The best parts of Multi Account Containers are truly streamlined with third party extensions.
Temporary Containers and Container Bookmarks elevate the experience to a new level.
I really wish that Firefox could embrace some of this functionality as native, or make it easier for these developers to integrate their extensions into the Firefox ecosystem.
Etymologically, I think the word "tweet" was slowly being supplanted by "post" even before Twitter's name was officially changed to X. After all, "post" is universal, and there were many uses of thingposting that go back years, even on Twitter itself.
Based on Mozilla's documentation, it looks like CHIPS only applies to "cross site" cookies that are just accessible on different subdomains of the same site. A third party cookie could share data between a.site.example and b.site.example if it asked nicely, but not on site2.example.
If this isn't about it subdomains exclusively, it's not apparent to me. But it's all pretty confusing, and CHIPS appears to be just one minor thing that Google introduced when they were creating Privacy Sandbox back in 2022. (You know, to facilitate the total removal of third-party cookies, something they eventually backtracked on anyway.)
Sounds like a search engine with extra steps. Kudos to them for removing one of the extra steps, which would usually involve going to a search engine and then finding and vetting sources anyway... AI appears, to me, to be nothing but a rough draft generator that requires both input from a human and output with the draft it creates.
If I've learned anything from this community, it's that having just one open source alternative to a closed source POS run by Google is not the ideal! Competition is always healthy.
With introduction of even more AI services to Firefox I wanted to express that to me it does seem like Firefox is missing with development of features. This sentiment is echoed by a lot of people in my social bubble of technologists, ethicists and other people with same priorities as what one could think are values which Firefox was built on.
Those concerns are in my opinion very valid. The machine learning models have shown to be unreliable - just some of the recent examples from AI products made by large corporations: pointing users to eat pizza with glue, providing false information about just about anything. There are a number of ethical issues yet to be resolved with usage of AI, from its intense usage of computing resources that adds up to electric grid demands. Through privacy and possible copyright violations of datasets that power the models. To an entire bag of other issues monitored by excellent resources such as AIAAIC repository.
AI/Machine learning is an amazing field with many likely applications, and yet, its recent rise to fame is characterized by failures and issues in many implementations. Personally I often don't even see whether the application of AI is truthfully necessary, in many cases a human would do a more trustworthy and fast task of information gathering than a large machine learning model.
When we compare current state of "AI", does it reflect what Firefox stands for? Does it reflect Mozilla's principals?
Let's compare.
LLMs are known for being a black box. Depending on our definition of "open and accessible", LLMs can be a very free resource or a completely inaccessible black box of math.
It's clear that LLMs pose a privacy risk to Internet users. LLMs pose risk in at least two ways - because the data they are trained on sometimes contains private information due to negligent training process. In this case users of a learned model can possibly access private information. The second risk is of course usage of 3rd party services that may use information to infringe on privacy of users. While Mozilla in blog assures that "we are committed to following the principles of user choice, agency, and privacy as we bring AI-powered enhancements to Firefox", it's unclear how supporting such services as "ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral" helps protect Firefox user privacy. Giving users choice should not compromise their safety and privacy.
In my opinion in the process of designing AI functionalities on top of Firefox there was no evaluation on how those functionalities can benefit the public. There are a number of issues as mentioned above with the LLMs, they can be dangerous and work in detriment to users. Investing and supporting in technology of this type may lead to terrible consequences with little actual benefit.
In addition Mozilla claims:
I argue that AI models are the opposite to that. AI output is not verifiable. They are working against sharing knowledge by making seemingly accurate information that turn out to be false.
I ask Mozilla to reevaluate impact of AI considering all of those points. I ask on behalf of myself as well as many users that I see on Fediverse being greatly worried and frustrated with AI changes added on top of Firefox. There is certainly a lot of potential greatness that could be done with AI, but those steps must be taken responsibly.
There's probably lots of situations in anything but rural environments where open Wi-Fi networks are either already available, or highly likely to be. Dorms, apartments, anything like that becomes a mess.
I'm really sorry, but all I have is confidence and a little surface-level knowledge that self-hosting is possible.
What happens when there's an open Wi-Fi connection close enough for the smart TV to connect to?
Ente and Immich are both projects like that, they're both trying to be drop-in replacements for Google Photos. Immich requires you to self-host, and Ente makes it an option that doesn't make it look too daunting.
The pricing is weird: Immich (like other FUTO sponsored projects) has a WinRAR-style license that requires you to pay them for hosting an instance, but only once, and you can technically ignore it. Ente, meanwhile, allows you to use their apps with third-party instances without charging for the privilege.
I would definitely recommend checking out either. I held out for a long time, because I thought image hosting might not be useful (and because deleting local photos is still a bit of a crapshoot, both backup-wise and functionality-wise) but it turns out to be pretty nifty.
If Mozilla must throw money at AI, this is the way to go... I guess. Ente is trying to build a Google Photos replacement that translates image contents into searchable text while being fully end to end encrypted (read: as private as it gets), after all. Ente also allows you to fully self-host, so you can get these benefits without even trusting their servers.
Out of the $65 million Mozilla has committed to throwing at for-profit and AI companies (that's roughly 9.4 Mitchell Baker Salaries), $100,000 is a drop in the bucket, only 1.44% of the size of a Mitchell Baker Salary.
I remain skeptical about Mozilla's commitment to "open source AI models" when I haven't seen a single blob of AI data released that is reproducible or open source. They are black boxes, and black boxes so closed that not even the people that created them could tell you what's inside of them (unless we count the blood, sweat, and tears of the underpaid workers behind it).
Full disclosure: I am a paying Ente subscriber
I recently downloaded Firefox Nightly and noticed some new settings that were enabled by default:
- Suggestions from Firefox Nightly
Get suggestions from the web related to your search- Suggestions from sponsors
Support Firefox Nightly with occasional sponsored suggestions
The link in the UI doesn't mention sponsorships anywhere. But this page does:
Who are Mozilla’s partners for sponsored suggestions?
We partner with organizations to serve up some of these suggestion types... For sponsored results, we primarily work with adMarketplace, while also providing non-sponsored results from Wikipedia.
This page links to the adMarketplace Privacy Policy which makes it pretty clear this company is okay with collecting your IP address and passing it to further unnamed entities.
Elsewhere, they say Firefox sends them "the number of times Firefox suggests or displays specific content and your clicks on that content, as well as basic data about your interactions with Firefox Suggest", and then will share interaction information "in an aggregate manner with our partners".
Update: Switched the link from the Desktop to the Mobile version. Added more quotes from FF, and bolded info about their one named AdTech partner.
Done in Boost.
Lemmy client devs? I have used quite a few Lemmy clients, and none of the ones I have tried (at least, the ones that have the best UIs IMO) support it.
For what it's worth, Mastodon clients also seem to have either slick user interfaces or they are packed with features, but usually more of one equates with less of the other. It probably depends on which one the developers want to spend more time on. Since Mastodon (and the wider Fediverse) and Lemmy specifically are a bit different, it seems like Lemmy devs have opted to not handle the idiosyncrasies of something that is not Lemmy specific.