Reading that thread is painful. He complains about a feature that is in testing because he didn’t know he could enable it and then complains because it doesn’t work like how he wants it to even though he just had to expand the sidebar.
Samir you are breaking the thread. Triple sharp right!
Fast sharp right!
I had to immediately rewatch the video after reading this comment
He complains about the priority given.
@marsup They started working on one of these projects this year and it’s shipping. The other has been in the works for a decade. Guess which one is getting priority.
source. He is also very aware it’s not ready and even says so
@ePD5qRxX @marsup It’s very cool that this is possible, but (a) if you have to activate them in about:config, it’s not really “ready"
I agree with him. Mozilla’s priorities have been wack for more than a decade.
I don’t understand what he’s saying at all, though.
They announced both initiatives, LLM and built-in sidebar tabs, I think, even in the same blog post.
An LLM is much easier to integrate, of course it’s going to be ready a few months earlier.I do not understand what was supposedly worked on for 10 years. Assuming he means sidebar tabs because LLMs didn’t exist 10 years ago, yeah, they’ve done the work to allow for extensions to provide sidebar tabs. You install Tree-Style Tabs or similar and you have sidebar tabs.
But it is pretty obvious that it is not the point here, or isn’t it? The fact that Mozilla is putting work into AI instead of I don’t know rewriting more of the Firefox backend in rust, which was the initial purpose of the language, is offensive. The Mozilla/Firefox VPN is offensive, because it is shit (was shit when I tried it). Sneaking in advertisement IDs into Firefox which are enabled by default is offensive. Having a for profit branch of Mozilla is offensive.
These are all from memory, and probably not accurate, the point still stands, Mozilla puts stupid shit into Firefox nobody wants or needs, instead of developing it along user needs.
Firefox is the last bastion of independent browser development. miss me with $obscure_browser_project, because they have no market share, cannot be used by my granny and are often using components of different browsers.
This is all we got, the rest is chromium based and is developed by a advertisement company.
I just want them to not add stupid shit. It costs money, manpower, and my nerves. None of them are available in abundance.
“Why is company wasting time on X feature I don’t like instead of Y feature I like”
- people who’ve never worked on large projects developed by many people before
They can work on multiple things in parallel, and putting more people on project Y doesn’t always mean project Y gets done faster. Also some people do like AI tools and it’s certainly popular right now. Most people have never programmed before and don’t know what Rust is or why it would benefit them to have their browser written in Rust.
Mozilla VPN is rebranded mullvad, it should have been pretty good.
Mullvad doesn’t support port forwarding so it’s useless for most people that actually have a need for a VPN and aren’t just victims of influencer marketing making them believe they need a VPN
So, genuine question, what do you do using your VPN where you need port forwarding? I keep seeing people say that port forwarding is a requirement in their VPN but nobody says what they actually use it for.
To my knowledge you should only need that if you’re hosting something through your VPN but I don’t even know how that would work or why you would want to do that. If you’re doing that then why not just rent a remote server and not need the VPN? I can’t think of anything off the top of my head that would need to be hosted from home, accessible remotely, and be completely hidden behind a VPN.
You need port forwarding for peer-to-peer protocols like Bittorrent
I’ve never done any manual port forwarding for torrenting and everything seems to download and seed correctly. Does the client automatically do it? Is it only required for private trackers? Once again a genuine question because I only know just enough about all of this to avoid the letters from my ISP.
Torrenting only works if the peers can connect to each other. If you dont have a port forwarded, then you can only connect to other peers that have a forwarded port. At least one of the 2 parties connecting to each other needs an open port for the connection to happen.
If you are on a public tracker it can happen that a torrent is shown to have multiple seeders, but if you try downloading it without having an open port it won’t work unless at least one of those seeders has their port open. This is mostly a problem on public trackers, since many private trackers enforce their members to have working port forwarding.
So it is technically possible to download torrents without working port forwarding, but only if enough other other peers have port forwarding set up on their end and your tracker doesn’t (rightly) ban you for it.
Does the client automatically do it?
If you aren’t using a VPN then most torrent clients will automatically set up port forwarding on your router using Upnp. Unless Upnp is disabled in your routers settings. If you are using a VPN you usually need to set up port forwarding manually, but there are some vpn clients that do it automatically
Edit: this article explains it better than me: https://protonvpn.com/blog/port-forwarding/
It’s one thing to be disappointed by a business decision made by a company that you do not agree with, but to be offended by it seems a little much; especially when said decisions aren’t offensive to begin with (i.e., there is no political/religious/sexual/social ties).
I see two possible solutions (there may be more):
- Open a respectful discussion with one or more of the core developers to see if they can shed some light on the decisions made.
- Become a contributor to the project and make pull requests for the changes you want to see implemented. Of course, talk to the developers first so you don’t waste your time on a contribution they don’t want.
Keep in mind that neither of those options guarantee that you’ll get what you want. Developers do not owe users for decisions they (or higher ups) make on a project. Also, they are not required to accept outside contributions if it goes against their roadmap.
- I don’t think that the core developer would disagree much, I think it’s a problem of project decision made by that projects government body which is the Mozilla foundation and Mozilla Corp. So I would need to have a civilized conversation with these bodies executives.
- I can’t even script properly without accidentally deleting my home directory, so I don’t think that’s a valid path either.
Talking to core developers can yield a lot of information about a project; both about whatever decision-making body has decided, and under-the-radar things they’d like to see. Plus it never hurts to ingratiate yourself to the folks doing the heavy lifting.
As for contributing, you can do more than just coding. And who knows, it could eventually lead to something else you might like (e.g., qa, documentation, evangelism, etc).
I was very confused by this tweet because I have no idea what chatbot he’s talking about, or what side tabs he’s talking about.
I am generally against putting AI in everything not because I think AI is necessarily a fad or anything, I simply don’t need 400 different iterations of the same technology
For what it’s worth, I don’t want tabs or AI in the sidebar. And I don’t want a sidebar
I want an optional sidebar because degenerates who are wrong still deserve the choice.
NO THEY DONT
I’d just like sidebar tabs instead of 4 visible tabs at the bottom of my window in Excel please.
You can right click the bottom left.button and scroll at least vs pressing right or left a billion times but we better not allow someone to see more than four tabs…
Instructions unclear, now you get two sidebars one for each side, another bar at the bottom, all filled with chatbots so you can chatbot while you chatbot. There’s a fee for each one though. Shit isn’t free.
We used to joke in 2010s: what is Internet Explorer? It’s a program that is used to download a browser.
Nowadays, what is Mozilla Firefox? It’s a repository you fork to make a browser.
Firefox forks have dozens of users! Dozens!
Yes but dozens of forks with dozens of users is still dozens.
Any number is a number of dozens if you think about it
This sounds pedantic, but honestly I just think the language of it is very interesting:
Any number can be dozens, except 1 or -1.
0 dozens, Pi dozens, 4.5 dozens, 1 dozen.
And now the word dozen has lost all visual meaning to me.
To sound (and be) even more pedantic though, any number except one (1) can be dozens, but truly any number can be a number of dozens, as my comment said.
1 is a number.
Except 12. That’s a single dozen.
As long as I can use something that isn’t Chrome’s 0dayware with 5 CVEs a week, I don’t care how many people use it.
But they’re also working on sidebar tabs. It’s out in nightly already
Don’t get me wrong, I think what Mozilla did is absolutely stupid. But unless it’s spying on you as you browse or whatever, how is this a problem? From what I see here in Developer Edition, it just iframes the chat window and docks it in a sidebar. It’s just bloat for people who don’t use it, or turn it off, and an upgrade for people who will use it.
My only problem with it is that this kind of stuff should be an add-on.
I haven’t looked into the chatbot thingy at all yet, but if it meets basic quality standards (local LLM, not too large in size, actually helpful), then personally, I do actually think that it should be included by default, because it’ll primarily help out the kind of users who don’t know to install add-ons.
Like, people had the same complaint with the translation feature they included, and I’m just seeing my dad who doesn’t speak English, who would never hear of such an add-on, where this just opens up a big chunk of the web to him.
Its functionality to integrate with whatever LLM you use - local or SAAS. I can’t say I’m excited about the feature, but I think it’s also a bit silly that people are angry about it (though I take the point about development priority).
It’s healthy for Firefox’s market share to keep feature parity with Edge and other browsers that have the same function but with a manufacturer-pushed service.
Wait, it’ll actually let you use local LLMs?
That would legitimately help me out. I use LLMs a lot for simple data restructuring, or rewording of explanations when I’m reading through certain sources. I was worried they would just do a simple ChatGPT API integration and have that be the end of it, but maybe this will end up being something I’d actually use.
It is spying on you. https://make-firefox-private-again.com/
about:config
dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled
set to false
