Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery
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Without having much knowledge of AI models beyond surface level stuff I read, but a good understanding on how computers work it seems fairly predictable to me that running an AI model in the browser session locally would be CPU intensive. As such you would think as a developer you would start with adding the feature as off by default, so users that want it can turn it on and you can get some real world metrics on how bad that hit is going to be before bending the entire user base over the AI kitchen table so to speak.
So both doing it for something as trivial as tab grouping and making it something you have to go into
about:configto disable seems really stupid. -
Well, stupid people want it and they do use it when its shoved in their face. Like how samsung updated and BLATANTLY made their peice of shit AI button TAKE OVER THR POWER BUTTON so when you try to turn off your phone little old granny gets confused that an ai agent pops up and starts recording you. Absolutely infuriating and I wish torture on whoever implemented that shit.
Holy shit I had no idea until I read your comment. I thought "surely they will have respected all of my opt outs". I guess this is my last samsung phone lol
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Correction: power users, such as the type on Lemmy, trend towards hating ai. That is by no means “all users” by any stretch of the term.
Nah, they've done studies and most people find it fucking annoying, worse, and don't want to pay any extra for it.
The whole thing is an obvious supply side economics push.
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According to the article, this is mainly for grouping tabs with a suggested name. Talk about backwards. Use AI to process the top websites on the Internet and create groups and/or logic to group them by keywords (cluster analysis), then save the small data structure in Firefox so it can group most websites instantly, using kilobytes of ram in the process; don't try to do this on everyone's device ffs.
Besides the heat and battery problem, this also means that the GUI is going to be non-deterministic, suggesting groups differently day-to-day based on the slight differences of input and the whims of the LLM. Burn it with fire.
Oh, so that's what the fuck it was. I was wondering why my tabs were getting grouped without any logic or reason. Impressive ability to make everything actively worse
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It makes a lot more sense when you realize that the Mozilla corporation is a for profit run by the same techno-fascist aggrandizing bait-and-switch narcissists as the rest of SV.
I've been saying it for years, but I will never donate to Firefox until it is freed from the shackles of a for profit corporation that can use your donation for any profit motive it sees fit; not even related to Firefox.
IIRC, you can't even donate to Firefox. You can only donate to Mozilla. It seems pretty clear to me why they set it up that way....
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That would make sense, i hadn't put that together but they had a lot of embedded control systems. This was water treatment but entirely separate from the control systems but i can see them having that a standard requirement
So was it a government (state or federal) water treatment plant? If so, I can tell you how it happened. The government contracting agencies have boilerplate text they're supposed to add to contracts to make sure salient requirements get flowed. They're supposed to delete or tailor anything that doesn't make sense, but the contracts people aren't usually very technical. We had requirements flowed to us about password management and account monitoring, but no one logs into a rocket engine or a torpedo. When we'd point it out, they'd say "oops, we should have deleted that."
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So was it a government (state or federal) water treatment plant? If so, I can tell you how it happened. The government contracting agencies have boilerplate text they're supposed to add to contracts to make sure salient requirements get flowed. They're supposed to delete or tailor anything that doesn't make sense, but the contracts people aren't usually very technical. We had requirements flowed to us about password management and account monitoring, but no one logs into a rocket engine or a torpedo. When we'd point it out, they'd say "oops, we should have deleted that."
Not in the US, our water infrastructure was sold off in 90s but that makes sense. Was probably something similar
They held us to it though so they overpaid for hardware beyond their needs and we forced the software to run slower -
You're forgetting the fact that laws are currently only being triggered if said company slanders dear leader.
If Google kisses ass you best believe they would completely allow them to be a monopoly and would ignore any laws being violated
Hinging their entire future on the bet that their country gets an easily manipulated dictator, when said dictator is 80 years old already, would be extremely short-sighted from Google.
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Literally no one on this green earth asked for this shit. In fact, we've been pretty direct about how much we don't want it.
It's exhausting.
Literally no one on this green earth asked for this shit.
This is why I use the version of Firefox that does not update.
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Well, stupid people want it and they do use it when its shoved in their face. Like how samsung updated and BLATANTLY made their peice of shit AI button TAKE OVER THR POWER BUTTON so when you try to turn off your phone little old granny gets confused that an ai agent pops up and starts recording you. Absolutely infuriating and I wish torture on whoever implemented that shit.
Like how samsung updated and BLATANTLY made their peice of shit AI button TAKE OVER THR POWER BUTTON
Was that part of OneUI 7? I'm so glad I never installed that downgrade.
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Waterfox has been pretty good lately
Waterfox
Very interesting. Did not know about this.
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It's also an example of a smaller company trying fight a mega Corp with infinite money, gained via unethical means.
People are shitting on Firefox while ignoring what they are up against.
I have no solution for their funding issue, what are they supposed to do? Charge for the browser or ads? There's literally no other alternative and I don't know what the solution is.
What I do know is that once FF dies and chrome fully owns the web we are well and truly fucked.
Honesty it might already be too late.
I have no solution for their funding issue, what are they supposed to do?
Stop updating their browser every 5 minutes. Software that already works fine does not need continuious updates that will sooner or later subtract value.
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Holy shit I had no idea until I read your comment. I thought "surely they will have respected all of my opt outs". I guess this is my last samsung phone lol
You can rebind it
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TBH despite I don't like this specific idea, nor use Firefox directly, I do like the usage of local inference vs sending your data to thirdparty to do AI.
They just needed to do it OPT IN, not OPT OUT.
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That is disingenuous.
People underestimate the cost of building a fucking browser, it's not the equivalent of maintaining a array sort app on fucking github.
Some random dude promising to "donate from time to time" is not a valid business model.
I wish they'd strip down and just focus on the browser, but fund it HOW? Ads? Subscription?
The reason a lot of companies are doing AI shit is essentially RD shooting in the dark, hoping something will pan out.
You have to do this if you are a tech company and want to survive in the future.
It's fun to meme on ai and but that shit is coming and pretending it doesn't exist or has no value simply isn't true.
So I ask everyone again, what business model exists for a software company to make money without ads or charging a monthly subscription.
People underestimate the cost of building a fucking browser
The browser is built. I don't want to see them have a gigantic development staff because further updates are just as likely to enshitify as to improve something.
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Yeah I don't like ai stuff. And I certainly don't need AI to group my tabs. I can do that myself just fine.
Pffft, next you'll say you want to wipe your own ass.
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This. It costs hundreds of millions per year to develop a web renderer. The security expertise required in particular is immense.
People have made clear they will not pay for browsers. At the same time, Mozilla doesn't want to hoover up mountains of personally identifiable information like Google and MS do.
People hate Mozilla for doing what they can to make money, and they also hate the idea of paying.
I understand the frustration, but I genuinely don't know what the community expects.
Don't get me wrong, I don't agree with or see sense in every Mozilla decision, but people act like they're satan incarnate and it's just ridiculous.
Developing from scratch yes, but several decent open source renderers exist. I'd love to see someone grab Servo and polish it to a fully usable state (I think it's something like 75% of the way there).
The issue also isn't Mozilla trying to make money, it's Mozilla trying to make money in the stupidest way possible, or even worse actively wasting money like with this AI slop. There's also the issue of what Mozilla is spending on. It came out a little while back how much their executives are making and it's completely ridiculous. They could afford multiple full time devs with just the money the CEO makes for making the worst decisions imaginable.
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It isn't though. At the higher end the last ceo was making 7 million. That is roughly 12 enginees after compensation and everything else.. It isn't nothing but it's less than 5 percent of the employees they laid off a year ago.
Increasing executive pay is a problem but it will barely move the needle.
For what it's worth, I would have no issue payibgif I knew that money didn't go in the pockets of a few executives
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Like how samsung updated and BLATANTLY made their peice of shit AI button TAKE OVER THR POWER BUTTON
Was that part of OneUI 7? I'm so glad I never installed that downgrade.
Pretty sure this goes back to the second to last Note. It's been a thing for years now
Power button became the bixby or google assistant button. It's annoying as hell
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Like how samsung updated and BLATANTLY made their peice of shit AI button TAKE OVER THR POWER BUTTON
Was that part of OneUI 7? I'm so glad I never installed that downgrade.
It's not their AI (Bixby). It's Gemini. But yes.
