Do you have to enable the feature first? Because I’m on v141 and I don’t see this feature. Complaining about a useless and draining feature that you yourself enabled is a special kind of stupid tbh.
where is this AI bloat exactly? I use Firefox every day and see no difference
Mozilla is no longer about making a great browser. Mozilla is about making sure their Google bucks come in each year without fail. They don’t work for consumers anymore – they work for Google.
Throughout the years, the market share of Firefox has shank and shank and their C-Suite has continued giving themselves raises.
Mozilla Inc. has been very sick for a long time. It’s a shame that one of the last pieces of honest competition for web browsers belongs to them, because I’m not sure how much longer they will be able to shamble on like this.
I was actually wondering why it felt like my Firefox was dying, possible could align with this.
Why does Mozilla think we want AI integrated in your browsers ??
Finally using Firefox ESR helped me
Demon tech
If AI mustt exist it should be in places where the general public cannot access nor interact with it
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, out of desperation, because it just can’t be done well 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. I like “generative” ML, within reason and ethics. But this is just stupid.
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.
Yup
Auto naming functionality is neat in some cases, like the AI chat UI itself
- It’s convenient to have names when toggling between a few recent chats or searching through 10s or 100s of chats later on
- I spawn new chats often and it’s tedious to name them all
- 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
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.
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.
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…
Isn’t the “for-profit” Mozilla Corporation owned by the “non-profit” Mozilla Foundation though?
I don’t care. It’s a corrosive force that causes them to pay for over priced CEO’s and integrate services that nobody cares about into Firefox (like pocket) or that runs against their principles (container VPN’s exclusive to Mozillas for-profit VPN).
90% of their cash flow comes from google to be the default search engine - they are probably trying to open up alternative routes of funding to reduce the risk, since it’s not guaranteed that the money will keep coming due to the current lawsuit.
Right, I sympathize with that.
…But also it’s ridiculous. Like why should including a feature with “AI” in it get them VC money? Even if that’s kinda reality?
TBH they should just become a contributor to llama.cpp and market that somehow.
Like why should including a feature with “AI” in it get them VC money?
Spoken like someone who’s never interacted with Silicon Valley VCs… just imagine someone with tons of a money, a moderately competent business background, and very little understanding of even the basics of technology that you and I take for granted. And then make them stupid and greedy.
“AI? Yes please! Here’s some money, I’ve heard of Firefox so I know you’re good for it.” It’s not really any more complicated than that, I don’t think.
Well, exactly. Then why the pretense?
They could contribute to some existing local inference effort, do actually useful dev work, and slap their brand on it. It would both be cheaper and “look” better to VCs.
Basically do what ollama’s doing but less shady.
Yeah. There would be a way to do it that I feel like might potentially be useful. The described method (doing clustering instead of just having a similarity threshold to group tabs together, vectorizing the entire tab title through a whole fucking network instead of just tokenizing it and calling two tabs similar if they have uncommon tokens that are within a certain similarity level) really sounds to me like people who have no real idea what they’re doing, just being “ML experts” all over the codebase and fucking things up, and probably walking away very proud of themselves while helping themselves to bunches and bunches of the Mozilla Foundation’s Google-money.
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.
Fair point. Not on the semantics per se, but on taking the best approach, 100%.
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?
The recognition of the pattern is done by the machine learning. That is the core concept of machine learning.
For the interpretation you need to use your domain knowledge. Machine learning together with knowledge in the domain analyzed can be a very powerful combination.
Another example in research i have heard about recently, is detection of brain tumors before they occur. MRIs are analyzed of people who later developed brain tumors to see if patterns can be detected in the people who developed the tumors that are absent in the people who didn’t develop tumors. This knowledge of a correlation between certain patterns and later tumor development could help specialists to further their understanding of how tumors develop as they can analyze these specific patterns.
What we see with ChatGPT and other LLMs is kind of doing the opposite by detaching the algorithm from any specific knowledge. Subsequently the algorithm can make predictions on anything and they are worth nothing.
even without AI, to me tab groups are already feature creep bloat in browsers. do people really put that much effort into organizing tabs?
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.
I like the tab groups.
And nobody should stop you installing an extension that provides tab groups. I agree with the other commentator that some features can be left to extensions and don’t need to be part of the core web browser, though.
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.
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.
FF already has tab groups. Right click on one.
Yeah, they were added somewhat recently, I know.
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.
Now does that need AI in any capacity? Absolutely not! I’m more upset that they’re even considering such thing because ir sounds utterly useless. A browser should do the browser thing and get out of my way.
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.
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.
I started using tab groups when they released vertical tabs.
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.
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.
So, are you not understanding that other people work differently, or are you just not using that skill?
The very first five words of my message was that this was useful to some people.
Another local LLM guy here, i fully agree with you - this is probably just a move to acquire capital in the case that the google-cashflow stops.
browser.ml.chat.enabled falseabout:config
in your address barYou only disable the chat. Overall setting seems to be
browser.ml.enable.browser.ml.enable
Thanks!
I also see an extensions.ml.enable. Anyone with actual knowledge of the source code know what those are doing?
My hero
Awe shucks
I too like corn.
Indeed it is a maligned but wonderful and versatile staple food
I hate how many of these you have to do on any new installation of Firefox.
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.
Just what I needed, ty
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.
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.
It’s not a new updated it’s been that way for years.
Bixby was not llm based, originally, and sometimes updates will rewrite a user’s custom settings. For instance, I had a galaxy on which I made pushing the power button three times turn on the flashlight. An update occurred that overrode that setting by deleting it and turned on five presses to call 911. I ended up accidently calling 911 at 3am (accompanied by a blasting alarm sound) trying not to wake someone by turning on the light.
Bixby was not llm based
I’m not really sure how that really makes any difference though. I’m not defending their decision I’m just saying that it’s been around for a while now.
I’ve just pressed my power button five times and it does call, what I’m assuming is, emergency number. It’s the wrong one for my country (genius Samsung) so God knows what that would actually do, but it doesn’t auto call I have to actually press the call button. Maybe they received some user feedback?
Seems a bit pointless given the fact that I have to press the button five times to call the emergency services but their phone number is only three digits long.
That’s goofy as hell that the emergency number isn’t localized. I think the idea that pressing a physical button 5 times quickly is faster than having to look at the phone and select options. Idk, though, I don’t use it.
No my s23 has no bixby buttons. Just power and 2 volume. Samsung DELIBERATELY updated so the POWER BUTTON activated their shitty agent. Only software shutdown was avilable until I changed.
Getting a linux phone when this dies. Fuck samsung.
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.
Yes, it was forced on me. I have updates disabled too. Pieces of shit.
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.
It’s not their AI (Bixby). It’s Gemini. But yes.
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
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
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.
All right, but apart from the vertical tabs, better video decoding, support for manifest v2, high quality adblocking, increased performance, and the useful programming language, what has Mozilla ever done for us?
The aqueducts?
Oh. Aqueducts? Shut up!
@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 what i don’t like the most is the change from opt in to opt out. Every new feature most users don’t want. You can argue that they know this and make it harder and harder to turn off those new “features” . 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 about:config.
I guess next time you need 3rd party patches and compile the browser yourself to switch a “feature” off.I would argue that it’s a bit easier to still follow your values if your business consists of mostly selling games.
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
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 it even downloads the model if you never enable or use it.
I love that people get upset that their CPU is using its resources when they’re using it.
Reminds me of how some people get upset when their OS uses up all their RAM, no matter how much they have. It’s like they want their PC to be sluggish and unresponsive. Unused RAM is wasted RAM.
Did a project several years where the customrr required that the server we delivered specifically for the project never use more than 50% CPU or RAM. No requirements about how fast it actually performs its intended function, just that it can only utilise half the available resources while doing it.
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
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
Yeah, we have that with our customers sometimes. To me, an app should either be running full whack - maxing out bandwidth on CPU, disk, memory or network - or completely idle. Chuntering along at 2% is a bug. For the ones that put ‘monitoring tools’ that raise errors when we reach 100% on something, we set a Linux CGroup to throttle the offending resource. Takes longer, obviously, but not worth arguing with their network deployment teams 🤷 .
That RAM is mint condition collectors edition RAM. We’re just storing it there temporarily.
Don’t you dare fucking touch it.
My software does that anyway because I can’t be arsed with multithreading or a 64 bit version
Actually, I’m kinda sad that my laptop doesn’t get close to maxing my RAM cause I specifically bought another stick to make it 16GB. This was back when I was using Windows but now I’m bloat-free on Fedoora. I need to get into gaming on my laptop instead now lol.
Why don’t they download more CPU? Are they stupid?
I want my cou to be idle all the time! Damn it why did I spend so much on a CPU only for it to “do work”? FFS.
“I’ve noticed that my CPU, GPU, and power usage goes up when I run games. Valve needs to fix this ASAP! Steam is literally unusable!”
Isn’t this enabled by default? And don’t you have to manually edit the config settings in the browser to disable it?
It wasn’t for me
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled = falseI haven’t used it and it is enabled in
about:configfor me.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.
No, I haven’t used tab groups. At least not beyond an initial peek when they were introduced. They’re no replacement or useful addition to my vertical hierarchical tabs (Tree Style Tab extension).
deleted by creator
That’s the sidebar thing
I realised that about a minute after I posted, so I deleted my commented right away :)
Ah, it was still visible to me. Now it shows it’s removed. My bad
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.
It is though.
then why the fuck is this newsworthy? ugh. Why is there such a huge hateboner for firefox lately?
I really don’t get it either.
It’s not like it’s a paid product either.
A lot of people would rather sit around and tear down the progress being made around them for being imperfect, than pitch in to help change things for the better.
Because they keep betraying their supposed values for short-term gains.
What is the gain? What is a single gain you think they have milked from their users?
Money for their executives
But nobody pays for Firefox? Do you mean the “recommended pages”? Because yeah that is a revenue source I guess, but as long as I can turn it off I can let it slide
They get money from Google, advertisements, and selling data. Did you think Mozilla made it without paying their employees and executives?
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.
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.
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.
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 amount 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.
They care about doing the least amount of work while making the most amount of money.
I mean that’s what capitalism does 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
They haven’t needed donations for years. In the current situations donos are, at best, part of the CEO and top-brass bonus.
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
could be, I can’t judge that. do you have any source for that info or is it based on an assumption?
Their public, reviewed 2023 financial statement and their official documents about administration salaries and bonus.
That’s basically what LibreWolf does.
Yep, and it still works great. I even use LibreWolf on my work machine, and since it’s running Linux I need to use all the Microsoft 365 stuff, like attending meetings via Teams, in my web browser. I just let it persist and share some site data to make things run smoothly. (which is a compromise, yeah)
The only real issue I had was when I installed the flatpak version, and it was the flatpak permissions screwing with me. Most of the time though I have been using the version from their repo.
How do you make browsling a good experience, other than performance?
I like the webpage translation it offers. I’d hate to lose it. Sync and tab sending is also very important to me, between desktop, mobile phone, and tablet.
I’m sure debloating would inevitably mean losing features that are required to catch the average internet user.
Why not add this features as browser extension?
Extending and managing extension APIs and extensions also comes at a cost. I certainly wouldn’t be against that - but I’m not familiar with the technical details or cost of the features involved.
Facebook Container comes to mind, they’ve done this before already.
If a browser only aims at tech savvy people, practically no one will end up using it.
This is an UI issue. You could just show them a landing Page and ask them if they want this new feature, and then it installs the extension in the background, without explicitly ask the user to go to the extension page to install something by hand.
Yeah, a good browser should probably take an approach similar to Linux Mint.
It has to be easy to install and it has to work great for like 99.9% of normal uses without changing a single setting.
But, being free and open, if you are tech savvy then you can change and customize whatever you want. Sometimes it means I can lock down the privacy and data storage in my browser, and sometimes it means I can change the icon on my work computer’s “start” button to be a check engine light. It’s all just part of being able to use your computer the way you want to.
Well this is obviously personal to some degree, but for me it would be to fix bugs, don’t crash, dont make me restart after an update and lose my incognito tabs, focus on being w3c compliant, block ads, maybe allow blocking annoying cookie banners and maybe allow good keyboard navigation. I like some features other browsers have, such as integrated tor browsing - but since I am not a big fan of bloat, I’m not sure whether that should be handled outside of the browser
block ads, maybe allow blocking annoying cookie banners and maybe allow good keyboard navigation.
those are/could be browsing extensions. i don’t see why the browser should integrate ad blocking when it could just be an extension (that could be installed by default, like how librewolf has ublock origin installed by default).
Fair, I’m all in for de-bloating! The only problem with plugins is that it can become increasingly difficult to provide the same quality of testing and quality, because you can’t possibly test all combinations of enabled plugins - even if most don’t interfere with each other, it can easily break stuff
They aren’t doing anymore for years. I moved to forks of ff instead.
deleted by creator
