Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery
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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.
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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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
You can rebind it
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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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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.
People underestimate the cost of building a fucking browser
The browser is built. I don't want to see them have a gigantic development staff because further updates are just as likely to enshitify as to improve something.
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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.
Pffft, next you'll say you want to wipe your own ass.
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This. It costs hundreds of millions per year to develop a web renderer. The security expertise required in particular is immense.
People have made clear they will not pay for browsers. At the same time, Mozilla doesn't want to hoover up mountains of personally identifiable information like Google and MS do.
People hate Mozilla for doing what they can to make money, and they also hate the idea of paying.
I understand the frustration, but I genuinely don't know what the community expects.
Don't get me wrong, I don't agree with or see sense in every Mozilla decision, but people act like they're satan incarnate and it's just ridiculous.
Developing from scratch yes, but several decent open source renderers exist. I'd love to see someone grab Servo and polish it to a fully usable state (I think it's something like 75% of the way there).
The issue also isn't Mozilla trying to make money, it's Mozilla trying to make money in the stupidest way possible, or even worse actively wasting money like with this AI slop. There's also the issue of what Mozilla is spending on. It came out a little while back how much their executives are making and it's completely ridiculous. They could afford multiple full time devs with just the money the CEO makes for making the worst decisions imaginable.
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It isn't though. At the higher end the last ceo was making 7 million. That is roughly 12 enginees after compensation and everything else.. It isn't nothing but it's less than 5 percent of the employees they laid off a year ago.
Increasing executive pay is a problem but it will barely move the needle.
For what it's worth, I would have no issue payibgif I knew that money didn't go in the pockets of a few executives
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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.
Pretty sure this goes back to the second to last Note. It's been a thing for years now
Power button became the bixby or google assistant button. It's annoying as hell
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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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]It's not their AI (Bixby). It's Gemini. But yes.
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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
But apparently, using the tools already available to you is not a common skill these days
So, are you not understanding that other people work differently, or are you just not using that skill?
Besides offering different approaches for different preferences, there are clear benefits to the extra level of organization. As an additional exercise, try to picture someone using multiple windows and tab groups.
Not everyone operates on the basic level. Hell, why even have tabs? The OS can manage multiple windows, and you can use multiple desktops to achieve the same result without that bloat.
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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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]It's really annoying when it's pushed in our faces everywhere. For getting a quick image of something you specify, or help with some boilerplate text it can be pretty neat.
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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.
They offer a fix behind a bunch of barriers? Is it not in settings with an obvious on/off toggle for the thing?
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They are all out of date, updates just take longer to arrive including security patches. Just use base Firefox and configure it as needed.
This is always the answer I go back to with Firefox. I just don't see a benefit to switching (yet) to another version of Firefox.
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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.
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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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.
It was. I'm struggling to find anything that was an actual improvement in the UI. Most of the changes were trivial and change for change's sake; but some were awful, and none are clearly better.
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Waterfox
Very interesting. Did not know about this.
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.
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You only disable the chat. Overall setting seems to be
browser.ml.enable.browser.ml.enable
Thanks!
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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.
It does seem bizarre and woefully inefficient to run this process on-the-fly locally.
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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.
Why would they bury the option... are they being paid to include this AI feature or something...?
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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.
