Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery
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Waterfox and/or Librewolf FTW
I just checked my Librewolf settings:
This stuff is ml chat is off by default.
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Come to LibreWolf, the waters fine!
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The pathological need to find something to use LLMs for is so bizzare.
It’s like the opposite of classic ML, relatively tiny special purpose models trained for something critical, out of desperation, because it just can’t be done well conventionally.
But this:
AI-enhanced tab groups. Powered by a local AI model, these groups identify related tabs and suggest names for them. There is even a "Suggest more tabs for group" button that users can click to get recommendations.
Take out the word AI.
Enhanced tab groups. Powered by a local algorithm, these groups identify related tabs and suggest names for them. There is even a "Suggest more tabs for group" button that users can click to get recommendations.
If this feature took, say, a gigabyte of RAM and a bunch of CPU, it would be laughed out. But somehow it ships because it has the word AI in it? That makes no sense.
I am a massive local LLM advocate. I like “generative” ML, within reason and ethics. But this is just stupid.
The pathological need to find something to use LLMs for is so bizzare.
Venture capital dumped so much money into the tech without understanding the full scope of what it was capable of. Now they're so in so deep that they desperately NEED to find something profitable it can do, otherwise they'll lose the farm.
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Instead of capitalising on Google pissing off power users with its crusade against adblockers, why the hell is Mozilla fucking up so hard here? Seriously, which chain of command green lit all of this and didn't even think this would be remotely an issue?
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When I'm browsing around with multiple tabs open, the last thing I want is something to start moving them around and messing my flow up. This is a solution looking for a problem.
Yup
Auto naming functionality is neat in some cases, like the AI chat UI itself
- It's convenient to have names when toggling between a few recent chats or searching through 10s or 100s of chats later on
- I spawn new chats often and it's tedious to name them all
- I don't have a strong preference for what the title is as long as it's clear what the chat was about
Tab groups don't hit those points at all
- I'll have a handful of tab groups
- I don't make them often
- I have a strong preference for what it's called, and the AI will have trouble figuring out exactly what I'm using those sites for
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Is that what the FUCK has been happening? I've been having tabs just BLOW Up in ram and CPU usage
Same here .... all I do is read most of the time ... I'm only interested in reading about 2,000 words which shouldn't take any data .... yet Firefox will struggle under the weight of advertising, adblock, scripts, background links, preloading and all kinds of stupidity that I will not and refuse to use.
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Hmm, I bet Librewolf doesn't have that...
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Come to LibreWolf, the waters fine!
It really is! Just needs an Android fork and it'll be on all my devices.
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Come to LibreWolf, the waters fine!
Am a wolf (that uses LW), can confirm
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Keep firing
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Holy fucking shit. I swear to God, I had to download chromium because running Jupiter lab in browser ate through 22gb of ram and got my shit OOM killed. If this is what's causing it I stg. I'm not even using vanilla Firefox, but the Zen fork got tebased on v141 right before this happened
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Now, several users have taken to the Firefox subreddit to complain about high CPU usage when using the feature, as well as express their disappointment in Mozilla for adding AI to the browser.
I don't think it even downloads the model if you never enable or use it.
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Is that what the FUCK has been happening? I've been having tabs just BLOW Up in ram and CPU usage
This doesn't trigger unless you enable and use it afaik
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Instead of capitalising on Google pissing off power users with its crusade against adblockers, why the hell is Mozilla fucking up so hard here? Seriously, which chain of command green lit all of this and didn't even think this would be remotely an issue?
Sadly this is nothing new for Mozilla. It's easier to count the decisions they've made that aren't terrible than the ones that are. Their history is a long series of fuckups occasionally punctuated by a decent decision.
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It really is! Just needs an Android fork and it'll be on all my devices.
use ironfox for android, it's the continuation of Mull
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It really is! Just needs an Android fork and it'll be on all my devices.
Try IronFox on android.
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Instead of capitalising on Google pissing off power users with its crusade against adblockers, why the hell is Mozilla fucking up so hard here? Seriously, which chain of command green lit all of this and didn't even think this would be remotely an issue?
it might have been Laura Chambers, who is CEO since early 2024.
It has been less than a week since the new interim CEO took over the reigns from long-time Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker. Today news broke that Mozilla is changing its product strategy going forward.
The organization plans to focus on bringing "trustworthy AI into Firefox" and to scale back some of its other products and services.Breaking: Mozilla changes strategy, focuses on Firefox and AI
She used to work for McKinsey according to her Wikipedia
which explains a lot if you ask me. -
use ironfox for android, it's the continuation of Mull
I'll check that out!
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Now, several users have taken to the Firefox subreddit to complain about high CPU usage when using the feature, as well as express their disappointment in Mozilla for adding AI to the browser.
I don't think it even downloads the model if you never enable or use it.
I love that people get upset that their CPU is using its resources when they're using it.
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Sadly this is nothing new for Mozilla. It's easier to count the decisions they've made that aren't terrible than the ones that are. Their history is a long series of fuckups occasionally punctuated by a decent decision.
Because of this, I've always had 'mixed feelings' (to put it mildly) towards Mozilla, and sometimes I really struggle not to hate them. They're (yet) not Google or Microsoft and that's cool, but besides that, I also cannot think of more than a handful of good decisions against a ton of pretty awful ones, so right now I've settled for 'a necessary evil', which is pretty sad considering their potential.
