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).

 

[WonkoTheSaneUK]

Tech site "The Register" has a comprehensive how-to on completely disabling this flavor of AI.

 

[2Be_or_Not2Be]

Really, you don't need AI to suggest names for Tab Groups or even tabs to add into a group. If you want to add AI capability, perhaps you could have it conduct background searches for content related to the tab, and then suggest that new content, if desired.

 

[Alex/AT]

Actually it may make more sense to do OS-wide configuration option (i.e. registry entry in Windows and some /etc file in Linux) that may state to all applications in the system to 'Disallow any "AI" functions'. As this crap will get integrated more and more. And yeah, make legal policy that user must be able to disable all "AI" functions in all "AI"-integrated applications alongside, so application developers have to conform. The big fat aim is to avoid these major power spikes that may come from millions of machines running "AI" after another software update for nothing. Another big fat aim is to free users that do not want it from any unpredictable "AI" behavior of their systems.

 

[t3t4]

I've been seeing this problem for a while now, specifically on youtube. As far as I've been able to discern, it's got nothing to do with AI anything but rather 'hardware acceleration'. I don't have anything AI enabled, and I could never be so lazy that I need some useless bot to sort my tabs! That's just another useless bloated feature nobody ever asked for. But my issues on youtube has caused me to spend a lot of time in the FF process manager, and I've seen 100 plus percent cpu usage which makes no sense to me. How can anything be used beyond 100% of it's capacity??? But what I do not see is any correlation to real actual CPU usage in the windows task manager.

FF process manager tells me 100 some percent CPU usage, but windows task manager say's 23 percent. Clearly there is something there I don't understand, unless one of them are lying to me!

But when I have issues, it's obvious. Stuttering scroll, sluggish playback, green screen video, slow performance in general. The 2 things I've found to bandaid the problem are clearing the cache and disabling the hardware acceleration. But the source of the problem sure seems to be software not properly talking to hardware.