Some users report their Firefox browser is scoffing CPU power People are noticing Firefox gobbling extra CPU and electricity, apparently caused by an "inference engine" built into recent versions of Firefox. Don't say El Reg didn't try to warn you. Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now …
Having read this and other recent articles about so called AI basically causing all sorts of nasty/weird shit to happen, I really am starting to despair at where the computing world is headed. Shoehorning new, unproven technology into everything "just because we can" never ends well.
I'm hardly a luddite, but for fuck's sake.... knock it off.
AI, the new Clippy.
I saw a youtuber giving a point by point argument that Clippy really only wanted to help people.
I have to say, after many decades, I have been swayed and I agree; Clippy was only annoyingly helpful, like an eager intern.
On further reflection I also feel bad for the actor who was a huge star wars fan his whole life and got to play Jarjar.
These days I'm feeling like a luddite. I miss the internet of even five years ago, and especially miss the internet of 15 years ago, but with the progression of enshittification I've been slowly removing my accounts from various services until it feels like the most technologically advanced thing I own is a book. With Mozilla's added slop I'll probably finally switch to Waterfox, but that's really just a stop-gap measure.
I am getting close to the day where I stop browsing the internet and have removed a ton of accounts just like you did.
You are right though; there was a golden age between the early 2000,s pop-up ad storms and the mid 2010's enshitification where the web was a cool place to find new things or information.
Blood is in the water. Musk divested in AI chip fab. GPT-5 is a nothing burger. The hype train is reaching for benchmarks for fuel. That's not a paradigm shift folks. That's just another iPhone release. Hopefully people will come to their senses. Throwing a shitton of compute at a problem instead of actually trying to thoughtfully solve it is not going to work out well for a lot use cases.
Still does a spectacular job at summarizing, plagiarism and filling nitwits with a false sense of confidence though!
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If you must insist on this crap to not feel left out, include an AI settings page with a toggle switch for each AI feature and another switch for 'shut it all off' for those who don't want anything. Don't hide it in about:config and make people search the internet for settings.
Too bad - eventually the setting in about:config will be ignored as well.
They did it for the floating tabs and the "megabar" - previously you could disable such antifeatures with an about:config setting - but it seems too many people were disabling such and therefore the settings was ignored.
Disabling such antifeatures now requires modifying the source code and well producing a free software version of firefox that doesn't recommend that the user install proprietary software and implements support for digital handcuffs (EME) already requires modifying the source code and it seems more modifications for the ESR version will soon be required.
Firefox management really dont get there Userbase, do they?
Generally more tech saavy folk, who hate the dominance of the big boys, and the constant push from tech bros to chuck the latest fad in everything. Soooo what do they do, start copying said tech bros, and trying to imitate the big boys.
Someone needs to educate them with the Clue Bat...
That is what the Tech Bros would like you to believe. But without the Userbase, there is nothing to sell.
The path to digital obsolescence is filled with websites, programs, and firms who thought they could make whatever changes they liked and the Userbase would just accept it. In some fields they might be able to get away with a lot more (think social networks, but even there, their are limits (Hello MySpace!) or unfortuately Microsoft), but something like a web browser, nobody has loyalty to a web browser, and it's an easy change to make. Change things to what people dont like, and people WILL walk away. And then you dont have anything left to sell...(Hello Netscape!)
So No, those who pay for the product, might be able to suggest where the product goes. But any competent management will pay attention to what the Userbase wants first and foremost... Then again, competent management might just be an Oxymoron, and it certainly doesnt seem to apply to Mozilla...
No, that's how the Tech Bros exploit open source and people. Brainwash people into believing it's because they care, and not because they are using people. Keep on believing in Santa Claus, you'll end in Santa Claws mouth.
What Mozilla sells? Nothing. What Google sells? Ads. So they pay Mozilla to ensure their real user base - the advertisers - has a reason to keep on pouring billions in Goggle's coffers.
If Mozilla loses users, Google couldn't care less. Firefox exists only because Google needs not an antitrust case against Chrome. And why it's Google keeping Mozilla alive, and not someone else? Because Google pays for a lot of projects, and nobody wants to displease Google. That's how the Tech Bros got their stronghold over IT. Kill any competition - if you can't make money selling software anymore, you need to make money sellling something else, but now they have a huge competitive advantage over anybody who would try to enter the data hoarding/ads slinging market.
They only fear now that AI could be a game changer in the ads business, and could challenge their position - that's why they need Ai in Firefox too. Not surprisingly, I've seen Gemini references within.
Face it - if you don't pay, your are the product, not the user. Why the management should care for people who don't pay them? Everytime those who pay their salaries and bonuses ask for something, and that is against what user wish, where to you believe their "loyalty" stands?
FOSS supporters are like MAGA supporters. They believe their leaders work for their good. The awakening will be hard.
Google is interested only in the mere existence of Firefox. If it has no users, and everybody uses Chrome, the better for Google, it can collect far more data.
It's there only to let Google to tell there is "competition" beyond Chrome. As soon as Google has to divest Chrome somehow, if ever, Firefox will die the next day (or even before).
Still Firefox **must not** become a real competitor to Chrome dominance, and if it also brings some benefit to Google beyond searches, like funneling some data to Gemini by default, the better.
Generally more tech saavy folk, who hate the dominance of the big boys
This is a problem because this sector is but few people. Mozilla want general adoption amongst normal human beings, so they care more about the normal humans.
If they lose the tech savvy folk whilst gaining more normal folk, that's not something Mozilla need to care about.
"Mozilla want general adoption amongst normal human beings"
Despite all their pandering to that viewpoint, they don't seem to be achieving any increase in uptake amongst "normal human beings" though, do they. All they are doing is driving more of what you appear to regard as not-normal human beings away from their browser, and the usage/market share of FF keeps falling.
Perhaps it would be better to stick to their original principles and retain a small but significant share of the browser market by keeping the loyalty of that small band of non-normal tech/privacy savvy human beings rather than lose it completely?
More proof that Mozilla has lost the plot. I thought just GUIs (they destroyed Thunderbird GUI being able to be like desktop after 91.x).
Go about:config
type chat into search.
Much stupidity.
In Settings, see Browser Layout. They have also disabled copy on selected text in Settings and About screen
Firefox 141.0.3 for Linux Mint
Which returns to my comment about user interfaces a few days ago: you can see all the switches but there is little clue as to what many of them do.
But thanks, I've also made them all 'false'.
(Probably unconnected, but I note that using Zoom in the browser drives four cores close to 100%, combined with several seconds lag between incoming audio and video. It _used_ to work...)
Also, turning it off is ONLY easy when the sidebar is enabled, which was something I had immediately disabled (along with the button to show/hide it) when the annoying thing first came along.
So, in order to disable AI, I had ENABLE the sidebar, turn off AI, and then disable the sidebar! Why on earth is there no direct option within the MAIN Firefox settings to turn this crap off?
What I'd quite like to be able to do is to tell firefox to suspend itself; so that when unattended the damn thing will stop having each of my many open tabs from constantly chewing cpu for no good reason. It just strikes me as untidy and not very polite :-)
Get your walking boots on, sharpen your pitchfork, and light that torch; this is more the fault of idiot web misdesigners using active this and Javascript that for things that neither is in any way shape or form required (I've lost count of the number of sites I've tripped over where *fonts* are set by some Javascript abomination).
Slightly off from what you meant, but that sounds like a movie about a dystopian future war in the making;
(queue pulsating 80's action movie synth music)
In a world of tomorrow, where Artificial Intelligence and Natural Stupidity have been at war for a thousand years, a hero emerges...
Darn, now I really want to see the movie :(
No.
Use LibreFox.
The customized Firefox browser that disables telemetry, studies, experiments, suggestions and others.
View their custom librefox.cfg file in the root of the installation fro see all the customizations. Which on Linux Mint is in the /usr/share directory.
They also use a custom policies.json file in the distribution folder that removes search engines such as Google, Amazon, Twitter and Bing and installs DuckDuckGo Lite and others.
You can customize this file and the .cfg file as I did to fit your needs.
We need more, More, MORE! of this stuff. We need AI in the kernel of our operating systems. The OS must infer what we want and present it before we know we want it. The era of biological solitary thinking is over. Everything must use AI and it must become LAW to have AI in all our lives at every step in any direction. Our washing machine can only perform better when controlled by AI that is controlled by AI controlling AI to control AI. The coffee brewer can only perfect the brew when controlled by AI. We need AIAD (AI Assisted Design) and AIAM (AI Assisted Manufacturing) to improve everything to become optimal. No more dull CNC machining. Any AI will optimize not only the CNC machine operation but also produce better and more in less time for no money at all! Soon we do no longer need to work! The AI will do it all for us!
Therefore, all operating systems MUST implement AI in their core operation. There is no point in algorithmic process selection when an OS' integral AI can infer the best workload distribution for all our products, writings and needs when we are awake and when we are asleep. The great and brave new world will do everything for us and we do not have to do anything any more.
/s
The main association Ely triggers for me is John Morton, who was the Bishop of Ely during the last few years of the Wars of the Roses, and is an important bad guy in Josephine Tey's delightful (if of somewhat questionable historical accuracy) The Daughter of Time.
Reddit seems to do some really weird stuff. In Safari the Back button will work most of the time, but will occasionally either reload the current page or show you a list of topics from a year ago. I've never seen this happen on any other site, and the cynic in me thinks it's a deliberate annoyance to nudge you towards their proprietary browser (aka "Reddit App").
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AL has its uses, but it does not belong everywhere in everything. Just as IoT does not belong in everything from toasters to clothes washers/dryers, refrigerators, door locks. Why would anyone want to control the living room lights from a thousand miles/kilometers away?
There is too much because we can, forced on users that complicate otherwise simple, easy to use operations.
To be able to see whether someone has broken in to your house or if there's a flood happening?
I had a few cameras in my house and while away on holiday I noticed a window that was open which wasn't when I left.
Got a neighbour to check and they found a different window had been forced open too. Called the police and provided them with footage of the criminals roaming my house in the dark.
If I'd have seen the break in in real time I could have turned the lights on and given them a shock and got clearer images. Also I can automate light settings to give the appearance of someone in residence.
In every movie, every scenario, every example - the AI eventually kills everyone.
That said -- make sure to hit the "browser.ml" config prefix - there's close to 50 settings -- including "browser.ml.enable" which one would think is the "grandaddy" of turning this garbage off...
browser.ml.chat.enabled false
browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost false
browser.ml.chat.prompt.prefix {"":""}
browser.ml.chat.prompts.0 {""}
browser.ml.chat.prompts.1 {"":"","":""}
browser.ml.chat.prompts.2 {""}
browser.ml.chat.prompts.3 {"":"","":"",":"|('') || ''"}
browser.ml.chat.prompts.4 {""}
browser.ml.chat.provider
browser.ml.chat.shortcuts false
browser.ml.chat.shortcuts.custom false
browser.ml.chat.shortcuts.longPress 0
browser.ml.chat.sidebar false
browser.ml.checkForMemory false
browser.ml.enable false
browser.ml.linkPreview.allowedLanguages en
browser.ml.linkPreview.blockListEnabled false
browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled false
browser.ml.linkPreview.noKeyPointsRegions
browser.ml.linkPreview.outputSentences 0
browser.ml.logLevel Error
browser.ml.minimumPhysicalMemory 2147483647
browser.ml.modelCacheMaxSize 2147483647
browser.ml.modelCacheTimeout 0
browser.ml.modelHubRootUrl https://fuck_the_ai_crap.mozilla.org/
browser.ml.modelHubUrlTemplate
browser.ml.overridePipelineOptions {}
browser.urlbar.quicksuggest.mlEnabled false
browser.urlbar.yelp.mlEnabled false
dom.origin-trials.mls.state 0
extensions.ml.enabled false
geo.provider.geoclue.mls_fallback_timeout_ms 0
intl.hyphenation-alias.ml-*
I woke up to find my desktop computer thrashing. I run standard Firefox on a rather eccentric, pieced together Linux Frankenmachine. I reboot once a week and clear my Firefox cache whether it needs it or not. Was this morning's thrashing caused by this bug? I have no idea, but do use the sidebar, and have now turned off the AI chatbox button. I had no idea that Firefox management had included a chatbox, so thanks to The Register for that information and the very clear instructions in the article.
I knew there was a good reason to keep The Register in my feed reader. And thanks for the LibreWolf recommendation: looks like something to check out during a slightly less busy week.
I'm using v 141. All I see is a setting to access AI chat bots. Not that FF has any built in chatbot. Yes. I unchecked it.
As for the "things to keep in mind", yeah, I've not seen it. I MAY have, and quickly disabled it, because that's just what I automatically do these days, and I've forgotten about it.
As for exactly what resource are using FF, Shift+Esc brings up a handy page for seeing EXACTLY what FF is using. It's called process manager and I'm seeing nothing out of the ordinary. But then I learned a long time ago to not keep umpteen tabs open.
Website bloat is a thing. Websites are VERY badly designed these days and the ads even worse. That's why I use all the ad blockers.
Now does FF have flaws? Yes. I use CCleaner regularly and if I don't, FF builds up multiple profiles which DO eat resources and CCleaner takes a while to clean them out if not cleared regularly. I learned that one years ago. Same with history.
That the next person who says "AI" in my presence is getting slapped (gently mind you).
The whole AI thing isn't far off from a Ponzi Scheme.
It's an advanced search engine at best.
I sincerely hope that all the idiots sinking money into this guff lose everything.
Nasty, I know, but there needs to be a wake-up call here.
I still like firefox as I run ghostery, ublock and noscript (if someone can point out another browser that can do that...Cheers!!!)
I run on Linux and I install firefox from the pre-built binary tar files. I also run without snap and flatpak and systemd and pulseaudio... shit I never asked for.
Now what installing from the firefox binary does is I never get an update forced on me and I just run run run on that version for years...until some protocol that is needed but not supported in my current version comes along.
Assuming I care about that protocol. Which rarely happens given I only view text/images on websites given the use of ghostery, ublock and noscript. If a site won't work under ghostery, ublock and noscript then I dont visit it.
I also run brave for the extremely rare times (say 3 or four times a year) I want to watch some kind of video content.
Now I (and my wife, $DEITY bless her) are in the rarefied air of not having/never had social media (we rock a "feature phone"...which is a strange term given the phone has no features), don't watch any "TV" from any channel (terrestrial, cable, stream), don't have any streaming services aside from music from Qobuz. The only OS my wife and I run is Linux.... we eat our own dog food as they say.
Anyways, living under a rock has advantages.
Bluck
AI aside, in the past, Firefox had a lot of memory leak issues. Now it's eating CPU in desperation for absolutely no reason. Google on Android has tab groups also, but it didn't bother needing to use AI for them, as you have to do it manually and name them manually. It does a nice job of putting the inactive tabs aside that haven't been used in a while as well.
P.S.: Anti-Google shills can buzz off in replies or spiteful downvoting. I'm no shill for Google, but the antis are sad.
Everytime I see something like this I just feel heartbroken because of the enormous amount of energy being wasted on these things. My hope for a safe habitable planet is collapsing. I don’t understand why people with decisionmaking authority over these things are so oblivious to the reality of anthropogenic climate change and the extent to which electricity consumption drives it.
What a shitshow. I don't quite understand why Mozilla keeps chasing trends and hype waves in this manner, is it to somehow justify the big salaries paid to their executives?
Well, maybe this is one explanation why my feeling of Firefox being speedy is conflicting so much with some users' experiences of slowness and lagginess.
I thought it was just that the hundreds of millions of web page elements blocked by the likes of NoScript or uBlock Origin over the years were helping browsing feel snappy, but it turns out I had pretty much reflexively also turned the AI chatbot off when it appeared, and don't use tab groups anyway.
I am SO happy that I am retired and don't have to suffer having this stuff rammed into my face at work, just about every business out there seems to be suffering from "me too" , FOMO or FOBLB* and loudly endorsing AI as the saviour of their business.
God knows what will happen to the economies across the world when it crashes and burns
* Fear Of Being Left Behind"
browser.ml.chat.enabled false
browser.ml.chat.prompt.prefix I’m on page "%currentTabTitle%" with "%selection|12000%" selected.
browser.ml.chat.prompts.0 {"label":"Summarize","value":"Please summarize the selection using precise and concise language. Highlight the main themes and conclusions. Use headers and bulleted lists in the summary, to make it scannable. Maintain the meaning of the selection."}
browser.ml.chat.prompts.1 {"label":"Simplify language","value":"Please rewrite the selection in plain, clear language suitable for a general audience without specialized knowledge. Use all of the following tactics: simple vocabulary; short sentences; active voice; examples where applicable to make explanations clearer; explanations for jargon and technical terms; headers and bulleted lists for scannability. Maintain factual accuracy while simplifying."}
browser.ml.chat.prompts.2 {"label":"Quiz me","value":"Please create questions related to the selection. Ask the questions one by one. Wait for my response before moving on to the next question. Evaluate each response. Ask a variety of types of questions, like multiple choice, true or false and short answer."}
browser.ml.chat.provider
browser.ml.enable false
Even Mozilla, which isn't even listed on the stock exchange, is caught up in the hype. When will this end?!!
They're even starting to build nuclear power plants next to data-centers just to fuel the A.I. hype so we can all generate useless images and videos and let LLM's poop out source code it picked up somewhere on the internet.
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