Mozilla released Firefox 141 last month, and with it came an AI-powered feature to organize tabs. Now, Firefox users are saying that the feature is causing high CPU usage.
Firefox uses the Inference process for the AI-powered tab groups feature. It's called Smart Tab Grouping, you can find its source code on GitHub. The feature is privacy-friendly, and runs locally on the device. It is designed to suggest a title for a tab group created by the user, it can also detect tabs from the current window and suggest adding them to a group. OMGUbuntu says that feature is imperfect, and missed a lot of tabs in their test. And the suggested title was completely irrelevant to the tabs.
That's not the main problem, users have been reporting that the Inference process was causing spikes in the CPU Usage. This in turn has been affecting the battery life of the computer. A couple of users said the latest version was causing their PC fans to run loud, which normally doesn't happen unless many tabs were open, and the culprit was Inference. You can open about:processes to access Firefox's built-in task manager and monitor the usage.
Check the user reports in these posts on reddit (1, 2, and 3). So, why does the AI have high CPU usage? Instead of activating when a user right-clicks on tabs or tab groups, it probably runs in the background continuously. It's either that, or badly optimized code, which raises the question, how was this approved to the stable release?
Note: Firefox's Smart Tab Grouping is disabled by default, it is rolling out to users.
If you like the feature, you may still want to disable it until the issue is fixed.
How to disable AI-powered Smart tab grouping in Firefox
1. Open about:config and search for this:
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled
2. Set the value to false.
3. Restart Firefox.
While you are at it, you may as well turn this off: browser.ml.chat.enabled. AskVG's article says it removes all AI features in Firefox (thanks Tom for the tip).
Is there a need for the feature? Apparently, it was requested by users. Here are two threads (1 and 2) on Mozilla Connect that discuss the requests. Automatic Tab Grouping may be useful for tab hoarders who have dozens of tabs open, or even hundreds. I don't use it, but that doesn't mean it is a bad feature. It's a personal choice, I prefer to organize my tabs manually because this way there is little room for error. Other users may find the AI-powered feature to be convenient, even if it may be inconsistent, as reports suggest.
I'm no fan of AI that rely on user data to train their language models. Privacy is king, to me. But, AIs that use on-device models can be useful if they maintain the user's privacy, and help simplify things, or even do tasks that a person isn't skilled at. E.g. If an app offers automatic and offline translations, or can auto generate subtitles for a video, that's useful.
Firefox's on-device automatic tab grouping falls under that category. Mozilla mustn't rush AI features just to attract or please users, and keep the AI features optional, i.e. disabled by default.
Do you use Smart tab grouping?
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