[alturp]

Does it also remove Firefox's translation models that uses local CPU? I find that feature very useful and totally obliterated my dependence on Chrome's translate features. Models are surprisingly good, especially for languages like English, Spanish and German.

I can see the use of LLMs and machine learning tools like TTS, translators and grammar checkers to be integrated to browser, but only depending on local models or better, like Firefox's case to CPU optimized local models.

[roywiggins]

It explicitly doesn't, though they don't explain why not. It's not an on/off device distinction because it disables Firefox's automatic tab groups too.

A lot of anti-AI backlash seems to exempt machine translation, which as far as I can tell is just because it's been around for so long that people are comfortable with it and don't see it as new or AI-y, which imho spells doom for a lot of this- in ten years automatic tab groups will seem just as natural and non-intrusive as machine translation.

[fc417fc802]

It's not mere familiarity. Machine translation is immediately useful to me. I was going to pull up google translate anyway; keeping it local to my device improves both convenience and privacy.

A local LLM that I explicitly bring up to ask a question and dismiss (ie no CPU or RAM usage) when I'm done consulting it is nice. A piece of software I'm using interrupting what I'm doing to ask me a useless and annoying question or to make an unsolicited change to my workspace leaves me thinking about permanently uninstalling it.

I will never want automatic tab groups or automatic anything else. I don't even want an "integrated" desktop environment - I use i3 to get away from that. I hate all the useless bullshit half baked features that are constantly shoved in my face.

If the modern web was compatible with it I'd use a text based browser for 90% of what I do online. And if that were the case I'd still welcome a built in machine translation feature because it's an incredibly useful tool.

[roywiggins]

Firefox's translation by default does pop up to interrupt and ask if you want to translate a page that it's detected is in another language. We're just more used to that and it's a more reliable signal that you probably want to run a tool than most.

It's still relatively new in FF and I don't think I've seen anyone complaining about it annoying them with popups, even though it absolutely does throw up an interrupting overlay, especially on mobile.

[downsplat]

I definitely complain about this one. I can read a few languages, and rarely if ever browse a page in a language I don't understand, so popups with "do you want to translate this" are unwelcome here. It doesn't help that in the first iterations Firefox didn't offer a quick way to turn the whole thing off.

[fc417fc802]

You can disable the popup but still invoke the tool manually from the main menu. I reaffirm my previously expressed dissatisfaction with modern software "features" and add that there are plenty of defaults in Firefox that I personally dislike. That includes anything that pops up unsolicited without good reason.

[roywiggins]

From a UI perspective, auto tab groups are just an extra button as far as I can tell, so it's not clear why it's getting the axe from this site, just from a pure "this is annoying" point of view.

The flow is 1) you drag a tab over another tab and it suggests a name for the tab group and 2) you click on a tab group and another button offers to suggest more of your tabs you can add to the group. That's less intrusive than Firefox Translations are by default.

[corbindavenport]

The local translation in Firefox is an NMT model, not an LLM: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations-models?tab=r...

It's much more efficient on system resources than the larger LLMs downloaded by browsers for other tasks.

[Vinnl]

AFAIK the model for tab group suggestions is about the same size? (And I think that model is/can be used for other features as well?)

[alturp]

Thanks for clarification!

[roywiggins]

It's still a transformer architecture though, right?

[asadotzler]

These are tiny purpose built models with simple and safe use cases.

Do you also want to remove the ML that gets the results you want at the top of the address bar autocomplete. That's been around for 15 years and it's "AI" so might as well get rid of it right?

This "all ML sucks" because generative AI LLMs suck has to end. It's entirely a garbage take.

[nhinck2]

It doesn't because the enterprise group policy doesn't which is what this sets.

Mozilla decided to give businesses the ability to turn off generative AI features about 6 months ago.

[bluebarbet]

Indeed. For translation, local LLMs are a straightforward privacy win. Not that they're getting much credit for that.

[alturp]

Isn't it? I am totally looking forward to a grammar checker that can compete with DeepL or Grammarly that can run locally and not heavy on resources. This will complete the holy trinity of local and free natural language editing; translations, grammar/spell checker, thesaurus/dictionary!

There is Harper as local grammar checker; an amazing project, but it is only in English and not yet able to replace the mentioned tools: https://writewithharper.com/