Mozilla Under Fire For Firefox AI 'Bloat' That Blows Up CPU and Drains Battery (neowin.net) 107
darwinmac writes: Firefox 141 rolled out a shiny new AI-powered smart tab grouping feature (it tries to auto-organize your tabs using a local model), but it turns out the local "Inference" process that powers it is acting like an energy-sucking monster. Users are reporting massive CPU spikes and battery drain and calling the feature "garbage" that's ruining their browsing experience.
You don't need 900 tabs (Score:2, Insightful)
You don't need 900 open tabs and at the same time Mozilla should stop shooting themselves in the foot. They're almost beat by Samsung's browser in terms of market share. https://gs.statcounter.com/bro... [statcounter.com]
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You don't need 900 open tabs
....who are we to tell how people should use their browser?
Because if you do something stupid, like making a browser capable of opening 900 tabs, then you have to do more stupid, like adding an AI feature to automagically organize all those tabs, which will only lead to even more problems. Its just one more level of enshittification.
Re:You don't need 900 tabs (Score:5, Insightful)
> then you have to
No you don't have to.
Mozilla's response hasn't been asked for by anyone, it's just stupid, unnecessary, and actually causes harm - I guarantee you that most people who open a lot of tabs have a "messy desk", where they know where everything is until some idiot, using logic like your's (whether it's "There's no need to have a messy desk!" or "If you have a messy desk, then that just FORCES us to tidy it up!" neatly "reorganizes" the desk messing up the desk owner's memory.
Just. Mind. Your. Own. Business. It's not up to you to dictate how other people use their browsers, and it's definitely not something you should be "fixing" or demanding groups impose "fixes" on.
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Yes, this. I do not have 900 tabs open, but I have a lot of them open and I do not want the browser to "help" me by moving them around. Just like I do not want anyone touching my desk and moving stuff around on it.
At least I hope that feature can be turned off and then Firefox does not waste CPU.
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Re: Re-install Brendan Eich now!!! (Score:2)
Yea. He's also the inventor of JavaScript. In 2014, he resigned soon after being appointed Mozilla CEO. This was after some Mozilla employees protested his 2008 donation of $1,000 to support California's Proposition 8, which opposed legalisation of same-sex marriage.
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Just relabel bookmarks as tabs and there you go.
Its already treating them as bookmarks though.. I just wish mozilla would fix smaller things like giving a site storage size limit that actually worked and didn't just ignore it and also wouldn't churn disk as much for no reason at all.
More features I don't need. As usual. (Score:5, Interesting)
[Who cares what AC pretended to think?]
I'm still using Firefox, but I am unable to recall the last feature they added that I actually wanted. Probably password syncing, and that was a long time ago. I do sometimes look at the changes and always fail to find anything that appears to justify any learning time.
I am quite unable to remember all the so-called upgrades. I don't want more upgrades that are not upgrades. If it ain't broke, why do they keep fixing it?
So why do I stay with Firefox as my primary desktop browser? The alternatives are feeding corporate cancers or have financial models that are even worse than Mozilla's.
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If it ain't broke, why do they keep fixing it?
Because not fixing what isn't broke causes your market share to crater. There's a concept in consumer products of staleness, that is that a product that is unchanged (even if perfectly working) appears to be old, outdated, useless, stale. Consumers generally demand some fresh new thing. It's why we round corners, then straighten corners, then create Aeroglass, then flat colors, then transparent colors. It's why we move tabs below the bar, above the bar, move menus to the right to the left, etc etc etc.
They
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Because not fixing what isn't broke causes your market share to crater.
...is what marketing drones keep telling us, but I sure have not seen evidence that this is generally true for all kinds of products. And specifically for Firefox, I see no evidence for the claim that their cratering market share had anything to do with lack of UI changes.
They are trying to "fix" their market share. They are failing, but doing nothing (despite how much that would please power users) doesn't help them either.
(emphasis mine)
What reason is there to believe that?
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Well stated, but I think there are a lot of people who would like stability if that is what they emphasized. Market pitch: "Here's a good browser and we promise not to fix it unless it's actually broken."
I need more than 900 open tabs (Score:4, Funny)
I need 640K tabs open, that should be enough for anyone.
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Mod parent funnier, but the story deserved more.
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900 tabs is way too few.
Apparently, it's too much to ask for (Score:5, Interesting)
All I want is a mainstream-supported fast, simple, clean browser with an efficient rendering engine. That's it. I don't want an AI "helper". This isn't an Iron Man movie where I'm Tony Fucking Stark talking to JARVIS. And if I wanted an AI to talk to, it wouldn't be a component in my goddam browser.
Build a web portal for that shit and otherwise leave us be.
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All I want is a mainstream-supported fast, simple, clean browser with an efficient rendering engine. That's it. I don't want an AI "helper". This isn't an Iron Man movie where I'm Tony Fucking Stark talking to JARVIS. And if I wanted an AI to talk to, it wouldn't be a component in my goddam browser.
Build a web portal for that shit and otherwise leave us be.
YOU'LL TAKE AI EVERYTHING AND YOU'LL LIKE IT!
Or at least, that appears to be the stance of every single god damned company involved in producing tech. I don't really understand it because I have yet to hear a single user say they want more AI in everything, yet that seems to be the only thing any of these companies are interested in producing, more AI, more places, more invasive, more intrusive. Why? Because fuck you, serfs. Do as you're told and feed the AI.
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All I want is a mainstream-supported fast, simple, clean browser with an efficient rendering engine. That's it. I don't want an AI "helper". This isn't an Iron Man movie where I'm Tony Fucking Stark talking to JARVIS. And if I wanted an AI to talk to, it wouldn't be a component in my goddam browser.
Build a web portal for that shit and otherwise leave us be.
You might as well ask them to throw in blackjack and hookers too. They don't do fast, simple, or clean anymore.
Re:Apparently, it's too much to ask for (Score:4, Insightful)
Firefox was supposed to be a platform that you extended with add-ons if you wanted to do fancy shit.
Instead they are forcing fancy shit on us by putting it directly into the browser.
If this kind of functionality must be included for some reason, it should at least be an add-on which can be conveniently disabled.
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I mean, it doesn't even get installed until you choose to install it, and it can be removed at any time. I don't think having AI extensions that aren't shipped with the browser and need to be explicitly enabled don't really qualify as "bloat". This should just be an article about how their smart tab grouping feature is broken.
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>"Instead they are forcing fancy shit on us by putting it directly into the browser."
I agree it should be an addon, but it is not being forced on us. You can turn off the local AI thing with:
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled False
Takes about 20 seconds? And if you aren't even using tab groups, it won't do anything in the first place. I am going to turn off tab groups, anyway, because I don't find them useful and just activate it by accident on occasion:
browser.tabs.groups.enabled False
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Having that shit in the browser at all lurking where they can turn it back on with an update like they have done to me repeatedly with "features" in the past is having it forced on us.
How to turn it off (Score:5, Informative)
Open a firefox tab and type "about:config" in the address bar.
Then find these two settings and set them to false:
browser.tabs.groups.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled
(I haven't tried this yet, just found these instructions online).
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Thank you.
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Was already diabled in the Mint version.
Disabled the chat "feature" and tab groups.
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I installed LibreWolf yesterday and it's *amazing*. I hadn't even heard of it until yesterday and it's faster and cleaner than both Safari (on MacOS) and Firefox. Firefox plugins still work (which is great because I love TreeStyle Tabs and the YouTube plugins), and it comes with UBlock Origin by default. Seriously, I think it'll fit your bill.
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You are so wrong. I am sitting in a chair which has AI. The paint on my walls has AI. I really can't live without it. AI even wrote this comment.
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Sounds like you want Chrome. Personally I find it hard to live without Ublock Origin, so I'm on Firefox. It does break some sites, although I sometimes can't tell if that's down to Firefox, or Ublock, or some other privacy add-on, or because I'm behind a VPN.
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Install Brave and turn off the extras in the Preferences?
It takes two minutes and doesn't bother you again.
Spend an extra two minutes to set up a sync chain, though - it's secure and handy.
AI in every door knob (Score:4, Interesting)
Patrick Winston, one of the fathers of classical AI, was known for famously, and derisively, predicting that we would have a microprocessor in every door knob, thanks to the microelectronics revolution. Thankfully, he was mostly wrong as even IoT didn't get quite that far. But it sure feels like AI is going in that direction.
Ferchrissakes, why do we need an AI to autogroup our browser tabs? I mean, WTF?
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Uhm, there are doorknobs with microprocessors and NFC these days that validates that a physical key is allowed to turn the lock so Winston's prediction isn't that far off to be entirely realized.
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Literally every door in the building I work in has this, RFID doorknobs on every single door.
Re: AI in every door knob (Score:2)
Most people (including us techies) are lazy, and most people do not suffer from variable degrees of OCD as us terchies do, hence the need of autogrouping tabs.
Either by TNNs, hidden Markov Models, crowdsourcing or any other thechnique
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Patrick Winston, one of the fathers of classical AI, was known for famously, and derisively, predicting that we would have a microprocessor in every door knob, thanks to the microelectronics revolution. Thankfully, he was mostly wrong
He was not necessarily wrong. We are still headed there. The only question is whether industrialized society will survive long enough to reach that point.
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Um, when was the last time you stayed at a hotel?
There's a microprocessor in every doorknob.
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I'm actually a little surprised that nobody has made an IOT doorknob yet. It would actually be useful. People already buy devices to tell them when windows are open. It's nice to be able to see that everything is shut and ready for you to go out/go to bed. They can also alert you if the window opens when you are not home, or asleep.
No need for a battery, the energy produced by the movement of the door, the knob, and the latch would be enough. Like those battery free wireless light switches. I imagine there
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Thankfully, he was mostly wrong as even IoT didn't get quite that far.
Give it time. No I'm not joking, have you ever been to an air-bnb, or a hotel, or entered a secure room? Do you actually know someone who really like's gadgets? My father a keypad doorknob on his front door as do many other examples in the first sentence. We definitely have doorknobs with chips in them, we have door handles and knobs with finger print readers, with smart card readers, with keypads above them, just everyone hasn't gone out and bought them ... yet.
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At some point the browser won't even load the websites anymore, it will just generate an approximation of them using AI..
It's not everywhere yet... (Score:2)
I have v141, but I don't see this on Linux (Kbuntu). The article doesn't say it, but I'm wondering if this is an MS platform problem only. A person in the article said they didn't see it on Mac either.
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According to the release notes it's on a progressive rollout, so it may just have not got round to you yet.
https://www.firefox.com/en-US/... [firefox.com]
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Firefox 141.0.3 on Artix Linux, no AI tab grouping either. Whew. Keep it this way.
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Re: Related stories, brought to you by AI (Score:2)
Who knows, but those were the links below the comments. Very amusing.
meanwhile, in FF-ESR land... (Score:2)
This "feature" will not be available until about june 2026. By then it will either be polished or be removed...
All advantages
Dropped (Score:4, Interesting)
I stopped using Firefox after about the fourth time they shoehorned something in that nobody asked for and nobody used or liked. After two or three pointless UI changes that made it harder to get to the functions I use all the time, they added Pocket, a poorly implemented tab grouping feature, then dropped support for most of the extensions I use while installing extensions I didn't ask for.
Now I use Brave, which is Chrome with all the junk you don't want removed. The only thing I would change is the ability to fix the wonky toolbar. Other than that it's nearly perfect.
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If it makes you feel any better, Pocket is gone [mozilla.org].
Yes, the same Pocket they spent $20M on specifically to get more chances to collect user data.
Re:Dropped (Score:4, Insightful)
I stopped using Firefox after about the fourth time they shoehorned something in that nobody asked for
Users never ask for anything. That is how product development and marketing worked. Users never asked for a phone that was just a glass front panel, in fact we mocked the idea. Brave and Chrome develop nothing but features that no one asks for.
That's literally how everything works.
Last n-AI-l in the coffin. (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's be honest. Firefox has been on a downward slope for a long, long time. For those few who were faithful to Firefox, those who chose it for configurability and relatively little bloat, adding AI to it, especially AI so detrimental to the user, is just the last nail in the coffin. Firefox won't be around for much longer, I'm afraid.
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I used Firefox from version 0.9 or something all the way up until a couple of years ago, when I finally had enough. I think the remaining userbase are fairly determined to keep an alternative to Google alive though, since pretty much everything else is Chromium-based, and that is a noble goal. So I hope Mozilla somehow avoids driving Firefox into the ground, although they also seem quite determined.
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Dude, I am one of the most pessimistic people around and you are wrong. Firefox will die when it stops receiving money and the users are not the source of money, so none of this matters. They could make Firefox wholly unusable and it would still exist until the money runs out.
Every time Firefox added new features (Score:5, Insightful)
The most asked question is : "How to turn it off?"
Don't Firefox devs ever thought why is that?
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Well, you can choose to just not install it. It doesn't ship with the browser and you have to enable it and download the AI model explicitly. But, you can go to "Tools > Extensions and Themes > On-device AI" and delete any AI model that you may have installed if you don't like it.
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I am not sure why the setting isn't in the Settings menu like other tab controls. I have a feeling it will be, in later releases, though. For now, about:config and set this to False:
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled
And if you aren't even using tab groups, it won't do anything in the first place. I am going to turn off tab groups, anyway, because I don't find them useful and just activate it by accident on occasion. In which case set this to False:
browser.tabs.groups.enabled
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Additionally, it looks like these will turn off the AI chatbot and possibly any future AI stuff that might show up:
browser.ml.chat.enabled
browser.ml.enable
extensions.ml.enabled
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The most asked question is : "How to turn it off?"
Don't Firefox devs ever thought why is that?
No one thinks why that is. They know. Users are completely resistant to change in all forms. Marketing and time exist to get users to adapt to change while about:config exists for power users.
There's literally no change that has ever been rolled out where everyone universally likes it. Your comment can literally apply to every product ever released, including some of the most praised.
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The most asked question is : "How to turn it off?"
Don't Firefox devs ever thought why is that?
What else are people supposed to ask?
The people that like the feature are not going to ask any questions about how to keep the feature.
Same procedure .. (Score:3)
When Firefox has a great new idea, people ask how to turn the shit of.
I found this answer by User "Brain-Fu ":
https://news.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org]
And it made my day! All props to him!
who would have thought? (Score:2)
Absolutely no one could have see this coming. How could it end up like this? Complete mystery.
Switch to LibreWolf (Score:2)
It's great. It's everything Firefox is supposed to be. It's free, they don't accept donations because they don't need funding. It comes with UBlock Origin, it works with Firefox extensions, it's fast, it's light. It'll even sync with your old Firefox stuff if that's what you want.
I heard about it yesterday, installed it, and now I'm all in, man. It's even better than Safari on my Mac. (The caveat is obviously that maybe after a day of use I don't know how broken it is, but I've got some hope that it will co
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That's not a solution. If firefox take a dive, all the forks are as good as dead. Developing and maintaining a browser is a huge task these days. It is way more interesting to redirect all the knowledge, skills, and money that goes into firefox in the right direction now instead of turning a blind eye to it.
The alternative if the upstream disappear/stops is to either severely cut down on features (making the end result virtually useless for 95% of users), move to another, dangerous upstream (hello Google),
Mozilla has completely lost its way (Score:5, Insightful)
Mozilla: "Hey! We screwed up the address bar!"
Users: "We need a built-in Javascript blocker/enabler to protect our privacy and security."
Mozilla: "Look! Look! We changed the shape of the buttons! New icons!"
Users: "We need built-in anti-tracking a la Privacy Badger and Canvas Blocker to protect our privacy and security."
We're well past the point where we should be filing bug reports and submitting fixes or assisting Mozilla in any way. Mozilla needs to die. And while it may be difficult to find an organization/group to take Firefox away from them, it must be done. The first thing the new caretakers should do is start ripping out code -- there's over a decade of bloat and crap that needs to go. And the second thing is that the browser should have the features of the best extensions -- like NoScript -- built in.
Re:Mozilla has completely lost its way (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do you need them "built in"? I'd much rather have as little as possible "built in" and more of these "features" as extensions/plug-ins.
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I don't. I'm sick of stuff breaking every time they "improve" the extension security model, especially if they should be core features, like menu organization and grouping. You really have to go out of your way to fuck that up.
The real problem, of course, is that they insist on fucking things up. Alas, the reality is that a ton of 3rd-party extensions isn't going to fix that. That's exactly why Mozilla is dying.
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Sorry but no I disagree. I don't want any of that built in to the browser. I want the choice of plugins and systems that can do that in different ways as there are different methods to do each and they are created with different levels of competence. I ask for a good plugin architecture which works. Firefox provides that. I don't want them touching any of the above, don't pretend you speak for all users.
Also not sure why you think the address bar is screwed up. Seems to work just fine. While I don't care ab
Why is Mozilla self-sabotaging? (Score:2)
I think they need to urgently get rid of the clowns that pass for "leadership" there.
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Mozilla gets a lot of money from Google. They do what works best for Google.
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The staff is on the payroll of your biggest competitor .. what do you expect, real competition?
Another Mozilla misstep. (Score:1)
Re:Another Mozilla misstep. (Score:4, Interesting)
That's just, like, your opinion, man. :)
I like Firefox. I tried many other browsers, but I always keep going back to it. Yeah it could be better, but the same can be said for all other browsers many times over.
Enjoy the choice.
Start removing features instead. (Score:2)
I think most people just want a browser that does its job fast and smooth, and doesn't sell your data. Anything else can be an extension.
Who is this for? (Score:1)
Who is this for? This seems to have been designed by people who would never, ever have more than the minimum number of tabs open that think it would be helpful to people completely unlike themselves. This is the fever dream of an OCD person trying to "fix" the life of someone who is the polar opposite. This is equating messy with disorganized. Messy can be organized in a way others just can't understand. I don't think there are more than a handful of people in the world who would actually use this feature.
I
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At no point did I state or imply it was enabled by default. Not sure what post you thought you were replying to.
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So in your opinion, I cannot explain why I dislike a new feature in response to a Slashdot article about how people don't like a new feature, because it's optional and I didn't write it?
Is this your first day on the internet? You don't seem to know how comment sections work.
This is why (Score:2)
I stay behind the curve. Several versions behind. Let someone else suffer with all the crapulence of new and shiny.
The people at Mozilla need to get their heads out of their asses and make a browser like they used to. Go back to the Phoenix implementations and see what was done right and learn from that. The first thing they can do is put back the checkbox to never remind people there is an update and stop harassing people.
Firefox needs to be the Craigslist of browsers (Score:3)
I wish Firefox would be more like Craigslist - a determined focus on keeping the same operations and look over decades, while only updating the underlying code as needed to keep functionality in the changing web landscape. No new features. No chasing the cutting edge. Just simply work and keep working, let the new features be handled by optional extensions and plug-ins from other companies. Let them drive the change, take the risks, and if people actually want them, the number of downloads will tell you what works. If everyone is using extension x, then Mozilla can either buy them and integrate it, or just put it on the recommended extension list. If Chrome comes out with a new "killer" feature that is actually in demand, maybe Mozilla writes an optional extension, or maybe just wait for another group to do it for them. But the core browser should look and behave the same.
The organization would be a lot leaner, development costs would plummet, consumers would be happier, and risks exported to other companies.
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No. A fork of it needs to be that. Craigslist bucks the trend of all development (and it's not a software program so this may not even apply to craigslist) in that its unchanging stale interface didn't lead to declining market share. For applications users (not us power users, but the general unwashed masses) expect visible development that results in change to them. It is what keeps things fresh.
Unchanging interfaces die into irrelevance as users seek new hotness. There's a place for it, but it is not in t
I want a refund (Score:2)
I bought-in to Mozilla when they did that full-page NY Times ad.
I want a refund. They listened to no one and ruined Firefox.
Ladybird (Score:2)
Ladybird can't get here soon enough.
Stay with the ESR releases ... (Score:2)
One thing I did a while back on Xubuntu, is uninstall the Firefox snap.
Then uninstall snap itself.
Then use the Ubuntu Mozilla Team repository to install the ESR version of Firefox.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo apt install firefox-esr
That is it!
You don't have updates that are too frequent, and you don't get the bleeding edge features like this AI crap.
Barely can wait for the bubble burst (Score:2)
So the actual advancements in LLMs (and better systems) can actually begin
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It's already happening. It's just that the actual uses are being drowned out by advertising/crap/PR/??.
There isn't just one flow of things happening. Most of the noisy ones are crap, but they aren't the only ones.
Toggles (Score:4, Interesting)
The source article says one should toggle "browser.ml.chat.enabled", but that switch controls if the sidebar (basically an iframe) that is thought for accessing LLM web interfaces is hidden or not. The sidebar doesn't take more processing power than the history sidebar.
The other mentioned setting, "browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled" is the only relevant switch. And it's disabled by default.
So every user who complains about AI draining the battery enabled AI themselves beforehand.
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I'm not sure you can trust all versions to have the same flags set...in fact I'm rather sure you can't.
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Yes, they are doing some experiments on users. Have a look on how to disable Shield Studies for example. But I think everything that downloads a model has a user interaction before. Still they should use a smaller model and I am not too convinced if one really needs to use AI or if users prefer just to group the tabs themselves.
Just turn it off (Score:2)
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about:config
browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled = false
Same as it ever was (Score:1)
Cool, we should shove all AI to the client side. (Score:2)
Nobody fucking wants or needs this shit (Score:2)
Why can't they just get tab groups right first? (Score:2)
Do they test these things before release? For the love of god put them on a separate line! Is it really that hard?