular subjects. This is really nice.
Do you have the SponsorBlock add-on installed? Most videos have user-submitted sections that it lets your skip. Also, a highlighted part.
RIGHT?!!! IT'S SO FKIN AMAZING
This is especially going to be useful for me as a student. It's just feels like browser 2.0 at this point haha
Huh, I'll have to check it out then. This will be especially useful for Louis Rossmann videos because he rambles and repeats himself a lot.
Can I just trade in that LLM for the old Firefox please?
Maybe they could focus on developing a web browser instead...
Considering how google is making chrome worse every day, they could do only security updates and still be the best browser.
