LWN: Comments on "Firefox 141.0 released"

AI for tab groupings?

Thalience — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 17:19:14 +0000

From what I can tell, the real feature is an abstraction layer for inference models. The tab grouping thing looks like just a proof-of-concept / example consumer of that API.

Maybe it's directly useful for some people, but I don't think that is why Mozilla developed it.

Unit conversion

KJ7RRV — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 23:33:19 +0000

I have never looked at the source code of GNU units, but since it's a command-line utility, I would assume it would need some changes to work as a library; perhaps that's what was meant?

More obnoxiousness

ccchips — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 18:39:29 +0000

This is embarrassing! I forgot that 141 uses themes for such purposes, and I had installed "dark theme" to correct my problem. I had to go to Google AI to find this out; I asked if Firefox still had a built-in "dark theme" and it said no, I would have to go to the themes site and download it now. Another waste of time....

More obnoxiousness

ccchips — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 18:33:36 +0000

Oddly, the top of my screen has suddenly fixed itself. Maybe a reboot after 141 install fixed it....

De-pinned tabs sigh

mathstuf — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 17:47:52 +0000

Mine are stable except where I have tabs pinned in containers other than those the "open in by default" page intercepts the initial load and I have to re-pin the desired container tab as the interception tab opening is unpinned. But I have 3 in one instance and 5 in another; not sure if my counts are low or high here (guessing "low").

Unit conversion

mathstuf — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 17:45:25 +0000

Aside: why the use of "convert" rather than "compile"? Is it really any different than any other target?

AI for tab groupings?

nix — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 17:35:03 +0000

It's probably useful for people (like me) with so many tabs that we never bothered to go through them and set up groups.

De-pinned tabs sigh

smurf — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 15:07:10 +0000

Strange. I Never had that problem.

De-pinned tabs sigh

ceplm — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 13:15:05 +0000

I would be more interested in fixing the order of pinned tabs. I don’t know what I do, but order of pinned tabs changes all the time. It is hard to do https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/04/22/Tab-Lore with that.

Unit conversion

ballombe — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 13:04:57 +0000

They could use GNU units which does a great job. They could even convert it to wasm.

Unit conversion

roryi — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 12:59:01 +0000

I certainly do this often - ctl+l to get to the browser address bar is two keystrokes further than typing 'units' in my terminal, *and* the address bar method almost always auto-completes intelligently (unless I'm using really obscure units).

The list of units at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/solve-math-calculati... looks reasonable as a first pass, but I hope it'll expand to cover date/time and derived units ("mph to m/s" would be a good test case, if anyone from Mozilla is reading). I'd also really like it to at least do some basic spelling correction, rather than relying on me remembering how to spell farheneit, er, fahrenheit correctly first time...

I stick to whatever version of firefox-esr comes with Debian stable, so it'll be a while before I get this feature - I hope that, by the time I do, the firefox-native version is as good as the duckduckgo one.

AI for tab groupings?

arafel — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 11:39:13 +0000

It's unclear to me why we need a local AI model suggesting tab groupings... is that something people struggle with, and I'm not realising it?

De-pinned tabs sigh

mathstuf — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 11:23:13 +0000

Does it happen with a fresh profile?

Unit conversion

paulj — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 09:43:22 +0000

Glad I'm not the only LWN reader who initially wondered why old money was a new feature in Firefox.

Really showing our age here. ;)

Unit conversion

farnz — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 09:31:03 +0000

I suspect that they have data showing that a reasonable number of Google searches made through the address bar are doing unit conversion (which Google does to a surprisingly high standard); e.g. if you search Google for "1 day in seconds", it suggests that you're looking for 86,400 seconds.

Given that this functionality is being used, might as well remove the network round trip. Now all they have to do is get as good at it as Google :-)

Didn't they have autogrouping before

aragilar — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 09:25:04 +0000

I recall that autogrouping existed for the original tab groups (before they were ripped out). Are we now at the stage where the original reasons for decisions being made are so totally lost and forgotten that Mozilla is reinventing features they previously argued against?

Unit conversion

gerdesj — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 08:26:45 +0000

"1d in s"

Surely that would be 1/12! There are 12 pence in one shilling.

De-pinned tabs sigh

smurf — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 06:10:25 +0000

Well on my system the pinned and unpinned areas are *not* separate; there is no separator bar between them which I could drag.
No, I don't have an userChrome.css or similar shenanigans.

De-pinned tabs sigh

smurf — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 06:05:20 +0000

Owch. I know I'll have a ton of fun finding this problem then. Not.

De-pinned tabs sigh

mathstuf — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 04:40:37 +0000

The pinned area can now be scrolled independently. You can drag-resize it using the separator bar. I was also confused at first, but it's…fine once you discover it.

More obnoxiousness

ccchips — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 23:45:26 +0000

Now, I can't hange the banner part of the screen to system defaults. I have dark theme working fine, but the address bar and all that at the top is a bright spotlight in my eyes. What changes have been made to the toolkit???

Unit conversion

dskoll — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 21:55:56 +0000

Ah, thanks for the explanation. Also explains why it wouldn't convert nanometres to light-years. 😛

No regressin testing?

atai — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 21:42:54 +0000

It is a non-profit... and you are the tester!

"Obnebulated" (was No regression testing?)

dskoll — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 21:41:54 +0000

Re: "obnebulated", the Oxford English Dictionary will need to update its page that currently reads: "This word is now obsolete. It is last recorded around the 1830s." 🙂

No regressin testing?

archaic — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 20:29:24 +0000

> our CSS code is fairly obnebulated.

Spelling aside, +1000 for today's word of the day! :)

Unit conversion

excors — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 20:29:02 +0000

I believe it's interpreting that as 1 degree = 3600 arcseconds, which is technically correct but not what any normal human would expect.

Looks like the code is at https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/blob/FIREFOX_1... (plus adjacent files for temperatures and timezones), which doesn't have any support for time units at all. And it's definitely not AI, it's just a regex looking for "number unit (in|to|=) unit".

De-pinned tabs sigh

ianmcc — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 20:23:02 +0000

I'm using 141.0 and pinned tabs stay visible on the left side, even when scrolling.

De-pinned tabs sigh

josh — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 19:55:25 +0000

I have Firefox 140 here, and pinned tabs stay visible at all times.

No regressin testing?

daroc — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 19:54:59 +0000

If the same thing happened to another site, that makes me suspect that it was the media queries.

The way LWN site themes work is:
- If the user is logged in and has specified values in their preferences, that overrides everything
- Otherwise, if the CSS prefers-color-scheme media query is set to "dark" or "light", use that color scheme
- Otherwise, default to the light scheme

So if Firefox changed how it initializes the prefers-color-scheme setting, that could explain it; perhaps it used to pick up the "dark" default from your OS, and stopped doing that.

No regressin testing?

ccchips — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 19:46:09 +0000

Went to my LWN account settings and set dark-mode colors in 'bulk options" and it worked. I have no idea how that got lost just by updating Firefoxx...same problem with Google's dark settings.

Unit conversion

intelfx — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 19:26:09 +0000

Hold up, though. I actually looked at the release notes and the unit converter does not appear to be AI-powered. I seem to have misunderstood the LWN's summarization.

No regressin testing?

daroc — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 19:12:08 +0000

Theoretically, the site CSS should default to using media queries to determine whether it should display the light or dark theme; I would not be surprised if an update messed with that in some way, because our CSS code is fairly obnebulated.

But you can override that setting in your account preferences, along with a lot of other details about how the site is rendered, as a workaround.

No regressin testing?

ccchips — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 18:57:20 +0000

This very web site is showing up black-on-white, after I changed the theme. Google doesn't work properly either. I think the people at Mozilla ought to spend more time fixing problems and less time changing things.

De-pinned tabs sigh

smurf — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 17:57:06 +0000

Sometime between 138 and 141, tab pinning changed so pinned tabs now scroll off the screen instead of being, well, pinned to the left (or top) of the tab bar (or sidebar).

*Sigh*. Hey Mozilla, kindly don't take away features people actually use! Also, what do you think "pin" means??

Unit conversion

intelfx — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 17:55:20 +0000

Yeah, this part makes no sense. Especially given the unit conversion is supposed to be, uh, entirely precise and deterministic process (both are things that generative AI sucks at), and also we have units(1) and qalc(1) perfectly capable of doing this with exactly zero AI involved.

It's getting harder and harder to continue taking Mozilla seriously.

Unit conversion

dskoll — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 17:26:23 +0000

Sigh, who asked for that? Anyway, for me it's buggy. "1d to s" gives me 3,600 sec. No wonder the days seem to fly by. It also doesn't do compound units; "1km/h to m/s" doesn't do anything.

LWN: Comments on "Firefox 141.0 released"

AI for tab groupings?

Unit conversion

More obnoxiousness

More obnoxiousness

De-pinned tabs *sigh*

Unit conversion

AI for tab groupings?

De-pinned tabs *sigh*

De-pinned tabs *sigh*

Unit conversion

Unit conversion

AI for tab groupings?

De-pinned tabs *sigh*

Unit conversion

Unit conversion

Didn't they have autogrouping before

Unit conversion

De-pinned tabs *sigh*

De-pinned tabs *sigh*

De-pinned tabs *sigh*

More obnoxiousness

Unit conversion

No regressin testing?

"Obnebulated" (was No regression testing?)

No regressin testing?

Unit conversion

De-pinned tabs *sigh*

De-pinned tabs *sigh*

No regressin testing?

No regressin testing?

Unit conversion

No regressin testing?

No regressin testing?

De-pinned tabs *sigh*

Unit conversion

Unit conversion

De-pinned tabs sigh

De-pinned tabs sigh

De-pinned tabs sigh

De-pinned tabs sigh

De-pinned tabs sigh

De-pinned tabs sigh

De-pinned tabs sigh

De-pinned tabs sigh

De-pinned tabs sigh

De-pinned tabs sigh