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Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.
Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:
If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.
Doing that turns off the AI chatbot features in Firefox, but also the stupid new LLM tab-naming feature that's rolling out.
if you want to turn off as much ai crap in firefox as possible, from this post on mozilla's connect forum, you should also set all these to false using about:config:
- browser.ml.enable
- extensions.ml.enabled
- browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled
- browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled
- browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled
to get rid of the revamped sidebar, which is also trying to incorporate ai:
- sidebar.revamp
unrelated anyone got browser recommendations for when we have to jump ship from firefox
and now keep in mind that all the other browsers are doing this shit, too, but you can't reconfigure them as with Firefox
on A for Effort's last point, is there any browser that offers users even half as much control as Firefox? if so, I'd like to try it as a backup
They're based on Chromium (the open source core of Chrome), so they have the same issue with no longer supporting the better ad-blocking extensions. But they do have a built-in ad blocker that's almost as good as as UBlock Origin-- it doesn't handle YouTube ads quite as successfully, for instance, but it's decent, and you can add extra block lists to it just like you can for extensions.
Firefox is still my main browser, but I'm a lot happier with Vivaldi as a backup than I had been with Chrome or vanilla Chromium.
