Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery
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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.
They could stop paying their CEO so much and hire a few more devs, refocus their identity on privacy and performance (their offline ai translation is actually really useful), and actually give people the sense that their donations will be well spent.
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90% of their cash flow comes from google to be the default search engine - they are probably trying to open up alternative routes of funding to reduce the risk, since it's not guaranteed that the money will keep coming due to the current lawsuit.
Right, I sympathize with that.
…But also it’s ridiculous. Like why should including a feature with “AI” in it get them VC money? Even if that’s kinda reality?
TBH they should just become a contributor to llama.cpp and market that somehow.
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I hate how many of these you have to do on any new installation of Firefox.
A space for vanilla ff experience extension, sort of like sanemacs?
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I agree with you on almost everything.
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.
Here i disagree. ML is using high dimensional statistics. There exist many problems, which are by their nature problems of high dimensional statistics.
If you have for an example an engineering problem, it can make sense to use an ML approach, to find patterns in the relationship between input conditions and output results. Based on this patterns you have an idea, where you need to focus in the physical theory for understanding and optimizing it.
Another example for "generative AI" i have seen is creating models of hearts. So by feeding it the MRI scans of hundreds of real hearts, millions of models for probable heart shapes can be created and the interaction with medical equipment can be studied on them. This isn't a "desperate" approach. It is a smart approach.
Fair point. Not on the semantics per se, but on taking the best approach, 100%.
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Look at the executives pay of Mozilla, there is a lot of money there to start with.
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.
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Here I am using browsers like apps. Chrome is my facebook app. I do zero else with it lol.
but really, my solution works fine. Is another 200MB on your SSD really that big of a sacrifice? I have Firefox, Chrome(in a fucking container where it belongs) and Librewolf installed lol.
Even though I'm aware Google would still have a lot of my data even if I deleted everything possible, one of the main reasons I swapped (apart from the manifest V3 controversy) was the privacy problem (yes, I know, I'm still using Facebook, regardless). I haven't thought of the container aspect, though - thanks for that.
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ecosia and qwant are german and french respectively :3
Ecosia on Android is based on Chromium.
Qwant on Android is based on: Firefox for Android, which uses the GeckoView engine.Otherwise they are just search engines.
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They are all out of date, updates just take longer to arrive including security patches. Just use base Firefox and configure it as needed.
LibreWolf seems pretty fast about it. The difference is only ever a matter of a few days for routine updates.
For example, it looks like Firefox 141 with the AI stuff was released on July 22, a few weeks ago.
My LibreWolf install is 141.0.2 (edit: since updated)
My Firefox install is 141.0.3That difference is worth it to me to know that various things I don't want have been removed from the code entirely, and that I can keep a completely default install of Firefox and/or nuke and replace that install whenever necessary.
Edit to add: A few hours since posting, I checked for updates and now I'm on LibreWolf 141.0.3.
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Did a project several years where the customrr required that the server we delivered specifically for the project never use more than 50% CPU or RAM. No requirements about how fast it actually performs its intended function, just that it can only utilise half the available resources while doing it.
Probably a bleed-over from the embedded side. Spent a lot of years working embedded control systems for NASA and DoD - bare metal systems, often interrupt driven - and it was common to have 50% margin requirements. They know those systems will grow over time, and they often have lifespans measured in decades.
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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.
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Just make it an official extension ffs...
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Waterfox has been pretty good lately
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I'll keep using LibreWolf as my main browser while keeping an eye on Ladybird with my fingers crossed.
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Actual users hate AI. Shareholders love it. It’s a bubble and the business world is trying to force it everywhere they can to create a dependency.
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.
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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.
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.
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Actual users hate AI. Shareholders love it. It’s a bubble and the business world is trying to force it everywhere they can to create a dependency.
Yep. Make the normies depend on the shitty Ai and kill the real internet. Makes me so fucking mad.
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Firefox does run better when you disable all "ml.chat" settings.
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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
That's a fairly new development. And it might not last, depending on how the cheating goes next year.
So a more risk averse company might not test the waters just yet.
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Bless your heart.
If you disagree, I'll donate $20 a month to you to do it better.
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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.
