where is this AI bloat exactly? I use Firefox every day and see no difference
Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery
Submitted 8 months ago by moe90@feddit.nl to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
_AutumnMoon_@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
eugenevdebs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
Still waiting for this bloat to show up, and I’m on the latest update.
Semicolon@lemmy.world 8 months ago
There is none, this is all AI=bad knee-jerk reaction. From what I can tell, so far Firefox has 3 ML-based systems implemented:
- Site / text translation - fully local, small model, requires manual action from user
- Tab grouping suggestions - fully local, small model, requires manual action from user
- Image alt text generation (when adding images to a PDF) - fully local, small model, looks like it’s enabled by default but can be turned off directly in the modal that appears when adding alt text
All of these models are small enough to be quickly run locally on mobile devices with minimal wait time. The CPU spikes appear to be a bug in the inference module implementation - not an intended behavior.
Firefox also provides UI for connecting to cloud-based chatbots on a sidebar, but they need to be manually enabled to be used. The sidebar is also customizable so anyone who doesn’t want this button there can just remove it. There’s also a setting in about:config that removes it harder.
I actually really like the way Mozilla is introducing these features. I recently had to visit another country’s post office site and having the ability to just instantly translate it directly on my device is great.
eugenevdebs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
You meant to tell me the general public has kneejerk reactions and don’t know how a computer works?
What a shock that lemmy bashes Mozilla for doing their job.
sus@programming.dev 8 months ago
I remember tab groups showing up one day maybe a week ago, and then I quickly clicked about two buttons and now they’re totally gone and I almost forgot they were a thing. But likely if I had summarily clicked 2 different buttons it might have been turned out without realizing it, and that would cause the model to be downloaded and the CPU cycles to be spent (at least if I kept the tab groups on)
blargh513@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Same here, I’m on 141.0 Linux. No tab grouping unless I group them. I do see the ai button but have not bothered with it.
Oneshot@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
Demon tech
yarr@feddit.nl 8 months ago
Mozilla is no longer about making a great browser. Mozilla is about making sure their Google bucks come in each year without fail. They don’t work for consumers anymore – they work for Google.
Throughout the years, the market share of Firefox has shank and shank and their C-Suite has continued giving themselves raises.
Mozilla Inc. has been very sick for a long time. It’s a shame that one of the last pieces of honest competition for web browsers belongs to them, because I’m not sure how much longer they will be able to shamble on like this.
Gloomy@mander.xyz 8 months ago
As somebody who is out of the loop a bit here, how is Morzilla making money through Googhe?
MystValkyrie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
Instead of trying to get Google money, I actually wish they would offer a monthly/annual/lifetime membership as the cost of not enshittifying to stay in business. And then severing ties with Google as a company.
A lot of tech companies are holding onto unsustainable business models from 10 years ago, and it’s forcing them into AI now. End users paying a fair price for the products they use is a better alternative than this because it puts the power back in our hands as opposed to tech bros and shareholders.
Auli@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
One a lifetime membership is not a sustainable business model . Two people so not want to pay for stuff a small percentage might but the vast majority won’t escpically when there is Chrome which is free.
The problem is everyone wants shit got free or 99 cents one time payment for life time upgrades. These are not sustainable business models. Then we complain why are their ads or whatever, well do you work for free? People have to make enough to live.NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
People won’t pay for that. Or, at least, not enough people.
yarr@feddit.nl 8 months ago
Much like electricity, lazy boards seek the path of least resistence. What’s easier, building a world-class browser and properly marketing it and maintaining profitability, or just setting your default search engine to “Google.com” and cashing the massive check?
At this point, there’s very few people even left at Mozilla that could even reverse the trend. Go back and look at their past few years. Other than some minor activity to Firefox, almost all their initiatives are little side missions that last for a few years and then are sunset.
Stuck like Pocket, Mozilla Social, Firefox Send, Firefox OS, etc. The list goes on and on. They invest heavily in some flash in the pan initiative and then ax it off a few years later.
MITM0@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Why does Mozilla think we want AI integrated in your browsers ??
Tywele@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Do you have to enable the feature first? Because I’m on v141 and I don’t see this feature. Complaining about a useless and draining feature that you yourself enabled is a special kind of stupid tbh.
eyekaytee@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Bro, several users have taken to the Firefox subreddit, this is definitely worthy of being the most upvoted post on Lemmy rn
Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
This is sarcastic right lol
Tywele@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Because people seem to have a special hat boner for Firefox on here.
And please don’t call me bro.
Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 8 months ago
If AIust exist it should be in places where the general public cannot access nor interact with it
Pjonathan@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I was actually wondering why it felt like my Firefox was dying, possible could align with this.
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Awful Idea? Anal Intrusion? Actually Irrelevant?Activating Idiocy? Adding Incompetence?
ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 8 months ago
Firefox really does seem to have lost the plot… they don’t seem to go five minutes without slamming their dick in another drawer. It starts to look like they’re in to it.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I never trusted them. Who would ever set up a nonprofit owned by a for profit company if not to decieve people?
I do appreciate the Open Sourced GECKO engine, though. I like Waterfox.
The_Decryptor@aussie.zone 8 months ago
a nonprofit owned by a for profit company
It’s the other way around, the foundation owns the corporation.
Still feels like the corporation is the one making decisions though.
Mika@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
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.
alsimoneau@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
It is though.
FiskFisk33@startrek.website 8 months ago
then why the fuck is this newsworthy? ugh. Why is there such a huge hateboner for firefox lately?
flop_leash_973@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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 could be kind of heavy on the CPU usage. 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 userbase over the AI kitchen table.
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.comador@lemmy.world 8 months ago
At least they offer a fix for it:
Head to about:config in a new tab, accept the risk warning, and use the search bar to find the controls. To kill the AI chatbot feature, search for browser.ml.chat.enabled and set it to false. To stop smart tab grouping, search for browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled and set it to false.
ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 8 months ago
Why would they bury the option… are they being paid to include this AI feature or something…?
Soup@lemmy.world 8 months ago
They offer a fix behind a bunch of barriers? Is it not in settings with an obvious on/off toggle for the thing?
Jason2357@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
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.
Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
I don’t think the centralised approach works either. If you bake that grouping metadata of individual popular pages into Firefox you have an issue with keeping it current if page content changes. And you have a difficult trade-off between covering enough pages vs not blowing up the size too much. And the approach can’t work for deep web pages, e.g. anything people can only see when logged in.
Ignoring all that: The groupings you could pre-process would be static and determined over some assumed average user behaviour, not an actual cluster of a specific users themes. You take some hardcore Warhammer 40k fan, and all his tabs on minis and painting techniques and rulebooks and fan media, and apply the static grouping then it all goes into “Warhammer”. However if you ran it locally it might come up with “Painting” “Figures” “Rules” “Fanart” or whatever. It would produce a more fine grained clustering for someone who is deep into a specific niche interest, and a more coarse grained one otherwise.
So I think fundamentally it’s correct to cluster locally and dynamically for a usable result. They need to make it opt-in, and efficient enough. Or better yet they could just abandon the idea because it’s ultimately not that much use compared to the required inference cost.
killeronthecorner@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The problem with useful suggestions like these is that they can’t be used when the MO is to shove AI into everything and anything to seem relevant, and chase the pot of cost savings at the end of the rainbow which is totally gonna turn up any day now, we think, we’re pretty sure anyway.
ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 8 months ago
It does seem bizarre and woefully inefficient to run this process on-the-fly locally.
Nalivai@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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
MithranArkanere@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Firefox does run better when you disable all “ml.chat” settings.
massivemeatballs@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’ll keep using LibreWolf as my main browser while keeping an eye on Ladybird with my fingers crossed.
tjsauce@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Waterfox has been pretty good lately
btaf45@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Waterfox
Very interesting. Did not know about this.
swordgeek@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
I messed with a few browsers (Librefox and others), but ended up on Waterfox because it’s just Firefox…without much extra shit. It’s faster, lighter, and runs all of the Firefox extensions I love.
Gsus4@mander.xyz 8 months ago
Just make it an official extension ffs…
JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
I’m fine with them pulling a Pocket as long it dies in the end.
58008@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
swordgeek@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Mozilla has stopped working on developing and improving their products, and is now entirely focused on adding trendy terms and garbage, to feed money to their C*Os.
michaelmrose@lemmy.world 8 months ago
They in the last year or so added built in vertical tabs , much better hardware support for decoding video on Linux, continue to support manifest v2 and high quality ad blocking. Have increased performance and memory usage.
In the last 7 years performance is night and day different as is multiple process performance and switched away from unmaintainable old broken addon system.
They also created one of the premiere programming languages which is making in roads in the Linux kernel.
btaf45@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Literally no one on this green earth asked for this shit.
This is why I use the version of Firefox that does not update.
BJ_and_the_bear@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Maybe check out LibreWolf. It’s Firefox except with good defaults. Otherwise, it’s exactly the same
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
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.
echodot@feddit.uk 8 months ago
It’s not a new updated it’s been that way for years.
JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
The kinds of people who want that switched to Google Chrome years ago. Only people who care more about software freedom than convenience are still using Firefox today.
btaf45@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
somethingsomethingidk@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 8 months ago
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.
NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Pffft, next you’ll say you want to wipe your own ass.
burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
Only after the thirsty bidet is finished with it. I’ve got her gushing at this point.
nectar45@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Firefox is a good example of “either you die a hero or live long enoigh to see yourself become the villian”
madcaesar@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
piefood@feddit.online 8 months ago
They could try asking for donations, while getting rid of the massive drains on their budget.
btaf45@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
scholar@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Basically, Firefox only crushes a handful of elderly cats while everyone else crushes kittens by the shipload.
Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
I could not disagree more.
Mozilla has used the most powerful cheat code in history: infinite money for free.
Google cannot let Mozilla go under or they would become an actual monopolist, triggering a lot of laws that would force them to diversifying/selling the browser.
They don’t want any of that headache so they’re pumping Mozilla full of money, making sure that they can always operate as “the other browser engine”.
The issue is that Mozilla’s management seems to be completely incapable of doing anything interesting. Instead of ensuring that Firefox is the lightest, most optimised browser on the market while also being packed full of features (or at least full-fledged add-ons, not this crap they have), they do… mostly nothing.
Their last major update was “vertical tabs”, something that Chromium-based browsers had for around a decade.
Their previous major update was integrating Pocket…
Meanwhile, PWAs still barely work, add-ons are still dependent on the website being loaded instead of working on the browser level, the whole thing still feels bulky.
Mozilla management needs to be replaced and then we might see some movement on the market.
echodot@feddit.uk 8 months ago
People are shitting on Firefox while ignoring what they are up against.
People are complaining about unnecessary bloat. That has nothing to do with them being the underdog.
DFX4509B@lemmy.wtf 8 months ago
So is RHEL.
BurgerBaron@piefed.social 8 months ago
I just want a web browser that's not based in the USA.
defaultwizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
It’s still a way out but Ladybird might be the alternative going forward. However, they’ve stated that it’s only going to support linux/mac with a windows version in the “eventually” column which makes it kinda hard to sell to people.
JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
It’s actually a smart move. Linux users are the most receptive audience, and the most likely to support its development.
BurgerBaron@piefed.social 8 months ago
American non-profit open source browser from scratch is certainly better, still not it.
Even though I'll probably switch :p I follow their youtube channel. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough and all that.
Iamaquantummechanic@lemmy.world 8 months ago
RIP the old Opera before they went Chromium.
Grapho@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Fr, that was my daily driver for a while back in the day
blinfabian@feddit.nl 8 months ago
ecosia and qwant are german and french respectively :3
klay1@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
BurgerBaron@piefed.social 8 months ago
I mean truly independent of USA code base. Everything is still relying on upstream Chromium or Firefox with superficial tweaks and gimmicks. The maintainers of LibreWolf and Fennec which are what I'm using are more like game mod devs.
If ecosia+qwant actually forked from either and broke compatibility going their own path I'd consider them non USA. I know those two are working together on a search indexer and I'm very excited about that coming to fruition because that's more what I'm talking about and eager to support.
I realise what a mammoth challenge this is :( Probably needs EU funding like the search indexer.
Zink@programming.dev 8 months ago
USA checking in here.
Yes, please!
raldone01@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I just wish one could donate to firefox development specifically. Then they could rid it of all the ai and tracking stuff.
haloduder@thelemmy.club 8 months ago
Bless your heart.
They will do whatever they believe will maximize profit.
mechoman444@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Firefox has always been resource heavy. Try having multiple streams open at the same time… The browser just takes a shit.
If you want something much lighter and more stable waterfox is the way to go.
UltraMagnus0001@lemmy.world 8 months ago
On my pixel 6 pro it takes a few seconds before I can start typing in the browser.
Dreaming_Novaling@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
If you’re a little less afraid of stuff breaking, use IronFox, it’s been configured for privacy and security. If you don’t want websites to break as much use Fennec.
cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
ppl composing complaining on the internet about something you can literally turn off with one about:config line never change internet
warm@kbin.earth 8 months ago
The point is you shouldnt have to turn it off, its a web browser, we want to browse the web, not be subject to whatever shite Mozilla want to force into it. Features like this should be optional plugins you have to download.
pheggs@feddit.org 8 months ago
I wish Mozilla would just debloat the browser, focus on performance and making browsing a good experience. But unfortunately their revenue situation is bad. At this stage, they won’t even manage to survive through donations after annoying their main user base.
DFX4509B@lemmy.wtf 8 months ago
That’s basically what LibreWolf does.
Taleya@aussie.zone 8 months ago
You can just …turn it off tho.
barnaclebutt@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Which fork should I be using? I am already using IronFox on Android and I’m loving it. What about Linux? What’s your favourite?
Mwa@thelemmy.club 8 months ago
I just use Librewolf so its removed by default.
usjelo@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Finally using Firefox ESR helped me