Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery

Comments

• ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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  • finitebanjo@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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    • The_Decryptor@aussie.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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• brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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:

  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, but this is just stupid.

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  • DaddleDew@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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    • otter@lemmy.ca ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Yup

      The auto naming feature is neat in some cases, like the AI chats themselves

      • It’s convenient for searching through 10s or 100s of chats later on
      • I spawn new chats often and it’s tedious to name them
      • 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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  • Godort@lemmy.ca ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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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    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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  • Saleh@feddit.org ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Fair point. Not on the semantics, but on taking the best approach, yeah.

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    • tabular@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Based on this patterns you have an idea, where you need to focus in the physical theory for understanding and optimizing it.

      How do you tell what the patterns are, or how to interpret them?

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  • acosmichippo@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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?

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    • exu@feditown.com ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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    • JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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    • hisao@ani.social ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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    • mr_satan@lemmy.zip ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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    • RecursiveParadox@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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    • cley_faye@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 :(

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    • tabular@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I started using tab groups when they released vertical tabs.

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  • a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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• 58008@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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  • bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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    • echodot@feddit.uk ⁨30⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

      It’s not a new updated it’s been that way for years.

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    • JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ 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.

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    • btaf45@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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    • somethingsomethingidk@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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

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  • swordgeek@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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    • michaelmrose@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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  • btaf45@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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    • BJ_and_the_bear@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Maybe check out LibreWolf. It’s Firefox except with good defaults. Otherwise, it’s exactly the same

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• Pjonathan@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I was actually wondering why it felt like my Firefox was dying, possible could align with this.

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• Mika@sopuli.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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• Jason2357@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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  • Nalivai@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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

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  • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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  • ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It does seem bizarre and woefully inefficient to run this process on-the-fly locally.

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• Sam_Bass@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  If AIust exist it should be in places where the general public cannot access nor interact with it

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• Krudler@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  browser.ml.chat.enabled false

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  • woelkchen@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    You only disable the chat. Overall setting seems to be browser.ml.enable.

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    • Krudler@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      browser.ml.enable

      Thanks!

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    • burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I also see an extensions.ml.enable. Anyone with actual knowledge of the source code know what those are doing?

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  • Serinus@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    about:config
    in your address bar

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  • ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    My hero

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    • Krudler@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Awe shucks

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  • mesamunefire@piefed.social ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I hate how many of these you have to do on any new installation of Firefox.

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    • Unpigged@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      A space for vanilla ff experience extension, sort of like sanemacs?

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• nectar45@lemmy.zip ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Firefox is a good example of “either you die a hero or live long enoigh to see yourself become the villian”

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  • madcaesar@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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    • scholar@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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    • Alaknar@sopuli.xyz ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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    • frongt@lemmy.zip ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      How does adding AI help their funding?

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    • echodot@feddit.uk ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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    • Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Basically, Firefox only crushes a handful of elderly cats while everyone else crushes kittens by the shipload.

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    • btaf45@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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  • DFX4509B@lemmy.wtf ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    So is RHEL.

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• HugeNerd@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Awful Idea? Anal Intrusion? Actually Irrelevant?Activating Idiocy? Adding Incompetence?

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  • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Altogether Imbecilic

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    • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Arrived in the Idiocracy?

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• pheggs@feddit.org ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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  • haloduder@thelemmy.club ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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    • pheggs@feddit.org ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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

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  • cley_faye@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    They haven’t needed donations for years. In the current situations donos are, at best, part of the CEO and top-brass bonus.

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    • pupbiru@aussie.zone ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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

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  • DFX4509B@lemmy.wtf ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    That’s basically what LibreWolf does.

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  • Kissaki@feddit.org ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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  • melroy@kbin.melroy.org ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    They aren't doing anymore for years. I moved to forks of ff instead.

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• RaivoKulli@sopuli.xyz ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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  • ObviouslyNotBanana@piefed.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I love that people get upset that their CPU is using its resources when they're using it.

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  • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    “I’ve noticed that my CPU, GPU, and power usage when I run games. Valve needs to fix this ASAP!”

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  • BD89@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Isn’t this enabled by default? And don’t you have to manually edit the config settings in the browser to disable it?

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• BurgerBaron@piefed.social ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I just want a web browser that's not based in the USA.

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  • defaultwizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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  • Iamaquantummechanic@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    RIP the old Opera before they went Chromium.

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• Gsus4@mander.xyz ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Just make it an official extension ffs…

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• comador@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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• massivemeatballs@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I’ll keep using LibreWolf as my main browser while keeping an eye on Ladybird with my fingers crossed.

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• pycorax@sh.itjust.works ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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?

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• raldone01@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I just wish one could donate to firefox development specifically. Then they could rid it of all the ai and tracking stuff.

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• themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Mozilla does it again, adding useless crap.

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• regedit@lemmy.zip ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  First thing I did when some hey we added AI… was to right-click and disable it.

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• flop_leash_973@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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:config to disable seems really stupid.

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• Taleya@aussie.zone ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  You can just …turn it off tho.

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• tjsauce@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Waterfox has been pretty good lately

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• nothingcorporate@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Waterfox and/or Librewolf FTW

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• paequ2@lemmy.today ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Come to LibreWolf, the waters fine!

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• TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Is that what the FUCK has been happening? I’ve been having tabs just BLOW Up in ram and CPU usage

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• jjjalljs@ttrpg.network ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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• MithranArkanere@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Firefox does run better when you disable all “ml.chat” settings.

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• funkyfarmington@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Hmm, I bet Librewolf doesn’t have that…

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• Mwa@thelemmy.club ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I just use Librewolf so its removed by default.

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