Slashdot Mirror
Incorporating Machine Learning into Firefox 2.0?
blakeross asks: "I will be doing research this summer at Stanford with Professor Andrew Ng about how we can incorporate machine learning into Firefox. As we work to finish up Firefox 1.0, we're also seeking ideas that will make Firefox 2.0 blow every other browser out of the water. People who come up with the best 3-5 ideas that involve the use of machine learning will win Gmail accounts, and if we implement your idea you'll be acknowledged in both our paper and in Firefox credits. Your idea will also be appreciated by the millions of people who use Firefox. We'll also entertain Thunderbird proposals. See my weblog post for more details; I'll read all comments posted in response to this story or to my weblog."
Here are the best five ideas incorporating machine learning:
... "this is a picture of a sunflower") and let them group and search for items. Eg. "Pictures like this" or "Documents about cats."
1. Based on the user's browsing habits, automatically bookmark the most frequently visited sites, and automatically put them into *multiple* categories (not just one category) to make them easy to find.
2. Create a full-text index in real-time of every page that has been browsed. When the user visits any web page, display a sidebar of "Related previously-viewed pages."
3. A Google-News-like consolidation feature for the user's most-frequently visited news site, automatically highlighting stories of interest based on ones they've previously viewed.
4. Allow user to select "Fewer images like this" or "More images like this" or "Less text like this" and "More text like this" and using Bayesian or other similar filters, automatically block or highlight content. For blocking advertisements, or highlighting certain key passages.
5. Allow the user to browse their own hard drive, and categorize content automatically ("this is a document about lambs"
Please give my Gmail accounts to Gmail for the troops.
- The pop-up management in modern browsers who provide this feature although more efficient than in the past is still not perfect. Adapt to what pop-ups a person normally uses
- Content highlighting (especially in news sites). Learn what types of news articles / subjects a user is interested in, and highlight titles in news pages that suit the user.
- Accelerator for narrowband connections. Predict which pages the user is more likely to visit next, and start loading them as the user still reads the previous page.
- Recognise efficiently scam sites? Protect users from fraudsters?
PS: Not machine learning, but the sole requirement by me for a browser (dunno if its done in firefox now as hvent used it for a long time): Open new tab as a default rather than a new window, or at least provide the option.
find a way to automatically aim focus at the box that the user seems to use most on a given page. this is my major annoyance with some form sites that insist on giving focus to something that i would never fill in first.
Make it so when the user hits the Page Down key, a horizontal line appears for a few seconds where the old bottom of the page was, then fades away. So when you're reading long sections of text and hit Page Down, your eye can quickly scan to where you left off.
Sick of people knocking on Gentoo's greatness in completely unrelated
There. Your most important feature that browsers never had. Searchable bookmarks. Doesn't get much simpler than that. Am I the only one who thinks it's something every browser should have had long time aog?
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
How about this: How about browsing the filesystem using tabs?
So for example, in one Firefox window you see the contents of your hard drive (or network folders) pretty much the same way as the Windows Explorer or Gnome/KDE/MacOSX show it to you today BUT if you click the middle mouse button on a directory (or select "open in new tab") you end up with the new directory being open in a new tab.
Think about it, how many windows do you usually have open browsing your filesystem? with this thing you have ALL those windows in the same window organized by tabs, PLUS you also have all you websites as well on tabs right along the filesystem tabs!
And here's another kicker: You can bookmark a group of filesystem browser tabs and later go back to them. You can even drag the group of bookmark tabs to the desktop so that when you double-click on it Firefox opens up all of them at once.
This should all be done with host filesystem integration so that you can drag-and-drop files between the firebox filesystem view and the normal host OS desktop.
I don't know if this has been posted, but I'll give it a shot...
I've accumulated well over a thousand bookmarks and have been much too lazy to organize them into folders. If you could automatically cluster bookmarks (http://vivisimo.com/ does this with web results) I would be eternally grateful.
One more suggestion is to learn usage patterns in a particular website. For example, when I go to http://www.nytimes.com, I generally click on the opinions sections. If the browser could anticipate that I typically go to the opinion section, it could start to preload it before I click on it.
I realize the later suggestion is much easier to implement than the former, but the clustering would be very useful for lazy surfers like me.
If you're a fan of women, add me to your friends list.
The firefox download manager should scan downloads for malicious spyware, stop the bad download(s) and warn the user of the danger posed by the file(s).
Now, because this has a lot of discussions, when I start typing basebal... I get a lot of urls in the autocompletion field like http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/files/primer/o racle/
or even unrelated baseball sites. So it's not uncommon for me to have to press downarrow several times. A very useful application of machine learning would be to order the autocompletion possibilities so that my average number of downarrow presses is minimized.
Currently, if I start typing URL in the address bar, it matches URLs alphabetically. This gets very annoying at times, especially if you accidentally type giigle.com instead of google.com and then it keeps on matching giggle.com for weeks when I type "g".
This problem can be fixed by using frequency count with some time decay. For example, if I went to google.com 100 times within last week and once to giggle.com, then match to google.com on "g". If, however, I went to giigle.com 5 times recently, then match to giigle.com
While one might argue that this makes the algorithm unpredictable from user's standpoint, in my experience people keep on typing until they see the correct match. So, this way they'll see the right match sooner on average.
"You mortals are so obtuse." -Q
Allow the user to change the layout and design of the web pages he views. WYSIWYG style. Would allow the user to make a webpage he doesn't like more to his/her liking. I don't think the web page designer should have the last word on how a page should look. I think I should be able (as the user) to move text, pictures, and links as I see fit.
Speaking of Bayesian filtering, some form of clever-er guessing as to where my next bookmark in my ecclectic collection of bookmarks goes. Sample relatively unique keywords in pages as bookmarked, weight towards bookmark folder baskets, bingo.
Avoid more sophisticated algorhythms that infer a sorting methodology the same as the developer, however. Maybe I have a Programming folder which has C in it, and so you'd infer that all characteristics of matches to Programming inherit to C, if that's the sort of sorter you are, and that fits with you, me, and program-think, so that's right? Right? Except perhaps I'm a university student who has a University folder, and I'm studying Java, whose extrinsic attribute prioritizes sorting it into that group... so you'd end up with a word weighting argument between superclass Programming, which is wrong, and Java, which is right.
Let me be clear. This suggests nothing at all about helping the user organize their bookmarks - everyone has their own system (although perhaps a Bayesian category guesser would be a separate fun feature). This suggestion is merely better guessing of first suggested folder when I CTRL-D.
Often masses of information are broken into multi page presentations.
Somewhere on the page you have buttons named things like Next, Previous, or Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6.
There may be good design rules for positioning these elements but often they are not followed.
I've found many instances where I have to scroll up or down just to find the Next button so that I can click it.
It should be possible to learn for a given site (or sub-tree of a site) what the Next and Previous buttons are just from user behavior and the nearly identical layout of say page 2 to page 3. I think this could be done without parsing any of the html or gifs associated with the buttons.
If Firefox could learn and extract multi-page navigation then these functions could be bound to buttons up on the menu bar, or assigned to keys, and the whole problem of scrolling to find a Next would go away.
You know the ones... You misstype the address for one of your regular sites (or possibly a site out of a computer magazine thats three years old). And you get a generic page with info on "www.whateveryoutypedin.com".
When you close the window you're asked if you'd like to set your homepage to www.searching.net?
Yeah right...
If Firefox could communicate with a central server and look for similarities of pages like this and when it hits a page like this it just has a simple message that this website has been hijacked, that would be handy. (and would protect dumb users).
If they made a movie of your life, would anybody buy a ticket?
There are three types of sites in the world:
Those that use flash for ads
Those that use flash for content
Those that stay the hell away from flash
Rightnow, Firefox doesn't have any way to tell the difference between 1 and 2. But I do, I can clearly see if it's an ad or not. On every flash ad give me the option to tell the browser it's good flash or bad flash and intelligently learn what sites ("sites" also being defined by study of the urls, if I say www.bob.com/~jimbo/whatever.htm and www.john.com/~jimbo/howie.htm and www.curly.com/~jimbo/marthastewart.html are bad it should figure out there is a commonality in the ~jimbo part and apply my preference) have bad flash and block flash content on those sites, instead presenting me with a button to load to allow that content to load.
It should use a number of pieces of information, the url of the page, the url of the flash animation, the size of the animation, the name of the animation, the server the page is being served off of, etc.
Smater Front Page: Making use of the first thing that the user sees when starting up.
How about creating an interface for the default page for Firebird. Instead of pointing to the Mozilla.org homepage creating a default Front page designed to evolve to the habits of the user. Whatever way you want to utilize machine learning, you will need a centralized location to acess the results, why not use "Home". That being, creating a simple interface (XUL, not html) that points the user to their most visted bookmarks, or a catagorised and searchable list of their bookmarks(or internet), or updating the user if their most visted sites are updated, aggregating information from sites from their own browsing habits in a single interface when the browser starts up.
Also, if the user uses Thunderbird or Sunbird updating the user of new E-mails and new appointments on the front page. A front page that is customizable to the needs of the user, and avoiding the clutter and ads of commerical sites, and that is local on the users computer and not centralized on a website. And most importantly makes the individual users own data most intuitively accesible to themselves, and evolves to fit the individual user.
>> 2) Please keep GTK+ 1.x support
> Just wondering...why? Is GTK+ 2.x not well-
> supported on certain architectures, or what?
Performance and RAM consumption, mainly. GTK 1.2 is easier on older hardware than GTK 2.x. (Note: I haven't yet worked with GTK 2.4)
"1. Keep track of how users enlarge/reduce the font size: if sites that use a 10 point font are repeatedly enlarged to 14 or 16 point then it is fairly safe to assume that the user has poor eyesight and all sites with tiny text should automatically be sized up."
This is a good concept in several ways.
First, what most people with eyesight limitations do is adjust the really severe problem text and put up with the less severe sorts, so if they enlarge 10 point to 16 consistently, they enlarge 12 to 16 only late in a browsing session, and just put up with 14 point type even though it's a bit smaller than optimum for them. People will go to an effort only when the threshold of discomfort is crossed and the problem gets their consious attention, and many people will put up with a problem beyond that.
Second, it's a clearly quantifiable area, making it the sort of thing machines can excel at. If it turns out to have unexpected complexities, we will get a warning about how much worse other tasks, such as adjusting web sites based on the user's color preference or aestetic criteria, will be (no plaid backgrounds)
Who is John Cabal?
I would let the user grab tabs and drag them to where s/he wants them on the tab bar. Hmm, maybe even stacking tabs - when you drop one tab directly on another one they are stacked and you see all the tabs underneath the top tab only when you mouse over it.
Here's my idea: Use machine learning to figure out the most-often-used code paths, and thereby allow users to optimize their browsers by removing or unloading from memory the least-needed functions, or rearranging the code to allow fastest access to those functions... Maybe you could still leave stubs in the UI so that code could be dynamically loaded if someone eventually decided to use something they rarely used. A self-optimizing browser that sheds the code you don't give a crap about. Now that would rock.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A homepage based on the most frequently visited sites. Could possibly even seperate them into categories with the META tags.
Not a sentence!
I have no idea if this is feasable or even relevant, but I'll suggest it anyway. Something that watches the user's actions for repetitions or a pattern. Then, offer to create a script/macro for them to use, or modify settings. Examples: User consistently opens browser, then go to a specific URL. Program sees this and offers to set it as the homepage. This would be immediate (within a half-minute or so) in case the user just browses their home page, then goes elsewhere. On certain days, user consistently goes to certain sites (ie checking web comics or Slashdot :). The program would perhaps offer to create a set of daily bookmark sets that can be used. Example: Sites visted on Mondays would be in a folder marked "Monday".
When I download an episode from Red vs Blue, I put it in a folder marked "Red vs Blue". The program would recognize that the file path is consistent for that URL, and change settings so that any download from that site is directed to the "Red vs Blue" folder.
A web page consists of several subsequent download links, and the user is downloading them all one after the other. The program would offer to create a script to do the task for the user, and let them define folder settings and file names.
Like I said, I don't know if this can be done or if its what you're looking for, but its an idea.
I would want a credibility rating on web pages.
There is a lot of information on the web but almost no way to verify the data. I would like a way for people to report the credibility of the information contained on a web page.
This is especially important with news reporting and double-extra-especially important in times of war.
It is also all too simple for politicians, journalists and other people of power to repeat the same old lies over and over.
The memory of media is short. A Truthalizer would help make it a bit longer.
Yes, I know that there are plugins for this one, but keeping bookmarks in sync on multiple machines via server storage. Since I got my laptop, it's not a big issue, but I hate having to go back to my other machine cause that's where the bookmark is.
Enabling persistent storage of passwords. I honestly don't know how much or little of a security hole this would be, but I am constantly using the "remember my password" feature in Moz/FF, and it KILLS me when I have to reinstall and start adding them all again. Have it store that file to a spot on the hard drive (or better, server sync if that option is turned on), and allow me to keep that data even if I have to uninstall/reinstall the application.
-9mm-
Let's see....what I would like to see in a new version of TB and FF....
1) Fully integrated internet applications:
Okay, this isn't FF/TB specific, but I wonder if there would be any benefit in somehow tightly integrating an e-mail client, a web browser and an IM client. I'm not just talking about linking the applications, I'm talking about a single work space with common buttons, common tabs, common favorites and address bars etc. for all of these apps. Web broswers, e-mail and IM are the three most widely-used Internet apps, yet they all operate separate from each other. I'm sure that there would be some benefit to trying to merge them (like an IM-log in your e-mail "sent" box or tabbed IM seem like logical things to me).
2) Zero-footprint applications:
I would love to see FF and TB be a non-installed, fully-contained application within a single directory (Windows side, at least). It would allow me to slap it on my USB memory key and surf the net and do my e-mail without leaving a trail. In the absolute least, that should be done with Thunderbird.
3) Aliases for webpages:
It would be cool if I could just create aliases for some sites. For example, I could just type in SLASH versus SLASHDOT.ORG to get to Slashdot. Firefox would check my manually-entered aliases first to see if I had entered in a shortcut, then try and do a DNS resolve if it didn't find the shortcut. I know that these are essentially bookmarks, but I find typing easier than using the mouse to go to a bookmark (makes me feel like a real computer user).
4) Smart Address Bar dropdown:
When typing in a site in the address bar, Firefox tries to do a match for me against previous visits. But the problem is that one site typically dominates the suggestion because of all of the sub-pages e.g. if I type in WWW.SLASH, Firefox will show me slashdot.org, slashdot.org/article1, slashdot.org/article2 etc when I really want to see all of the MAIN sites that start with WWW.SLASH, such as WWW.SLASHDOT.ORG, WWW.SLASHTHENASH.ORG etc.
Well, those are my two cents...(can I have my change please?)
I grab images off websites all the time and save them into a bunch of different folders. I would like if the browser paid attention to where I saved certain images from certain sites and then automatically jump to the folder I last used FOR THAT SITE. It would save me a few seconds a day, at least.
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
People regard their privacy highly and are reluctant to provide their personal information to websites. Website which need personal details from its users have to convince a new user that it won't misuse the data that it has. This is usually made with a statement, known as Privacy Policy.
Privacy Policies have problems. First, they are usually written in a legal language incomprehensible to a lay person. Second, people have no way of knowing that website in fact follows the policy it has.
One way of assuring people might be machine readable privacy policies. P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences) is W3C framework for such privacy protocol. It allows user to store his personal data to a P3P agent, which will then follow the user given rules to share private information.
This agent should be implemented to firefox and it could use a machine learning to automate further the interactions with websites. The agent could for example learn, that if website's privacy policy promises to use user's e-mail address only for initial consistency check and to send a forgetten password if user explicitly asks for it, the agent can give it to the website without prompting the user.
Of course, this won't solve the problem of malicious websites which don't follow their privacy policies, but is a step into right direction where privacy policies are certified and their enforcing is auditted.
When I am looking for something, using google or another search engine, I often come across "spam" websites that have computer generated content or hidden text. I really hate the ones that make themselves out to be a search engine or a directory when they contain no real content... content is what I came there for.
I'd like a button that I click on that says "this is spam" which adds the content and URI to a database. In the future when similar pages are found in the search engine results, it could either remove the result altogther, or identify the link as probably being to a spam website when I mouse-over it.
I'd like an option that I could configure so that the URI is automatically reported to the search engine that I followed to the website.. if any. Enough complaints and a human reviewer would know who the worst offenders are and kick them out of the SERPs quickly. Right now its too time consuming to report the spam websites now, so a way to make it easier would definiately help clean up the search engine results.
Another idea would be to submit the URI to a centralized website with a database of spam websites.. the search engines could use this centralized DB to pare down their results to only non-spam sites. That way the spam reports could be used by all search engines.. and other browsers too..
I know that it is planned for MSIE, but this would be a nice feature. If it could store browsing history in a central location, it would be great too, because often I can't remember if I'd seen something while surfing at work or at home.
Some kind of a history.html file that is automatically modified on ones personal webspace could be a an idea.
Sigs waste bandwidth in 56k land.
Machine learning?
Give me a break.
What I'd like to see if I could finally use vim for these damn textareas (or any editor of choice for that matter).
Extend your idea beyond the browser and you might be on to something very usefull if widely implemented. Imagine a mail server with this self-optimizing memory footprint/runtime that runs better the longer it's running. As time goes by, all non-mail server tasks are dropped out of memory, leaving more for the job at hand.
The following is the best e-mail idea of the last two years, and should be a feature of every e-mail program.
As a person who writes a lot of e-mail, or as a manger, one major organizational problem is simply not having your messages replied to. It currently takes a ton of manual effort to decide which of your e-mails need a followup by you. So much effort that nobody does it. Some questions fall through the cracks when you write a hundred e-mails a day. Closing up these cracks would measurably, demonstrably improve the effectiveness of managers, project coordinators, and any other heavy communicators, since e-mail has become the most important and most used mode of communication for a large number of people. (It is very rare to see a manager actually send out an e-mail asking "Was this resolved?" Generally, un-followed-up e-mail is simply forgotten.)
A system for followup could be partially automated.
1. A checkbox exists when writing an e-mail. If turned on, it tells the e-mail client, locally, that you want to make sure this e-mail has been followed up. I'll call this a "follow-this-up", or FTU, e-mail.
2. After an FTU e-mail has been sent, the e-mail client remembers it in a list. Once an FTU e-mail is sent, a copy of it is placed in a mail folder which I'll call the FTU folder. The user of the e-mail client can open this mail folder at any time to see the FTU e-mails that still have to be followed up.
3. When the client detects that a recipient of an FTU e-mail has replied to that e-mail, then it provisionally removes the FTU e-mail from the FTU folder. (Probably the e-mail is grayed out in the list but not actually removed.) Making this detection complete and thorough is an interesting problem. The starting point would probably be based on receiving an e-mail from the recipient with an appropriate subject line (e.g. the same subject line prefaced by FW: or Re: or Re[5]:). And in order to increase the effectiveness of this technique, the client might actually maintain a database of previously-used subject lines that are already in the FTU folder, and nag the user if he sends a second e-mail with the same subject, asking him to write a more elaborate Subject line.
Other starting techniques could include parsing the e-mail's content to see if part of the content matches an FTU e-mail that has been received. Or by utilizing e-mail fields or even implementing a new e-mail field which hopefully doesn't get stripped when the recipient replies.
This system, then, tries to ensure that after an FTU e-mail is sent, there is either a copy of the e-mail in the FTU folder so the user can see that the recipient hasn't followed up, and the user can follow up with a question; or there is a response from the recipient in the user's Inbox.
User interface is critical to making this system useful for the user:
4. When the client sees that an FTU e-mail has been replied to, it presumes that a followup has actually occurred. This obviously may not be true; the recipient may have responded with a joke, or with a followup question, or with "I'll get back to you Thursday". Presumably when you read a followup to an FTU e-mail, a new bar of UI should appear in the client saying to the user "This looks like a followup to an FTU e-mail you sent, which you can view by clicking here." Buttons would let the user choose things like "Yes, this resolves my FTU e-mail completely" or "No, I still need a followup", or "I now want my reply to this e-mail to be an FTU e-mail, and not the parent."
5. I imagine that the FTU folder displays its FTU e-mails in date order, showing the oldest non-followed-up e-mail at the top (colored red after 2 to 4 days or so). The user can mark these e-mail copies as already-followed-up (i.e. it's resolved, no more followup needed, because the recipient saw me in person and resolved it).
The next (or next after next?) version of MS Visual Studio will include a new profiler that does part of this. The developer will compile an instrumented build of the app. Run the app in common senarios. Then recompile the app with generated statistics.
Doing this in realtime might be useless though. Difficult to gather statistics fast enough. Plus the lack of info about the source code (i.e. debug symbols).
IMHO, this suggestion should be given to the GCC guys and gals, not the firefox folk.