Mozilla Is Building Context Graph, a 'Recommender System For the Web' (venturebeat.com) 87
Mozilla is looking into ways to build a "better forward button" that helps you understand a topic, and find alternative solutions to a problem. On Wednesday, Firefox-maker announced Context Graph, which in addition also allows browsers to offer useful information without demanding input. From a VentureBeat report: Context Graph is a "recommender system for the web" that is supposed to help the company develop an understanding of browser activity at scale. By tapping into what and how people are browsing, Mozilla hopes to unlock "the next generation of web discovery on the internet." Another example is learning how to do something new, like bike repair. Context Graph should be able to help you learn bike repair based on the links others have navigated to when they attempted to learn the same thing. "This should work regardless of whom you're connected to, because your social network shouldn't be a prerequisite for getting the most from the web," Nick Nguyen, Firefox's vice president of product, said.
It works! (Score:1)
The latest beta just sent me to this article so I could get a first post!
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What makes you think they haven't already
Whatever (Score:5, Interesting)
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Is it just me, or does Mozilla look a lot like The Fonz in swim trunks right now?
Best to learn to walk again, (Score:5, Insightful)
before they try to run. At one time Mozilla ran like the wind, then they just ran, then they walked, now they're crawling. Trying to run from where they are now, directly to "develop an understanding of browser activity at scale", (whatever the hell that means), would seem to be WAY beyond their current capabilities. Especially when their share of the market is dropping to the point where whatever data they might collect may not be enough to be statistically meaningful...
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Their development efforts seen to have turned into 90s microsoft, with just too many developers to actually get anything that works out the door. Most of what they ship now consists of new features that are full of security holes, removal of old features, and constant thrashing of the code that reduces quality and causes things like, "now your configurable toolbars are no longer all configurable; some are, some are not."
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Count as what? More newly minted CS grads reinventing the wheel?
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What are those? A programming language invented to solve a non existing problem and a re-invention of a wheel? Why not try to fix the damn bugs in current browser and speed it up some more instead of wasting effort on toy projects.
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Web sites loaded faster in the year 2000, even using Sun's Java browser.
New standards have to be added, but why a lot else?
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Yeah. I stopped allowing updates a while back.
So sad, it's like watching a good friend douse himself with gas and set himself on fire. I used to cheerlead Firefox, but I am now a bit embarrassed to admit to using it now. And no, I won't use chrome or IE or edge.
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What I find weird is this contemporary idea that "updates make you more secure." Well, if security updates were on a different track than features, there would be a good argument for that. But with new bugs and exploits released on a regular basis, this isn't obvious at all. And people will quickly shout the name of a past exploit as a counter-argument, but all that proves is that trust was misplaced to begin with; it isn't as if when those exploits were announced, people who had been updating constantly ha
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Mozilla was infiltrated by the millennial fairies. It's over for them, say goodbye and move on.
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QTWeb has ended it seems (last release in 2013), maybe what you're looking for is Qupzilla which is maintained and the same idea.
K-meleon is still developed, which I didn't expect. So they made the switch from old school Gecko to tracking Firefox ESR (24, 31, 38)
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We like to pretend that Mozilla was something more than it was, but the reality is this is what they've always been.
I remember when Mozilla actually took users' desires seriously and used their feedback to help shape the browser. And I remember when they were proud of Add-ons - now they seem to regard them as a millstone around their necks. So no, I don't agree that Mozilla has always been this way.
We'll pull out all the irrational arguments that they've changed, but that's really just a reflection of where we've gone, not where they've gone.
For me, it's probably a reflection of where I haven't gone - namely, to minimalist GUI fads that give me jack shit when it comes to configurability and customization, and to products that are not only aimed at the lowest commo
FTFY (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:FTFY (Score:5, Insightful)
Privacy issues aside the main problem I have with tracking this information to "improve" your experience is that it gets in the way.
Google starts to think it knows you and serves up certain results because "it's you", when you run the same query on a totally different engine (like Duck Duck Go) you get a much better result set because it makes no preconceptions about what you were looking for based on past searches / browsing habits / etc
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How is this different from a Google search? Google spends a lot of time trying to figure out how sites and searches are related to one another. Mozilla thinks they can do it better because they can "harvest" data directly from the browser? I doubt it. And, that's ignoring the privacy issue of sending my full time stamped browsing history to a private company...
Oh no! (Score:5, Funny)
Clippy is back!
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Has it found them a solution for... (Score:1)
overpaid managers/developers making solutions in search of a problem?
Mozilla is pissing away far too much time 'keeping their browser state of the art' and not enough time 'fixing security issues endemic in their browser since time immemorial.'
If the only other Web 2.0 compatible choices weren't based on either Google's fork of Webkit, or Microsoft rendering engines, I'd tell them to get boned.
That said, maybe some of you code-savvy slashdot nerds can put in some hours on netsurf web browser (netsurf-browse
Go to hell, Mozilla (Score:3, Insightful)
Another useless feature and, most importantly, a privacy nightmare by Mozilla, probably the 100th in the last 2 years.There's no "value added" that will ever persuade me sharing my browsing history with you to let you do your unrequested "suggestions".
GO TO HELL, Mozilla.
Time to look for firefox forks.
I guess I'm old-fashioned (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate -*HATE*- having a machine try to read my mind. And a web browser? No, thanks. Just get out of the way & let me do what I want, the way I want.
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What if "what I want" is to be able to visit the sites that are linking to a YouTube video I'm watching. Today I can't easily do that because YouTube doesn't want me leaving YouTube.
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The browser is for the user, not you. The webmaster's desires are (and should be) completely and utterly irrelevant.
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Then you can go right to hell, and take your shitty site with you.
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No one cares, Asa. Fix your shitty browser first.
Re:I guess I'm old-fashioned (Score:5, Insightful)
Hi Asa!
What *I* want is for you guys to stop breaking my UI, my extensions, and my workflow.
I am totally uninterested in how you guys think I should experience the Web. I am interested in getting stuff done.
Start listening to your users again, and stop using us as your friggerty UX guinea pigs already.
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If you use extensions like Request Policy, you see that everybody's tracking everybody, all the time. It is somewhat natural that a browser maker, having direct access to the users' browsing habits, wants in on the action, but remember this: We can't do much about the servers tracking us, because there is only one Facebook and one Youtube. We will choose another browser though. You have added far too many privacy-invading features to the browser already, and some of them are well hidden. It takes a lot of e
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Millennials cannot do that. They don't have the attention span to copy/paste into other tabs and do research. If information doesn't look pretty, they won't touch it.
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So you never, ever have used spell checkers, tab autocompletion, search suggestions - or Google's web search, for that matter? Google Search is by definition the #1 "machine that tries to read your mind" in order to show the most relevant pages for a query term.
More tracking/data mining (Score:2)
Yet more tracking/data mininig.
Fuck off.
Netscape Navigator has this in 2001 (Score:2)
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Hey, remember when Mozilla produced a web browser that didn't completely suck donkey balls?
Ah, yes. Yesterday. What a glorious time! It was a lot like today. I suspect it'll be a lot like tomorrow as well...
More seriously, FF is still the exemplar. Chrome is a bloated, slow, memory hog in comparison. It spies on you to boot. None of the other players have a browser worth using. The best you can hope for as a reasonable alternative is an outdated and bug-ridden FF fork like Palemoon.
With Servo ticking along at a nice pace, I expect FF will continue to trounce other browsers well in to the
The Mozilla mascot should be a pig. (Score:1)
How about making a browser that is not slow and a memory hog?
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"Voluntarily" resigned. Because there's so much of a practical difference for anybody except his finances.
Sort of an automated ShiftSpace, no? (Score:3)
This sound something like a pimped out ShiftSpace. BTW, what happend to that?
I thought that was a pretty neat idea - now it appears all traces of ShiftSpace seem to be lost.
Can I still get ShiftSpace somewhere? Is it a distributed thing or does it rely on servers for it's content?
And how is that with this new Mozilla thing?
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https://github.com/ShiftSpace [github.com]