News New local AI integration into Firefox spurs complaints of ‘CPU going nuts’ — chip and power spikes plague new version 141.x

[Admin]

Firefox rolled out update 141 last month with AI enhanced tab groups, but an issue simmering under the hood has only now come to a head.

New local AI integration into Firefox spurs complaints of ‘CPU going nuts’ — chip and power spikes plague new version 141.x : Read more

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Laughs in Microsoft Edge

 

[usertests]

I would probably use a feature that automatically grouped tabs together using AI, because I'm so lazy about tabs myself and don't want to fiddle around with groups manually.

In the meantime, I'm wondering when local LLM support will hit the HTML living standard and web browsers, because I'd like to play around with it without requiring external libraries.

 

[Aeden]

I thought I finally found the culprit behind Firefox taking upwards of five minutes to restore my tabs. Turns out my computer is just really old and feeling its age.

 

[hwertz]

I assumed this tab grouping thing was off by default. If not, they should just do that. Problem solved.

The other thing that inference is used for is translation -- this does burn some CPU cycles but I do prefer local translation over the data shipped off remotely (which is how it worked before.). This in fact works quite well.

 

[TheBobs]

So -- this is about as easy as you could imagine to turn off

in 141.0.3 simply open settings, search for "suggest" and untick the "Use AI to suggest tabs and a name for tab groups" (Its under General -> Tabs, right at the top of Settings) Yup, it seems to be on by default in this particular update. Easy enough to change. I get how resource-sapping defaults can be annoying, but sitting here with... quite literally hundreds if not thousands of tabs open, I didn't notice the impact, but do expect to be a 'bit' snappier with the setting off (Win11/GTX GPU + Core i9 with 64GB certainly helps with that).