Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery
-
You only disable the chat. Overall setting seems to be
browser.ml.enable.browser.ml.enable
Thanks!
-
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.
-
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...?
-
This post did not contain any content.
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.
-
This post did not contain any content.
Awful Idea? Anal Intrusion? Actually Irrelevant?Activating Idiocy? Adding Incompetence?
-
Hinging their entire future on the bet that their country gets an easily manipulated dictator, when said dictator is 80 years old already, would be extremely short-sighted from Google.
Mark my words: It will be Vance, not Trump who gets to be the first King of America.
The future is bleak.
-
Pffft, next you'll say you want to wipe your own ass.
Only after the thirsty bidet is finished with it. I've got her gushing at this point.
-
True, but I'm not sure that an extension would have the necessary access to manipulate the browser like that. I don't think it should. A malicious extension could do horrible things.
I’m not sure that an extension would have the necessary access to manipulate the browser like that.
I don't know if they still do but they used to have. That, however, is something to discuss with the genius decision makers at Mozilla who decide to break extension APIs every couple of years. Firefox on Android still hasn't recovered from last time.
-
Literally no one on this green earth asked for this shit.
This is why I use the version of Firefox that does not update.
Maybe check out LibreWolf. It's Firefox except with good defaults. Otherwise, it's exactly the same
-
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.
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.
-
Mark my words: It will be Vance, not Trump who gets to be the first King of America.
The future is bleak.
I don't know if Vance has a strong enough following. Trump is effectively worshipped by MAGAts, not sure Vance is capable of taking over like that.
-
A space for vanilla ff experience extension, sort of like sanemacs?
That's basically what librewolf, waterfox, and a whole bunch of others are. In the same way manjaro and endeavor etc. are opinionated arch installs with spackling, those browsers are opinionated settings-already-selected versions of firefox.
-
You only disable the chat. Overall setting seems to be
browser.ml.enable.I also see an extensions.ml.enable. Anyone with actual knowledge of the source code know what those are doing?
-
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.
@michaelmrose @swordgeek I 100% agree that Mozilla is important but it's also clear that currently their is not enough business to keep Mozilla going. I don't blame them for trying to make a Business , i blame them for not following their former values. You can make a business and still mostly follow values ( look for example to GOG ).
And for what i don't like is the change from opt in to opt out. Every new feature most users don't want and they know this and make it harder and harder to turn off. The last time it was hidden in a sub menu in the settings ( switching off sending data to their ad service ) now it's hidden in config:about.
I guess next time you need 3rd party patches and compile the browser yourself to switch a "feature" off. -
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.
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.
-
I just want a web browser that's not based in the USA.
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.
-
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.
American non-profit open source browser from scratch is certainly better, still not it.
Even though I'll probably switch
I follow their youtube channel. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough and all that. -
Non profits do have corporate leeches too. The executives at Mozilla have executive salaries. That is, hundreds of thousands, or millions.
They don't work out of the goodness of their hearts. And Mozilla has to find a way to earn the income to pay their bloated salaries.
Why would an organisation choose to over spend on executive salaries?
Obviously, it's because thats what it costs to get people with the right skills.
-
Mozilla is a bizarre Matryoshka doll with a for profit company inside of the nonprofit. If anything, I believe this structure is responsible for Mozilla's problems
So the profit from the for-profit is passed up to the non-profit.
This is a really common organisational structure and not bizarre.
There's loads of worthy criticisms to make of mozilla but this is not one of them.
-
Profit can be distorted based on how much employees are being paid.
They're a "non-profit," but their CEO makes millions of dollars per year. I'd say that's a profit.
Believing otherwise is just falling for rhetoric that exists to take advantage of our naivete so people richer than us can be even richer.
Many of you will disagree with this (because you're greedy consumerists), but their employees also typically don't need to be paid nearly as much as they are. Their employees are also working to maximize profit, albeit from a different, less-effective angle.
Money brings out the worst in people. I don't really value the input of people going to bat for the businessmen taking their money. Too often I see useful idiots proud to be ripped off and getting angry whenever someone points it out. It's really the norm at this point, which is sad.
Calling whatever you like "profit" cant really be rebutted, it's subjective semantics.
Yes CEOs are paid lots of money. Why would mozilla choose to over pay staff?
