Firefox 130 Now Available With WebCodecs API, Third-Party AI Chatbots 55
Firefox 130 introduces several enhancements, including improved local translation handling, better Android page load performance, and the WebCodecs API for low-level audio/video processing on desktop platforms. Notably, it also supports third-party AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Gemini via the new Firefox Labs feature. Phoronix reports: The WebCodecs API is particularly useful for web-based apps like video/audio editors and video conferencing that may want control over individual frames of a video stream or audio chunks. For any web software interested in that low-level audio/video encode/decode handling there is now WebCodecs API working on the Firefox desktop builds. As for the third-party AI chatbots, here's what Mozilla's Ian Carmichael said back in June: "If you want to use AI, we think you should have the freedom to use (or not use) the tools that best suit your needs. Instead of juggling between tabs or apps for assistance, those who opt-in will have the option to access their preferred AI service from the Firefox sidebar to summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledge, all without leaving their current web page."
You can learn more about Firefox 130 via developer.mozilla.org. Binaries for Linux can be found at Mozilla.org.
You can learn more about Firefox 130 via developer.mozilla.org. Binaries for Linux can be found at Mozilla.org.
Dear /. Firefox experts (Score:5, Insightful)
What unwanted new features or UI changes shall we disable after installing this update? Asking for a friend.
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I actually wish they would make some UI changes to Firefox for Android. The current tab handling is awful and Chrome style tab grouping is one of the most requested features on their feedback site. Being able to close and switch tabs more easily would be great too.
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So they finally replaced the weather extension that was broken ages ago during one of the many revamps?
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Nice FP. I agree, though I tend to think of it in terms of money. Would I donate money to pay for that feature? Really hard for me to remember the last time I noticed a feature where the answer was "Yes". Probably password sync?
Alternatively, which of the current features that I am using would I donate money to continue using? Or you could word that in competitive terms and ask which features could motivate me to donate to Firefox rather than switch to a different browser? There are two categories of answer
Javascript (Score:4, Insightful)
...really has no business dealing with low level AV. Use a plugin written in C++ or Rust (if they exist) for proper performance.
Javascript has been developed way out of its comfort zone and its not very good at any of it. Its slow, bloated and inefficient and any apps written in it drag performance back 10-15 years compared to a compiled binary on the same machine which might not matter for static data but it really does matter for AV.
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Webassembly is just javascript wearing dark glasses and a hat with its coat lapels turned up. Its no faster.
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Not really. WebAssembly at least has native integers and looks like a stack-based VM. The trouble is it has to call out to JavaScript to interact with the outside world.
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No way I'm installing a binary plug-in in my browser, especially just to run some web app.
Javascript is crap but you can write in a better language and have it "compiled" to JS and/or Wasm.
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"Javascript is crap but you can write in a better language and have it "compiled" to JS and/or Wasm."
IOW write it in an efficient performant language and "compile" it into a dog slow one. Got it.
Re:Javascript (Score:4, Interesting)
Wasm isn't "dog slow", it's specifically designed to be the opposite of that. It's bytecode that gets compiled into native code in Firefox and Chrome.
In fact Javascript is compiled into native code too. Chrome actually starts executing it as soon as it is tokenized, and compiles it in parallel. Not sure what Firefox does.
Here's a paper comparing native C to Wasm: https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/h... [arxiv.org]
As you can see, Wasm is often about the same as native code, sometimes slower. Those are synthetic benchmarks though. If you compare real applications, e.g. the Internet Archive has emulators that are C compiled to Wasm, those apps are perfectly responsive and perform close enough to native to be extremely useful.
And you get the benefit of everything being inside a sandboxed browser, no downloads, no installing random shit you found on the internet. I'll trade that for a little worse performance.
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I've never seen games or AV run anything other than snail like in a browser compared to a native app so I'll take those comparisons with a large cellar of salt particularly since JIT performance is highly dependent on the context and type of CPU instructions plus it often causes horrendous CPU pipe stalling. Java has done JIT compilation for decades but its still a dog compared to C/C++ so I doubt browser authors have made some kind of radical discovery to improve things that the java devs couldn't.
The millions of dollars for the CEO ... (Score:4, Interesting)
were totally worth it after all!
https://lunduke.locals.com/pos... [locals.com]
I have been a supporter and contributor to Mozilla and Firefox from day one but the direction that org is heading recently is really repulsive.
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People who denounce meritocracy as racist, sexist and xenophobic don't care about opinions of racists, sexists and xenophobes who insist on pay reflecting merits of the CEO.
CEO wasn't hired on merit, and isn't going to be paid for merit either. Frankly, it wouldn't make sense to hire based on one thing, and reward based on another.
So I think it's good that Mozilla is following its creed and doing what it sees as the right thing to do. And with some luck, the recent anti-trust decisions will be upheld, Mozil
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Recently?
Mozilla's been over-paying their executives for ages, while their decisions are tanking the company. Focusing on chasing useless fads and trying desperately to clone Chrome's UI, for example.
Nobody left Firefox for Chrome because of the UI.
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They did admit they've ignored Firefox recently... (Score:2)
And they'd planned to return to focusing on it more. No idea how accurate that is, or what those other projects/tasks they'd worked on were. Or if they were worthwhile.
Would be nice to have a good way to get a more objective look at CEO results versus pay. How much would still happen if they didn't get in the way of everyone else... Versus what they pushed for that failed to matter/deliver. Etc... Not easy questions to answer, let alone create objective measures of (since any opinion can be manipulate
Firefox can't keep up. (Score:3)
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I have bad news about Manifest V2.
I've been using Firefox for Android for years, with Manifest V2 add-ons like uBlock Origin. Battery life has been terrible, it is really heavy on power consumption compared to Chrome.
Recently I thought I'd try the Manifest V3 version of uBlock Origin, called the "Lite" version. It only blocks about 80% of the stuff that the full version does, but it barely touches the battery. It's an order of magnitude more efficient. Puts Firefox on a par with Chrome, very nearly.
For desk
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I get five days of battery life on my $200 Moto phone while running Firefox constantly.
Except... for the times when I have to force it to quit because of the memory leak. Multiple times per day, usually.
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It must have a pretty incredible battery as even with light use I get about 2 days out of a Pixel 8 Pro, and it's considered to have somewhat above average battery life. That's running Chrome or Firefox with uBlock Lite.
What model of Motorola is it?
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Moto G Power 2021.
Sometimes I only get 4 days, but usually it's 5.
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Okay, Snapdragon 665 and a 5000mAh battery. My battery is actually 5050mAh, and the CPU is known to be more efficient than the older 665. Your screen is an IPS LCD, mine is OLED, but it should be the difference between 2-2.5x as much run time.
Do you keep yours in airplane mode or something? Disable WiFi and location? And how much use are we talking?
Tom's tested it and it lasted a couple of hours longer than comparable sub $300 phones in their benchmark (14 hours vs 12 for the others) so it's clearly not sup
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I do not disable anything, except that I explicitly turn off mobile data when I'm near wifi and then enable it and disable wifi when I am not near wifi. I leave location on, I use that all the time! It's been very handy for me to know when I got to certain places and I'm not particularly worried about Google knowing where I am (the telcos know already.) I use my device fairly frequently, I use it on breaks and at lunchtime. I have the brightness cranked and auto dimming off (I can dim it fine myself in low
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I don't see it crashing more often on Android than Chrome, nor it is using more resources or battery. The only annoying bug to me, is that autoplay videos is not always properly blocked. Also, it installs and updates on much older versions of Android than Chrome. And for the older devices whose root certificates have expired, it's the only browser that can go online on HTTPS websites (most of them) as it as its own certificate storage.
I never really understood why everybody jumped into the Chrome bandwagon,
Literally all I want (Score:2)
All I want is for them to fix the memory leak bug on mobile that has me force quitting Firefox multiple times per day.
They are drowning in Google money and can't fix shit.
Send that CEO to see the Titanic.
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To be fair, if you wanted a browser from old engineering staff people from Mozilla, you already went to Brave.
Mozilla informed all of us of their new priorities when Eich got kicked out for wrongthink.
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if you wanted a browser from old engineering staff people from Mozilla, you already went to Brave.
I don't need another chromium skin. Stop trying to turn Android into iOS.
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Pale Moon is unworkable for many modern sites and the performance is poop.
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I am well aware, and I am honest about the fact that I don't value differentiation from Chromium enough to use it since the Goanna split (well that and lead dev being an absolute asshole when it comes to caring about compatibility, but you probably need to have that kind of personality to run something like Pale Moon, so that's probably not a real negative).
But a lot of people use Pale Moon even with all the problems, because they do.
You made the claim that you value that highly. I'm merely pointing out tha
Re: Literally all I want (Score:2)
I didn't say I valued it more than actually being able to view sites.
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But you did use that argument to diss brave for no reason.
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Re: Literally all I want (Score:2)
Agreed. The Mozilla/Firefox leadership has been doing all the wrong things for ten years. Firefox has a lot of catch-up to do if it's ever going to become on par or even better than Chromium-derived browsers.
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And yet (Score:2)
Still no way to stop the notification harassment a new update is available. Something so simple yet apparently too difficult to implement.
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Still no way to stop the notification harassment a new update is available. Something so simple yet apparently too difficult to implement.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Mozilla\Firefox\DisableAppUpdate = 1 /usr/lib/firefox/distribution/policies.json
"policies":{"DisableAppUpdate":true}
So glad to see webcodecs getting more attention (Score:2)
Phones these days should be fully capable of hardware encoding videos, but that's a nightmare with current javascript. Client-side encoding can save servers a lot of trouble. Running ffmpeg with WASM for software encoding is just SO ugly in comparison.
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And cancel a lot of their good products. Remember Firefox transfer?
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No, it was for securely transferring documents. It was a great free service! Dropbox has a similar service but you have to be a subscriber to get half the tools Firefox offered.
Why not just do Chatbots through plug-ins? (Score:2)
I don't understand why Firefox need to implement anything at all for Chatbots. Why not just make them plug-ins like everything else?
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Chatbot? Time to Fork it, again! (Score:2)
"webcodecs API" (Score:2)
another name for yet another way to use stinky DRM in the web browser, this time, written in obfuscated javascript
I like FF, still (Score:1)
We're Doomed (Score:1)
I'd love to have an SVP plug-in use this... (Score:2)
Smooth Video Project is a video frame interpolater like how fancy TV's can do. Turn 24fps into fps for instance. And they've been pretty fair with licensing costs (though it is per machine/OS).
https://www.svp-team.com/ [svp-team.com]
Yes, there are ways to download videos and do this offline (SVPtube). I'd just rather be able to have it applied to 'everything', even DRM'd stuff played back through my browsers.
Zero idea if they're considering work on a version compatible with this, but it's what came to mind when I read
Why? (Score:2)
I've been using Firefox exclusively for longer than I can remember and I'll continue to do so, but Mozilla could have enough cash and cash equivalents to not be at the mercy of Googl