Mozilla launches privacy friendly AI addon called "Orbit"

UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee to Technology@lemmy.world – 149 points – Try Orbit by Mozilla: a new AI productivity tool
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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!

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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.

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 generates bad press for you?

It’s provocative it gets the people going.

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.

What core utilities does Firefox need that it doesn't have? Honest question. I've been using it over a decade and never had it fail to do something I asked it to, and I'm a little out of the loop on the web browser development news cycle beyond the recent wave of Google Bad.

Mozilla has firefox and thunderbird. They're the two core utilities. The vpn attempt, the Mastodon server, that kind of stuff is fluff.

I may be using the wrong terminology? It was an offhand comment and that's the word that I picked out of my head, it might mean something different to a developer, I dunno.

But Mozilla, if you ignore what Google pays them, is not exactly a high profit endeavour, and we don't want it to be. So having what funds they have focused onto the things that matter is what I'd prefer they do. Mind you, if the vpn pulls enough in to generate funds rather than cost them, that's great.

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.

Well, that's been the basis for some other products. AMD and Intel comes to mind😊 They both have IP the other need and historically Intel has been the dominant one, but now the tables have turned somewhat.

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.

They said they'd open source Pocket and they didn't. In fact, they've simply allowed it to rot and just removed features. So here I think the skepticism is warranted.