this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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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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[–] reddig33@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

I’m just glad it’s an add on/extension. A lot of the crap baked into browsers these days is just bloat nobody wants or uses.

[–] 0x0@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Maybe they could focus on developing a web browser instead...

[–] Railcar8095@lemm.ee 1 points 2 months ago

Considering how google is making chrome worse every day, they could do only security updates and still be the best browser.

[–] cloudless@lemmy.cafe 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] n2burns@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 months ago (12 children)

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.

[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] skulblaka@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] dantheclamman@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] toothbrush@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

then why make it closed source to begin with?

[–] vinnymac@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

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.

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[–] CluckN@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago

It’s provocative it gets the people going.

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[–] treadful@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] tb_@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

The general tone in this thread seems so very different from when "Mozilla is working on AI" was first announced

[–] AceBonobo@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

So mozilla is paying the server costs for this, what's the business model?

[–] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 1 points 2 months ago (8 children)

If you really care for an LLM, run it locally... Not sure if this does it...

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[–] FreshLight@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago

Can I just trade in that LLM for the old Firefox please?

[–] iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 months ago
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