Comment by oidar

2 days ago

That sounds admirable. But it doesn't sound like a fast browser.

Maybe, but I would argue that some of these features are genuinely useful and important. Take translation, for example. It's not great to have to send off a page that potentially contains identifying content to Google, but it is the easiest way to handle the matter. Firefox uses local AI to perform a decent translation relatively quickly, and I'd like them to work on improving that capability.

  • Agreed on all counts. Right now there's not even a keyboard shortcut implemented (fiddly context menu only), and the translations are sometimes dodgy too, but I still use it. It's such peace of mind to know that the translation is happening entirely locally.

  • Many things that are not browsers are genuinely useful and important, this alone doesn't mean Mozilla should be doing them.

Well it does say that compute is a current bottleneck, but I doubt that'll stay that way forever. There's a ton of resources going into making AI run locally, quickly. It's already gotten loads better just last year.