Orbit is an LLM addon/extension for Firefox that runs on the Mistral 7B model. It can summarize a given webpage, YouTube videos and so on. You can ask it questions about stuff that’s on the page. It is very privacy friendly and does not require any account to sign up.
I personally tried it, and found it to be incredibly useful! I think this is going to be one of my long term addons along with uBlock Origin, Decentraleyes and so on. I would highly recommend checking this out!
Can I just trade in that LLM for the old Firefox please?
“we have a few potential paths to follow depending on the feedback we receive. Running a truly local LLM is one that we’re researching at the moment”
In that case, fuck off with this bullshit until your research is done, that’s some feedback for you.
- I don’t think this is the proper channel for feedback.
- Rude
- Fuck you. This is an optional extension for those who want to try. Do you want the final version of a piece of free software? Then you can go lie in a ditch because hopefully it will continue to evolved for years. It’s astonishing the entitlement of some people.
- Good local LLM that can run on most hardware is a very interesting project. Usually you need at least a GPU to get it to run. The fact that is only summarizing might be because it this.
You’re right, it was rude. Sorry.
So mozilla is paying the server costs for this, what’s the business model?
AI
It is very privacy friendly […]
What makes you believe that? The most information I could find about this is that it doesn’t “save your session data.” The Orbit privacy policy also seems a bit bare, and I can’t decide if that’s a good thing or not.
Either way, you’re still sending data to a third party service to process. Might be worth it for some people.
No association with any account. Therefore, no profiling.
Ooh, I just tried it out and I can tell I’m going to love it - if not this specific plugin (the UI needs some work) then this general concept of a plugin.
I just popped over to Youtube and went to a ten-minute video of something or other, clicked the “summarize transcript” button, and within a few seconds I had a paragraph-long summary of what the whole video was about. There have been sooo many Youtube videos over the years that I’ve reluctantly watched with a constant “get to the point, man!” Frustration. Now I’ll know if it’s worth it.
RIGHT?!!! IT’S SO FKIN AMAZING
This is especially going to be useful for me as a student. It’s just feels like browser 2.0 at this point haha
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Do you have the SponsorBlock add-on installed? Most videos have user-submitted sections that it lets your skip. Also, a highlighted part.
Huh, I’ll have to check it out then. This will be especially useful for Louis Rossmann videos because he rambles and repeats himself a lot.
If you really care for an LLM, run it locally… Not sure if this does it…
Don’t want to install and maintain 10gigs of cuda stuff on my PC. Next, my mum won’t know how to do that. Her laptop is a potato. This add-on makes all of this way easier.
Well that comes with shit ton of privacy risk. If y’all are comfortable, then it is your choice
You’re not generating models at this point. You don’t need that kind of hardware to run these.
You don’t need CUDA, it’s actually pretty easy. You can run the Mistral 7B model this add-on is based on using GPT4All. It doesn’t require much, if any, technical knowledge.
HOLY HELL THAT’S COOL. It can do so much too!!!
I locally installed some small LLM model more than a year ago. It took up like 25 gigs or something along with all CUDA libraries n stuff. It was alright, but I figured that cloud based solutions were the best for my use case, as they were better and for free.
I had no idea that open sourced AI progressed so much in the last year. Amazing stuff!
It depends how you run it etc. You may have not been using a quantized model.
Maybe they could focus on developing a web browser instead…
Considering how google is making chrome worse every day, they could do only security updates and still be the best browser.
Most important part of the thread:
In it’s beta stage, Orbit is currently not open-source. This doesn’t mean it will remain this way forever. If orbit gains traction and we have the resources and funding to support an Open-Source project, I’m sure things could change.
Press X to doubt.
Has Mozilla done sometime to deserve this skepticism? They were founded on open-source and AFAIK have continued to support open-source. Mozilla is far from a perfect organization, but if this project was a success I think it would be out of character for them to keep it closed-source.
Has Mozilla done sometime to deserve this skepticism?
Yes, their “privacy friendly ad measurement” that’s opt out is a faux pas that I just can’t forgive. I used to donate to the fuckers.
That feature (more) they’ve been getting all that negative press over for the past two days is an absolutely gigantic non-issue. Like most anti-Mozilla stories end up being.
The whole thing is an experimental feature intended to replace the current privacy nightmare that is cross-site tracking cookies. As-implemented it’s a way for advertisers to figure out things like “How many people who went to our site and purchased this product saw this ad we placed on another site?”, but done in such a way that neither the website with the ad, nor the website with the product, nor Mozilla itself knows what any one specific user was doing.
There are definitely things that can be said about this feature, like “Fuck ad companies, it should be off by default” (my personal take). But the feature itself has virtually no privacy consequences whatsoever for anybody, and Mozilla is at least trying to build a system that would legitimately improve the privacy situation on the internet created by companies like Google.
I don’t think that whether it has a privacy impact even matters. What matters is how it demonstrates Mozilla’s attitude towards user consent.
It does not affect you if you use an adblocker, this feature is meant to allow websites to have ad analytics without tracking.
User JohnFen on ycombinator’s hacker news said it nicely and I’m lazy, so:
PPA means that my browser is doing the spying instead of a third party directly. That’s certainly a privacy improvement, but I don’t consider it sufficient.
“Sufficiently private” is a subjective call. I don’t want to be spied on. Whether or not there are technological “privacy preserving” features baked into it doesn’t alter that fundamental fact.
All that said, this isn’t a bad enough move to get me to stop using Firefox, as long as I can keep it disabled. It does mean that I have to view Firefox with suspicion, though. I can’t consider the browser to be my “user agent” anymore.
Well, since you copy-pasted, i will likewise share my favorite take on thr situation.
After reading about the actual feature (more), this seems like an absolutely gigantic non-issue. Like most anti-Mozilla stories end up being.
The whole thing is an experimental feature intended to replace the current privacy nightmare that is cross-site tracking cookies.
As-implemented it’s a way for advertisers to figure out things like “How many people who went to our site and purchased this product saw this ad we placed on another site?”, but done in such a way that neither the website with the ad, nor the website with the product, nor Mozilla itself knows what any one specific user was doing.
The only thing I looked for but could not find an answer on one way or the other is if Mozilla is making any sort of profit from this system. I would guess no but actually have no idea.
There are definitely things that can be said about this feature, like “Fuck ad companies, it should be off by default” (my personal take), or “It’s a pointless feature that’s doomed to failure because it’ll never provide ad companies with information as valuable as tracking cookies, so it’ll never succeed in its goal to replace tracking cookies” (also my take). But the feature itself has virtually no privacy consequences whatsoever for anybody.
I’m absolutely convinced there’s a coordinated anti-Firefox astroturfing campaign going on lately.
Pocket.
That’s a pretty good answer. I knew Mozilla had bought it, and were operating it as an independent subsidiary. I didn’t know they promised to open-source it over 7 years ago.
Firefox is sustained (biggest funder) by google who needs artificial competitions to not be labeled a monopoly.
Its still the best browser i can think off that isn’t chromium but i would recommend staying skeptical.
then why make it closed source to begin with?
Believe it or not but it requires resources to open source an internal product, especially one that may have been an experiment where some small team was able to convince leadership could become useful to the masses.
React.js at Facebook is a good example of this. It took a lot of effort to externalize and open source React, and tbh the codebase is still kind of garbage when it comes to contributions from those unfamiliar with its intricacies.
but… you dont have to accept contributions? you can just make it open source and tidy it up at the same time?
In a different world maybe, but I can already see the headlines, “Mozilla open sources lackluster AI tool”. PR is unfortunately a thing, and once you miss that initial wave of interest, you’re unlikely to grab attention later without another marketing push. Mozilla is experienced in open sourcing software, so by now they’re pretty good at knowing when to do it and when not to. In other words, it says something that they chose not to do it in this case.
Yeah, it definitly tells me something, namely that I should not use the tool.
Why would news publish articles about the code quality of the tool, instead of its functionality?
Now they have negative press about its closed source nature, which is a calculated risk they took, just to open source it soon anyway? I doubt it.
So risk someone else beating you to market? And they’ll either have the resources to make it superior, therefore making yours irrelevant, or they’ll make it inferior, which generated bad press for you
Eh, skepticism should be the default.
But I agree with you, nothing they’ve done is inherently bad, though they’ve done some abysmally stupid things in the way they handle them.
But I also really wish they’d stop fucking around with half-assed things like this and focus on core utilities.
Gross.
