Firefox Labs is Live!

[itskaren]

Hi everyone,

We’re excited to share that we’ve launched Firefox Labs, a brand new way to play with some of the projects that we’re working on. Firefox Labs is available both on the Nightly and Release versions of Firefox, giving you an easy way to access our experimental features. If you enable experiences in Firefox Labs, you’ll get a sneak peek of where Firefox could be going in the future – before everyone else! 

How Do I Get Started? If you’ve updated to Firefox 130, all it takes is a trip to about:preferences#experimental through the Awesomebar and a check of a box! 

Or you can navigate to there via Preferences > Firefox Labs.

You can turn the experience on and off whenever you wish. 

You can learn more about the Firefox Labs program in our dedicated support article. Our Firefox 130 Release Notes will mention new Labs features, too.

We’d Love Your Help! Firefox was made by people for people, and it was the community that helped our browser grow. We want to get back to our open-source roots and build better web experiences together with you–out in the open. As such, we warmly invite you to become our intrepid Firefox adventurers, testing out new features and sharing your experience with us. Moving forward, most of the experimental features we highlight will have a “Share feedback” link, which will take you directly to a dedicated feature post on Mozilla Connect. Please add any notes for improvements, issues, and questions as you play with any experiences we offer in Firefox Labs. You’ll be interacting with our product teams through Firefox Labs, and your feedback will steer us in a better direction towards future updates that will better serve your online needs. 

What’s Next? Right now, we’re building a queue of incoming Firefox experimental features that we’ll highlight on Labs. Since it just debuted, we’ll be making incremental changes to improve Labs while taking on new projects one-by-one, and we look forward to working with you a little more directly in our product development process. Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading. Let’s build things together, and let’s build things right!

[ThePillenwerfer]

 An interesting idea but there's nothing in the first batch that I'd ever use.

[wutongtaiwan]

Why didn't the sidebar and vertical tabs appear in the version 130 lab, since the AI has been added, by the way, the vertical tabs have also been added

[asafko]

Hi! We are actively working on improvements and fixes to both, so both are only available in Nightly for now (which updates twice a day). Putting sidebar and vertical tabs in the Labs release would have stranded folks with a version of still very imperfect features, and we wanted to avoid it until we can offer a good, polished experience.

[thesoloist]

I'm a big fan of Auto Picture in Picture, however on sites with a lot of gifs, it can be quite unbearable. For instance I use tweetdeck with multiple columns of tweet lists that almost always have a tweet with a gif. And anytime I change tabs the auto pip thinks the gif was a video and pops up. I think adding an option to ignore gifs would be a great addition. 

[businessethics]

I'm switching to LibreWolf (which unfortunately does appear to have this new code, but avoids some of Mozilla's other recent bad choices). I'm looking into browser options that do not use Mozilla or Google code and do not have "AI" integration "features."

Mozilla, cut it out with this "AI" garbage. You're alienating the core of your user base.

[ledeve]

Regarding Auto Picture in Picture:

I love this feature very much and this could be as useful as the original PiP feature was. But as mentioned above, the gifs; short videos and the websites which have autoplay on do cause issues.

To fix this, there could be a few options:

• Ignore gifs.
• Ignore short videos(<~20s or 30s).
• Only Auto PiP videos which play sound. (i.e. ignore auto-play videos but PiP videos I have clicked on and hence there is sound. This also overrides "Ignore short videos".)
• Option to Whitelist/Blacklist certain websites.
• Option to Auto PiP only one video. (If one video is Auto PiP, then do not Auto PiP one more if I end up browsing a website which has a auto-play video. This should not interfere with manual PiP feature.)

[asafko]

Hi ledeve!

100% agree with you - and one of the reasons we left contributor's patch in Labs for now was the lack of some of these things.

I am very hopeful we will be able to get some engineering time internally to address this feedback sooner rather than later (I hear you on the irritating nature of gifs, this was one of the key reason we did bring it as a standard setting right away) + specifically bring in site-specific permissions for auto-pip.

[vincentj]

---

We’d Love Your Help! Firefox was made by people for people, and it was the community that helped our browser grow.

...your feedback will steer us in a better direction towards future updates that will better serve your online needs. 

...we look forward to working with you a little more directly in our product development process.

What has been the point of Mozilla Connect and the previous Ideas site if not providing this feedback?  It's hard to take these statements seriously when the first batch of projects includes a bunch of stuff nobody asked for.

Will any of the upcoming projects address the issues that have been reported and highly-voted on these sites?  We have been providing feedback for a long time, please stop experimenting with AI and fix the top-voted issues that we have been requesting for FOR YEARS.

[ThePillenwerfer]

As you say its smacks of PR b/s.

Another place where answers lie are the support forums.  The same questions like "How do I get rid of Hover Previews on Tabs?" and "How do I make the Firefox UI Bigger?" come up often enough to suggest that there should be simple, intuitive settings for these things rather than them being buried in about:config, the existence of and access to which aren't obvious.

A more worthwhile, though maybe impractical, exercise would be to push a survey out to all users with a list of all Firefox's features and a request to rate them from Essential to Never Use or even Wish It Wasn't There.

The problem with this site is that the people on it are not typical users.  For a start we've found it and following that are interested enough to contribute to it.

Oh goodie — this is something else where Firefox's spell-check doesn't work.

[asafko]

Hi!
I really hear your frustration. Two thoughts:

1. Folks from Firefox who engage with the community here are all individual contributors, with a variety of opinions and stances on different technologies, and approaches to product development. Most of us worked very hard to advocate for ideas we think are important and community has requested, indeed, for years. When you post here, you can expect engagement with us on how specific features we work on can be improved.  

Labs is a grassroots attempt to make some of these efforts happen; the first batch of projects includes:
- sidebar and vertical tabs (second most requested feature on Connect, Nightly only for now),
-  auto-pip. Auto-pip patch was created by a contributor based on this Connect request.

2. When you give feedback on the company strategy, prioritization, and projects driven by strategic bets, things are different. Individual contributors do not define the strategy, and the decision-making process for company-wide strategic bets is complex. I probably don't need to explain it, as the same pattern is at work in any hierarchical collective, unless an alternative approach - direct democracy and co-determination is practiced.

So your feedback on the strategy, positive or negative, is welcome; just please be sensitive to the fact that you're talking to folks who are trying to make the browser better, day in and day out, in very small teams, and whose decision-making power is reflective of the organizational structure.

[Haagee]

I can really appreciate that you guys are here interacting with the community as individual contributors. And a lot of the people here who also work in tech are going to be all to familiar with the struggle of having a clear vision of areas that you care about, while having limited control over the company's course at the best of times. The board of directors certainly isn't going to go by all the desks every month for people's input on their corporate strategy, if an announcement is going to be received well, or if they thought of any features worth exploring.

And if you have a hundred engineers working on software full-time, they are going to come up with some amazing features. That they then have to sell to ninety-nine others, plus a management layer and a corporate layer. Where the more a colleague's vote matters, the more they also outrank you, and the less likely they know of your specific field. That's actually why I'm really glad that Mozilla uses community contact on in that equation, with Connect and now with this Labs. Where you don't necessarily have to convince the entire organization to change course with your vision, anyone can make a grassroots suggestion. Create the outlines of a feature, and have the actual users outside of the corporate ladder give their direct feedback on whether a direction is worth exploring. Like you guys already said, this is fantastic for innovation.

However, and there is going to be a however here - that does also create expectations in your community of cutting both ways. You allow smaller voices at the bottom of the pyramid to present cool new ideas, who get amplified by direct user feedback and create innovation you wouldn't get otherwise. But when you present suggestions from the top of the pyramid, which are already firmly in the company's strategy, and they get a terrible reception - the community also has expectations of that feedback having a similar weight to it.

And I absolutely get where your comment is coming from, as the person who happened to post the original announcement, but can't exactly change the company's strategy on a whim. Getting 2500+ negative comments doesn't sound like a great way to spend your week, I am genuinely sorry you're having to deal with that right now. But I am also making this comment, because I am concerned that you might be misdiagnosing the deeper problem right now because of that position in the middle of it all? Because I'm not seeing a lot of comments so much assigning personal blame, including vincentj's. I am mostly seeing a deep cynicism in them, expressing irritation about the community feedback system not responding to their feedback like they expected.

And while comments wrongly assigning blame to semi-related community members are certainly just as unpleasant, they are also temporary as emotions flare. They're best kept at bay with a call to be civil, think of the person on the other end, and to keep feedback helpful. Cynicism does not respond to that call in the slightest. And more importantly: cynicism is not temporary while emotions are high, if anything it tends to snowball on. To the point where it can permanently damage the community's ecosystem, and the community feedback system which depends on it. I hope that I am able to convey my concerns about that here, because right now it feels like I'm starting to see this thing pick up speed at an uncomfortable rate.

[wutongtaiwan]

I'd like to give feedback on a question about automatic picture-in-picture. When I entered the website of Bilibili, there were many videos for me to choose from, and at this time none of the videos were playing, and when I selected one of the videos to play, the problem arose, a picture-in-picture window appeared, and it was still black, and there was no picture-in-picture window for video playback.You can take a look at the two diagrams below  Bilibili's website address is: https://www.bilibili.com/