Firefox sidebar

Posted Sep 3, 2024 19:06 UTC (Tue) by geofft (subscriber, #59789)
Parent article: Firefox 130.0 released

I'm a little bit surprised the default configuration of the AI chatbot isn't a local/offline one - all of the options are online services. Certainly a local one isn't going to be nearly as powerful or featureful as the flagship cloud services, but given Mozilla's work on llamafile (previous LWN coverage), I expected them to go that direction. Maybe it's coming in the future?

On a tangent, they're doing a few more things with the sidebar in Nightly. I gave the Vertical Tabs feature a try for a week or so, but I couldn't retrain my instincts to associate the shortcuts for switching to a particular tab (Ctrl-1 or Cmd-1 for the first tab, Ctrl-2 for the second, etc.) with a list of tabs that went orthogonal to the keys on my keyboard.

Firefox sidebar

Posted Sep 3, 2024 20:24 UTC (Tue) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link] (2 responses)

Local ones that are powerful enough require a dedicated GPU with sufficient VRAM.

Nothing you find on a typical laptop.

Firefox sidebar

Posted Sep 3, 2024 22:39 UTC (Tue) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (1 responses)

Or an NPU, which many current laptops do have.

Firefox sidebar

Posted Sep 3, 2024 23:31 UTC (Tue) by mussell (subscriber, #170320) [Link]

You just need drivers for that NPU, which Linux does not have.

Also you need a single API for all NPUs, which no one seems interested in making.

Firefox sidebar

Posted Sep 5, 2024 14:01 UTC (Thu) by denials (subscriber, #3413) [Link]

The Treestyle Tabs extension works pretty well for managing the dozens of tabs I have open at any given time. You can nest groups of tabs on the side, but still have the standard horizontal tabs.