Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery

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.
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?
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.
- 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.
- 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 :(
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.

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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
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.
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

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.
- a nonprofit owned by a for profit company
  It's the other way around, the foundation owns the corporation.
  Still feels like the corporation is the one making decisions though.

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.

Bro, several users have taken to the Firefox subreddit, this is definitely worthy of being the most upvoted post on Lemmy rn
- Because people seem to have a special hate boner for Firefox on here.
  And please don't call me bro.
  Edit: hate not hat
- This is sarcastic right lol

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?

        browser.ml.chat.enabled   false

about:config
in your address bar
You 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 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?

where is this AI bloat exactly? I use Firefox every day and see no difference

There is none, this is all AI=bad knee-jerk reaction. From what I can tell, so far Firefox has 3 ML-based systems implemented:
Site / text translation - fully local, small model, requires manual action from user
Tab grouping suggestions - fully local, small model, requires manual action from user
Image alt text generation (when adding images to a PDF) - fully local, small model, looks like it's enabled by default but can be turned off directly in the modal that appears when adding alt text
All of these models are small enough to be quickly run locally on mobile devices with minimal wait time. The CPU spikes appear to be a bug in the inference module implementation - not an intended behavior.
Firefox also provides UI for connecting to cloud-based chatbots on a sidebar, but they need to be manually enabled to be used. The sidebar is also customizable so anyone who doesn't want this button there can just remove it. There's also a setting in about:config that removes it harder.
I actually really like the way Mozilla is introducing these features. I recently had to visit another country's post office site and having the ability to just instantly translate it directly on my device is great.
- You meant to tell me the general public has kneejerk reactions and don't know how a computer works?
  What a shock that lemmy bashes Mozilla for doing their job.
Same here, I'm on 141.0 Linux. No tab grouping unless I group them. I do see the ai button but have not bothered with it.
Still waiting for this bloat to show up, and I'm on the latest update.
I remember tab groups showing up one day by themselves maybe a week ago, and then I quickly clicked about two buttons and now they're totally gone and I almost forgot they were a thing. But likely if I had summarily clicked 2 different buttons it might have been turned on without me realizing it, and that would cause the model to be downloaded and the CPU cycles to be spent (at least if I kept the tab groups on)

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
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.
- The problem with useful suggestions like these is that they can't be used when the MO is to shove AI into everything and anything to seem relevant, and chase the pot of cost savings at the end of the rainbow which is totally gonna turn up any day now, we think, we're pretty sure anyway.
It does seem bizarre and woefully inefficient to run this process on-the-fly locally.

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.
- 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 = false
- That's the sidebar thing

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.

Instead of trying to get Google money, I actually wish they would offer a monthly/annual/lifetime membership as the cost of not enshittifying to stay in business. And then severing ties with Google as a company.
A lot of tech companies are holding onto unsustainable business models from 10 years ago to make their products at a loss or "free," and it's forcing them into AI, oligarchy, or being beholden to oligarchs. End users paying a fair price to own the products they use is a better alternative than this because it puts the power back in our hands as opposed to tech bros and shareholders.
- Much like electricity, lazy boards seek the path of least resistence. What's easier, building a world-class browser and properly marketing it and maintaining profitability, or just setting your default search engine to "Google.com" and cashing the massive check?
  At this point, there's very few people even left at Mozilla that could even reverse the trend. Go back and look at their past few years. Other than some minor activity to Firefox, almost all their initiatives are little side missions that last for a few years and then are sunset.
  Stuck like Pocket, Mozilla Social, Firefox Send, Firefox OS, etc. The list goes on and on. They invest heavily in some flash in the pan initiative and then ax it off a few years later.
- People won't pay for that. Or, at least, not enough people.
  We literally saw this play out with media. Everyone hated cable tv. Suddenly we had netflix (2.0) where we can "pay for what I want". Except... then everyone got in on that because apparently we want things beyond Netflix Original Pictures and whatever they could get cheap out of Korea.
  And now? "Ugh, there are juts so many services. I need like twelve. I wish there was one big bundle of everything".
  Not exactly the same but a premium browser (that, again, isn't going to make anywhere near enough money to fund development) would be dropped even faster than the guy whose patreon is still "pay one dollar per episode"
- One a lifetime membership is not a sustainable business model . Two people so not want to pay for stuff a small percentage might but the vast majority won't escpically when there is Chrome which is free.
  The problem is everyone wants shit got free or 99 cents one time payment for life time upgrades. These are not sustainable business models. Then we complain why are their ads or whatever, well do you work for free? People have to make enough to live.
As somebody who is out of the loop a bit here, how is Morzilla making money through Googhe?
- https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-google-search-deal-for-firefox
  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-google-keeps-paying-mozilla-s-firefox-even-as-chrome-dominates
  https://nerdschalk.com/85-of-mozillas-revenue-at-risk-firefoxs-survival-threatened-by-potential-loss-of-google-search-deal/

Firefox is a good example of "either you die a hero or live long enoigh to see yourself become the villian"

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.
- They could stop paying their CEO so much and hire a few more devs, refocus their identity on privacy and performance (their offline ai translation is actually really useful), and actually give people the sense that their donations will be well spent.
- I could not disagree more.
  Mozilla has used the most powerful cheat code in history: infinite money for free.
  Google cannot let Mozilla go under or they would become an actual monopolist, triggering a lot of laws that would force them to diversifying/selling the browser.
  They don't want any of that headache so they're pumping Mozilla full of money, making sure that they can always operate as "the other browser engine".
  The issue is that Mozilla's management seems to be completely incapable of doing anything interesting. Instead of ensuring that Firefox is the lightest, most optimised browser on the market while also being packed full of features (or at least full-fledged add-ons, not this crap they have), they do... mostly nothing.
  Their last major update was "vertical tabs", something that Chromium-based browsers had for around a decade.
  Their previous major update was integrating Pocket...
  Meanwhile, PWAs still barely work, add-ons are still dependent on the website being loaded instead of working on the browser level, the whole thing still feels bulky.
  Mozilla management needs to be replaced and then we might see some movement on the market.
- How does adding AI help their funding?
- People are shitting on Firefox while ignoring what they are up against.
  People are complaining about unnecessary bloat. That has nothing to do with them being the underdog.
- Basically, Firefox only crushes a handful of elderly cats while everyone else crushes kittens by the shipload.
- They could try asking for donations, while getting rid of the massive drains on their budget.
- 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.
So is RHEL.

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?
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?
- 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
They aren't doing anymore for years. I moved to forks of ff instead.

I just want a web browser that's not based in the USA.

RIP the old Opera before they went Chromium.
- Fr, that was my daily driver for a while back in the day
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 actually a smart move. Linux users are the most receptive audience, and the most likely to support its development.
- American non-profit open source browser from scratch is certainly better, still not it.
  Even though I'll probably switch :p I follow their youtube channel. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough and all that.
USA checking in here.
Yes, please!
ecosia and qwant are german and french respectively :3
- I mean truly independent of USA code base. Everything is still relying on upstream Chromium or Firefox with superficial tweaks and gimmicks. The maintainers of LibreWolf and Fennec which are what I'm using are more like game mod devs.
  If ecosia+qwant actually forked from either and broke compatibility going their own path I'd consider them non USA. I know those two are working together on a search indexer and I'm very excited about that coming to fruition because that's more what I'm talking about and eager to support.
  I realise what a mammoth challenge this is :( Probably needs EU funding like the search indexer.
- Ecosia on Android is based on Chromium. Qwant on Android is based on: Firefox for Android, which uses the GeckoView engine.
  Otherwise they are just search engines.
- Those are search engines though, not web browsers.

Just make it an official extension ffs...

I'm fine with them pulling a Pocket as long it dies in the end.

Instead of capitalising on Google pissing off power users with its crusade against adblockers, why the hell is Mozilla fucking up so hard here? Seriously, which chain of command green lit all of this and didn't even think this would be remotely an issue?

it might have been Laura Chambers, who is CEO since early 2024.
It has been less than a week since the new interim CEO took over the reigns from long-time Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker. Today news broke that Mozilla is changing its product strategy going forward. The organization plans to focus on bringing "trustworthy AI into Firefox" and to scale back some of its other products and services.
Breaking: Mozilla changes strategy, focuses on Firefox and AI
She used to work for McKinsey according to her Wikipedia which explains a lot if you ask me.
Sadly this is nothing new for Mozilla. It's easier to count the decisions they've made that aren't terrible than the ones that are. Their history is a long series of fuckups occasionally punctuated by a decent decision.
- Because of this, I've always had 'mixed feelings' (to put it mildly) towards Mozilla, and sometimes I really struggle not to hate them. They're (yet) not Google or Microsoft and that's cool, but besides that, I also cannot think of more than a handful of good decisions against a ton of pretty awful ones, so right now I've settled for 'a necessary evil', which is pretty sad considering their potential.
Even if they wanted to bank on the adblocker thing I imagine they can't because they have to stay in Google's good graces. Like 90% of their revenue was google money, and has been for years now.
At this point I'd honestly even pay for a privacy focused mozilla browser that is clean of all this crap, just to keep them afloat, but fat chance of that happening.
- At this point I'd honestly even pay for a privacy focused mozilla browser that is clean of all this crap, just to keep them afloat, but fat chance of that happening.
  As much as I'd love for something like that I don't think it's even remotely possible. I don't think enough people are willing enough to pay for a browser that respects them, heck the amount of people who remain on Chrome shows that people aren't even willing to take a small step to stop using a browser that's actively working against their interests. I'd love to be proven wrong though.
The company is doomed with this kind of leadership

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?
Why would they bury the option... are they being paid to include this AI feature or something...?

Mozilla does it again, adding useless crap.

Make a stable, privacy respecting, robust browser with a powerful extension environment? No let's try do do chrome 2
Mozilla could solve all of it's issuesby just removing all of the executives
- I switched to FF after having enough of Chrome's shenanigans. I don't make changes easily, and I took the sacrifice of not being able to receive calls over Facebook (desktop browser, and some of my acquaintances wouldn't leave FB), and I still preferred Firefox after that.
  And now they want to turn it into another Chrome? I could still just use Chrome and have the lost functionality. I mean I won't, but they will just lose users with that direction.
- It's definitely an issue with the culture among tech companies.
  They're all regurgitating each other's shit, so whenever a bad idea gets passed around, they all jump on board.
- How do you think they will do that without any money?
  It's always "just do the browser" , ignoring the fact that everything you listed doesn't matter at all to the general public who are likely using Chrome because it's the default on their device.
  Mozilla is trying to find revenue sources but people just complain about it.
  The AI integration is clearly attempting to be a new search box.

First thing I did when some hey we added AI... was to right-click and disable it.

That'll stop 'em ;)

I just wish one could donate to firefox development specifically. Then they could rid it of all the advertisement and tracking stuff.

Bless your heart.
They will do whatever they believe will maximize profit.
- 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.
- I thought mozilla was a non profit?

Awful Idea? Anal Intrusion? Actually Irrelevant?Activating Idiocy? Adding Incompetence?

Altogether Imbecilic
- Arrived in the Idiocracy?

I'll keep using LibreWolf as my main browser while keeping an eye on Ladybird with my fingers crossed.

I was actually wondering why it felt like my Firefox was dying, possible could align with this.

Waterfox and/or Librewolf FTW

I just checked my Librewolf settings:
This stuff is ml chat is off by default.

Come to LibreWolf, the waters fine!

Am a wolf (that uses LW), can confirm
It really is! Just needs an Android fork and it'll be on all my devices.
- Try IronFox on android.
- use ironfox for android, it's the continuation of Mull

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:config to disable seems really stupid.

Is that what the FUCK has been happening? I've been having tabs just BLOW Up in ram and CPU usage

This doesn't trigger unless you enable and use it afaik
Same here .... all I do is read most of the time ... I'm only interested in reading about 2,000 words which shouldn't take any data .... yet Firefox will struggle under the weight of advertising, adblock, scripts, background links, preloading and all kinds of stupidity that I will not and refuse to use.

Waterfox has been pretty good lately

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.

You can just ..turn it off tho.

In about:config. Not very obvious or user-friendly tbh.
- Not to mention that constantly having to turn off crap is still awful UX
- You can literally do it through the menu. Go to settings, hit labs or search "ai" and untick it
It should not be on by default and you should not have to go into about:config to turn it off.
- It was not enabled by default for me.

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.
- Only after the thirsty bidet is finished with it. I've got her gushing at this point.

Firefox does run better when you disable all "ml.chat" settings.

Why does Mozilla think we want AI integrated in your browsers ??

Hmm, I bet Librewolf doesn't have that...

I just use Librewolf so its removed by default.

Finally using Firefox ESR helped me

Demon tech

Which fork should I be using? I am already using IronFox on Android and I'm loving it. What about Linux? What's your favourite?

I love Zen.
- Zen user here also. Awesome project. Beautiful and useful browsing experience.
They are all out of date, updates just take longer to arrive including security patches. Just use base Firefox and configure it as needed.
- Always the answer until it goes to complete shit. Folks will always suggest other forks, but in the same breath describe them as subpar compared to Firefox base. FF is still best, just tweak it a smidge, browse away.
- LibreWolf seems pretty fast about it. The difference is only ever a matter of a few days for routine updates.
  For example, it looks like Firefox 141 with the AI stuff was released on July 22, a few weeks ago.
  My LibreWolf install is 141.0.2 (edit: since updated) My Firefox install is 141.0.3
  That difference is worth it to me to know that various things I don't want have been removed from the code entirely, and that I can keep a completely default install of Firefox and/or nuke and replace that install whenever necessary.
  Edit to add: A few hours since posting, I checked for updates and now I'm on LibreWolf 141.0.3. :)
- 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.
I've been using LibreWolf for a while and it works pretty well
I like Floorp. it's a FF fork by a Japanese dev team. Best I can compare it to is Vivaldi as far as customization (what Mozilla will allow).
However the updates for it have been coming less frequently over time so I'm not sure how that bodes for the long term.
But hey i'm currently building my own FF fork with fediverse integration, tree style/stacking tabs, and vim navigation sooooo look forward to that? /shameless self promotion.
I am using LibreWolf. It's probably the best fork out there.
I can only answer that last question with Waterfox, as I've been using it for something like a decade.
My other browser is Vivaldi because of the tab stacking feature makes organising, uh, ...stuff... easier...
I use vanilla FF, Floorp, LibreWolf, and Mullvad in the FF family (plus Vivaldi for Chromium) - I only use vanilla FF for anything that I want to use persistent logins and containers for, so it's like an hour a day at most. I only installed the update 36 hours ago, do other than set bookmarks, I haven't searched anything with FF to give it the opportunity to recommend anything.
In the settings, there's 2 boxes you can un-check about recommendations. Seems pretty easy to disable this.
Firefox-ESR.
I have zen and librewolf on linux and waterfox on android.
Waterfox on mobile and floorp on desktop.
Librewolf, with the Cascade CSS theme. I used to use Zen Browser but honestly I don't really like vertical tabs that much.

If AI mustt exist it should be in places where the general public cannot access nor interact with it

On my pixel 6 pro it takes a few seconds before I can start typing in the browser.

If you're a little less afraid of stuff breaking, use IronFox, it's been configured for privacy and security. If you don't want websites to break as much use Fennec.

Keep firing

Holy fucking shit. I swear to God, I had to download chromium because running Jupiter lab in browser ate through 22gb of ram and got my shit OOM killed. If this is what's causing it I stg. I'm not even using vanilla Firefox, but the Zen fork got tebased on v141 right before this happened

Sounds kind a jupyter lab issue
- Julyterlab has been pinned for multiple versions now and the issue only started happening on the latest Firefox update. Still works fine in chromium

Firefox has always been resource heavy. Try having multiple streams open at the same time... The browser just takes a shit.

If you want something much lighter and more stable waterfox is the way to go.

ppl complaining on the internet about something you can literally turn off with one about:config line never change internet

The point is you shouldnt have to turn it off, its a web browser, we want to browse the web, not be subject to whatever shite Mozilla want to force into it. Features like this should be optional plugins you have to download.
- why shouldn't you have the option to turn things off? try turning off the ai features in chrome.