Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery
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Literally no one on this green earth asked for this shit. In fact, we've been pretty direct about how much we don't want it.
It's exhausting.
Well, stupid people want it and they do use it when its shoved in their face. Like how samsung updated and BLATANTLY made their peice of shit AI button TAKE OVER THR POWER BUTTON so when you try to turn off your phone little old granny gets confused that an ai agent pops up and starts recording you. Absolutely infuriating and I wish torture on whoever implemented that shit.
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Actual users hate AI. Shareholders love it. It’s a bubble and the business world is trying to force it everywhere they can to create a dependency.
Yep. Make the normies depend on the shitty Ai and kill the real internet. Makes me so fucking mad.
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Firefox does run better when you disable all "ml.chat" settings.
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You're forgetting the fact that laws are currently only being triggered if said company slanders dear leader.
If Google kisses ass you best believe they would completely allow them to be a monopoly and would ignore any laws being violated
That's a fairly new development. And it might not last, depending on how the cheating goes next year.
So a more risk averse company might not test the waters just yet.
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Bless your heart.
If you disagree, I'll donate $20 a month to you to do it better.
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According to the article, this is mainly for grouping tabs with a suggested name. Talk about backwards. Use AI to process the top websites on the Internet and create groups and/or logic to group them by keywords (cluster analysis), then save the small data structure in Firefox so it can group most websites instantly, using kilobytes of ram in the process; don't try to do this on everyone's device ffs.
Besides the heat and battery problem, this also means that the GUI is going to be non-deterministic, suggesting groups differently day-to-day based on the slight differences of input and the whims of the LLM. Burn it with fire.
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Correction: power users, such as the type on Lemmy, trend towards hating ai. That is by no means “all users” by any stretch of the term.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Exactly.
People seem to think "if I don't do X, that means nobody does X"
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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
yes, that's exactly what i was getting at.
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That is disingenuous.
People underestimate the cost of building a fucking browser, it's not the equivalent of maintaining a array sort app on fucking github.
Some random dude promising to "donate from time to time" is not a valid business model.
I wish they'd strip down and just focus on the browser, but fund it HOW? Ads? Subscription?
The reason a lot of companies are doing AI shit is essentially RD shooting in the dark, hoping something will pan out.
You have to do this if you are a tech company and want to survive in the future.
It's fun to meme on ai and but that shit is coming and pretending it doesn't exist or has no value simply isn't true.
So I ask everyone again, what business model exists for a software company to make money without ads or charging a monthly subscription.
So I ask everyone again, what business model exists for a software company to make money without ads or charging a monthly subscription.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-source_software
Speaking of WIkipedia, https://wikimediafoundation.org/who-we-are/financial-reports/
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Have you used the tab groups?
You mean that annoying shit they do where I'm trying to move one tab and it puts it in a colored square with some bullshit?
Yeah there was NO WAY TO AVOID THAT. It straight up did that shit on its own. Like literally it almost magnetically attracted itself to the other tab to pull this shit. It effectively activates it for you this way whether you want it or not.
Man even Firefox is starting to shit the bed with their decision making.
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Probably a bleed-over from the embedded side. Spent a lot of years working embedded control systems for NASA and DoD - bare metal systems, often interrupt driven - and it was common to have 50% margin requirements. They know those systems will grow over time, and they often have lifespans measured in decades.
That would make sense, i hadn't put that together but they had a lot of embedded control systems. This was water treatment but entirely separate from the control systems but i can see them having that a standard requirement
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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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FF already has tab groups. Right click on one.
Yeah, they were added somewhat recently, I know.
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This post did not contain any content.wrote last edited by [email protected]
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 would be CPU intensive. 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 user base over the AI kitchen table so to speak.
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. -
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.
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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Correction: power users, such as the type on Lemmy, trend towards hating ai. That is by no means “all users” by any stretch of the term.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Nah, they've done studies and most people find it fucking annoying, worse, and don't want to pay any extra for it.
The whole thing is an obvious supply side economics push.
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According to the article, this is mainly for grouping tabs with a suggested name. Talk about backwards. Use AI to process the top websites on the Internet and create groups and/or logic to group them by keywords (cluster analysis), then save the small data structure in Firefox so it can group most websites instantly, using kilobytes of ram in the process; don't try to do this on everyone's device ffs.
Besides the heat and battery problem, this also means that the GUI is going to be non-deterministic, suggesting groups differently day-to-day based on the slight differences of input and the whims of the LLM. Burn it with fire.
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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It makes a lot more sense when you realize that the Mozilla corporation is a for profit run by the same techno-fascist aggrandizing bait-and-switch narcissists as the rest of SV.
I've been saying it for years, but I will never donate to Firefox until it is freed from the shackles of a for profit corporation that can use your donation for any profit motive it sees fit; not even related to Firefox.
IIRC, you can't even donate to Firefox. You can only donate to Mozilla. It seems pretty clear to me why they set it up that way....
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That would make sense, i hadn't put that together but they had a lot of embedded control systems. This was water treatment but entirely separate from the control systems but i can see them having that a standard requirement
So was it a government (state or federal) water treatment plant? If so, I can tell you how it happened. The government contracting agencies have boilerplate text they're supposed to add to contracts to make sure salient requirements get flowed. They're supposed to delete or tailor anything that doesn't make sense, but the contracts people aren't usually very technical. We had requirements flowed to us about password management and account monitoring, but no one logs into a rocket engine or a torpedo. When we'd point it out, they'd say "oops, we should have deleted that."
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So was it a government (state or federal) water treatment plant? If so, I can tell you how it happened. The government contracting agencies have boilerplate text they're supposed to add to contracts to make sure salient requirements get flowed. They're supposed to delete or tailor anything that doesn't make sense, but the contracts people aren't usually very technical. We had requirements flowed to us about password management and account monitoring, but no one logs into a rocket engine or a torpedo. When we'd point it out, they'd say "oops, we should have deleted that."
Not in the US, our water infrastructure was sold off in 90s but that makes sense. Was probably something similar
They held us to it though so they overpaid for hardware beyond their needs and we forced the software to run slower
