browser.ml.chat.enabled false
Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery
Submitted 1 month ago by moe90@feddit.nl to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
Krudler@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Serinus@lemmy.world 1 month ago
about:config
in your address barwoelkchen@lemmy.world 1 month ago
You only disable the chat. Overall setting seems to be
browser.ml.enable.burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
I also see an extensions.ml.enable. Anyone with actual knowledge of the source code know what those are doing?
mesamunefire@piefed.social 1 month ago
I hate how many of these you have to do on any new installation of Firefox.
Unpigged@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
A space for vanilla ff experience extension, sort of like sanemacs?
58008@lemmy.world 1 month 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.
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 1 month 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.
btaf45@lemmy.world 1 month 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 1 month 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
JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml 1 month 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.
echodot@feddit.uk 1 month ago
It’s not a new updated it’s been that way for years.
swordgeek@lemmy.ca 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month ago
Maybe check out LibreWolf. It’s Firefox except with good defaults. Otherwise, it’s exactly the same
RaivoKulli@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
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 even downloads the model if you never enable or use it.
ObviouslyNotBanana@piefed.world 1 month ago
I love that people get upset that their CPU is using its resources when they're using it.
Psythik@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Reminds me of how some people get upset when their OS uses up all their RAM, no matter how much they have. It’s like they want their PC to be sluggish and unresponsive. Unused RAM is wasted RAM.
callouscomic@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Why don’t they download more CPU? Are they stupid?
mannycalavera@feddit.uk 1 month ago
I want my cou to be idle all the time! Damn it why did I spend so much on a CPU only for it to “do work”? FFS.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 1 month ago
“I’ve noticed that my CPU, GPU, and power usage when I run games. Valve needs to fix this ASAP!”
BD89@lemmy.sdf.org 1 month ago
Isn’t this enabled by default? And don’t you have to manually edit the config settings in the browser to disable it?
RaivoKulli@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
It wasn’t for me
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled = false
Mika@sopuli.xyz 1 month 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 1 month ago
It is though.
FiskFisk33@startrek.website 1 month ago
then why the fuck is this newsworthy? ugh. Why is there such a huge hateboner for firefox lately?
ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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.
pheggs@feddit.org 1 month 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.
haloduder@thelemmy.club 1 month ago
Their revenue is fine.
They just waste it on unnecessary bullshit.
They’re a business, after all. They don’t care about their products. They care about doing the least among of work while making the most amount of money.
It’s not about keeping the lights on. It’s about living as luxurious a life as possible.
pheggs@feddit.org 1 month ago
They care about doing the least amount of work while making the most amount of money.
I mean that’s what capitalism in a nutshell. Lower costs and increase the price. It’s optimized for profit, not for the best product, unfortunately. The only thing that should keep it within lines is competition, but if the competition isn’t any better it won’t help
cley_faye@lemmy.world 1 month ago
They haven’t needed donations for years. In the current situations donos are, at best, part of the CEO and top-brass bonus.
pupbiru@aussie.zone 1 month ago
it’s even worse than that tho: donations are for the mozilla foundation which is doing all the nonsense everyone hates… firefox is the mozilla corporation, which is a distinct entity
IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO DONATE TO FIREFOX
pheggs@feddit.org 1 month ago
could be, I can’t judge that. do you have any source for that info or is it based on an assumption?
DFX4509B@lemmy.wtf 1 month ago
That’s basically what LibreWolf does.
Kissaki@feddit.org 1 month ago
How do you make browsling a good experience, other than performance?
I like the webpage translation it offers. I’d hate to lose it. And I’m sure debloating would inevitably mean losing features that are required to catch the average internet user.
melroy@kbin.melroy.org 1 month ago
They aren't doing anymore for years. I moved to forks of ff instead.
nectar45@lemmy.zip 1 month 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 1 month 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.
DFX4509B@lemmy.wtf 1 month ago
So is RHEL.
pycorax@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
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?
not_IO@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
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.
orclev@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.
absquatulate@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Even if they wanted to bank on the adblocker thing I imagine they can’t because they have to stay in Google’s good graces. Like 90% of their revenue was google money, and has been for years now.
At this point I’d honestly even pay for a privacy focused mozilla browser that is clean of all this crap, just to keep them afloat, but fat chance of that happening.
hummingbird@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The company is doomed with this kind of leadership
Jason2357@lemmy.ca 1 month 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.
Nalivai@lemmy.world 1 month 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
BurgerBaron@piefed.social 1 month ago
I just want a web browser that's not based in the USA.
themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Mozilla does it again, adding useless crap.
regedit@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
First thing I did when some hey we added AI… was to right-click and disable it.
Gsus4@mander.xyz 1 month ago
Just make it an official extension ffs…
nothingcorporate@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Waterfox and/or Librewolf FTW
raldone01@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I just wish one could donate to firefox development specifically. Then they could rid it of all the ai and tracking stuff.
comador@lemmy.world 1 month 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.
paequ2@lemmy.today 1 month ago
Come to LibreWolf, the waters fine!
Tywele@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month 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.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Is that what the FUCK has been happening? I’ve been having tabs just BLOW Up in ram and CPU usage
massivemeatballs@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I’ll keep using LibreWolf as my main browser while keeping an eye on Ladybird with my fingers crossed.
Taleya@aussie.zone 1 month ago
You can just …turn it off tho.
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Awful Idea? Anal Intrusion? Actually Irrelevant?Activating Idiocy? Adding Incompetence?
_AutumnMoon_@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
where is this AI bloat exactly? I use Firefox every day and see no difference
yarr@feddit.nl 1 month 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.
Pjonathan@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I was actually wondering why it felt like my Firefox was dying, possible could align with this.
flop_leash_973@lemmy.world 1 month 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.tjsauce@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Waterfox has been pretty good lately
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 1 month 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.
funkyfarmington@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Hmm, I bet Librewolf doesn’t have that…
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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 that just can’t be done conventionally.
But this:
Take out the word AI.
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, but this is just stupid.
DaddleDew@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.
otter@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Yup
The auto naming feature is neat in some cases, like the AI chats themselves
Tab groups don’t hit those points at all
Godort@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
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.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Firefox has little financial motivation for this, though?
Other than getting “AI” investor money, if that’s the plan… But otherwise it just feels like they’re following a meme.
Saleh@feddit.org 1 month ago
I agree with you on almost everything.
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.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Fair point. Not on the semantics, but on taking the best approach, yeah.
tabular@lemmy.world 1 month ago
How do you tell what the patterns are, or how to interpret them?
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 1 month ago
even without AI, to me tab groups are already feature creep bloat in browsers. do people really put that much effort into organizing tabs?
exu@feditown.com 1 month ago
I like the tab groups. I use them often at work to group an issue with related tabs and my attempts at solving it. Also makes it easier to pause work on one problem and work on something else because I have the tabs grouper and know exactly where to go back.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 month ago
No, but I think the idea of a second layer of organization to tabs is a wonderful idea. Maybe not a gig of RAM to sort them, sure.
mr_satan@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Yes, especially at work. Different tasks, different tab groups. Once the task is done, the group dies. Really useful when working on multiple tasks at “the same time”.
Pair that with multi account containers and temporary containers and it’s a godsend tool for web dev.
hisao@ani.social 1 month ago
You probably look at tabs as something inherently transient. In my tab group powered workflow a lot of tabs are persistent between browser restarts and stay open at all times. To try to formalize it, there is a set of core tabs that are permanently open, and there are transient tabs are opened and closed from those core tabs. Before tab groups I used “Tree Style Tab” extension but I like tab groups more. It’s especially cool tab groups are integrated well with containers so that you can have for example I2P tab group tied to I2P container configured to use I2P proxy port to automatically browse all tabs opened within group through your I2P proxy port.
cley_faye@lemmy.world 1 month ago
It is to some people. My approach though, when I happen to have multiple “work group” to organize, is just to use my OS ability to have multiple windows. No need for any extra bloat, the feature is already there, and it works as I’m used to.
But apparently, using the tools already available to you is not a common skill these days :(
RecursiveParadox@lemmy.world 1 month ago
For work at any given point I have 17-20 tabs open. It’s totally useful for me to sort them into tabs to cut out the “noise” when I’m doing research.
tabular@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I started using tab groups when they released vertical tabs.
a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Another local LLM guy here, i fully agree with you - this is just a move to probably acquire capital in the case that the google-cashflow stops.