Comment by wtallis
9 hours ago
Mozilla should really try taking their extension ecosystem seriously, and deliver features like the AI chatbot integration as first-party extensions that come pre-installed but can be easily managed by users with a much better UI than about:config.
And then people would complain about Firefox being bloated with all these built-in extensions. And then if you don't pre-install them people will complain about needing to add all of these extra extensions.
Kinda, but if something can be built as an extension, it probably should be. It proves what you can do with the APIs, proves it can be replaced / forked by other people, and ensures a consistent level of isolation by default.
And if it can't... often it's worth asking if it should be possible.
There would still be decidedly fewer complaints, because extensions are vastly easier to manage and disable or remove than this long list of about:config settings. The fact that you cannot satisfy everybody simultaneously cannot be an excuse for failing to ship with sensible defaults and easy, discoverable customization.
Indeed, and this argument ("it will be too bloated") is often used by developers themselves to avoid (or hide) advanced features. I never quite understood it. Just put all the mysterious flags behind an "Advanced" menu, which normie users will know not to touch.
They right clicked on an image which is also a clickable link which adds the additional options for both links and images, a total of 11, to the defaults.
Apparently they've recently added a first party side bar for LLM integration, but I haven't tried it out yet.
Yes, that's one of the things that really should have been an extension. Tree Style Tab works alright as an extension-provided sidebar.
Putting the chat or sidebar in the core of the browser sounds very much like something done by a developer who wasn't around for Mozilla prior to Firefox, and isn't aware of the original goal of being the antithesis of the browser that included everything and the kitchen sink.