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).
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 :(
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.
yes, that’s exactly what i was getting at.
browser.ml.chat.enabled falseabout:config
in your address barYou 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?
browser.ml.enable
Thanks!
I went for it and noticed it had the Reset button available, clicking which it switched to “false”. I am on Zen Browser and I never turned anything like that on.
Any idea why it appeared like that?
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.
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.
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
Like how samsung updated and BLATANTLY made their peice of shit AI button TAKE OVER THR POWER BUTTON
Was that part of OneUI 7? I’m so glad I never installed that downgrade.
It was. I’m struggling to find anything that was an actual improvement in the UI. Most of the changes were trivial and change for change’s sake; but some were awful, and none are clearly better.
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
Yes, it was forced on me. I have updates disabled too. Pieces of shit.
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.
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.
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?
@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.
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 = false
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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.
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.
i think they may be referencing the fact that huge amounts of money have been given to them by google?
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.
This. It costs hundreds of millions per year to develop a web renderer. The security expertise required in particular is immense.
People have made clear they will not pay for browsers. At the same time, Mozilla doesn’t want to hoover up mountains of personally identifiable information like Google and MS do.
People hate Mozilla for doing what they can to make money, and they also hate the idea of paying.
I understand the frustration, but I genuinely don’t know what the community expects.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t agree with or see sense in every Mozilla decision, but people act like they’re satan incarnate and it’s just ridiculous.
Honestly if that is it, it is understandable. This AI nonsense, however, is plainly a waste of money and resources, Mozilla’s and their users’.
Depends what you mean by this AI nonsense. Some of it is great. Offline translation in Firefox is great, as is the enhanced screen reader for blind people.
Chat bot integration less so, but it’s opt-in so I don’t bother getting myself worked up about it.
The community are idiots.
They just want free shit. They claim they would love to pay but look at the percentage of donations things like VLC get, they won’t pay.
Google likely spends over a billion dollars a year developing Chrome and everyone likes to talk about how AI might upset web search forgetting that what is where Mozilla’s money comes from.
Developing from scratch yes, but several decent open source renderers exist. I’d love to see someone grab Servo and polish it to a fully usable state (I think it’s something like 75% of the way there).
The issue also isn’t Mozilla trying to make money, it’s Mozilla trying to make money in the stupidest way possible, or even worse actively wasting money like with this AI slop. There’s also the issue of what Mozilla is spending on. It came out a little while back how much their executives are making and it’s completely ridiculous. They could afford multiple full time devs with just the money the CEO makes for making the worst decisions imaginable.
The company is doomed with this kind of leadership
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?
Are we pretending that lots and lots of people aren’t incredibly horny for AI right now?
Actual users hate AI. Shareholders love it. It’s a bubble and the business world is trying to force it everywhere they can to create a dependency.
Yep. Make the normies depend on the shitty Ai and kill the real internet. Makes me so fucking mad.
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.
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.
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
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.
on android theyre browsers :3
Waterfox and/or Librewolf FTW
I just checked my Librewolf settings:
This stuff is ml chat is off by default.
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First thing I did when some hey we added AI… was to right-click and disable it.
That’ll stop 'em ;)
Just make it an official extension ffs…
I’m fine with them pulling a Pocket as long it dies in the end.
I just wish one could donate to firefox development specifically. Then they could rid it of all the advertisement and tracking stuff.
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…?
