New Firefox loads the processor by 100%: users ask Mozilla to stop playing with AI

In the pursuit of newfangled AI, Mozilla developers have managed to do something that a significant portion of Firefox users did not ask for. While the open source browser is slowly losing ground, the company is adding AI features to perform tasks that can hardly be called critical to the user experience.

In the latest major update of Firefox 141.0 appeared the function of automatically grouping similar tabs with suggestions for names for these groups. It works on the basis of a locally installed AI model, meaning that processing takes place without sending data to Mozilla servers. The idea is to let the browser organize tabs by itself, for example, by topic or context.

However, shortly after the release, users began complaining on forums and Reddit about abnormal spikes in CPU load and power consumption. One user said notedthat the CPU utilization by the new Inference process can jump from 0.05% to more than “130%”. At the same time, the system’s cooling system is very loud, even though a small number of tabs are open.

Mozilla developers recognized the problem in an official bug report. They called it «abnormal spikes in CPU utilization» that shouldn’t happen under normal conditions.

How to explains According to Mozilla, the feature is still experimental and is being implemented gradually, and the algorithm for determining groups and selecting names may be wrong. At the same time, the developers confirmed that they are already working on fixing the problem with load surges.

Dissatisfied users urge the company to stop “bloating” Firefox with unnecessary AI options, especially for such minor tasks as tab grouping. For now, the new feature can be disabled manually through the browser settings.

Mozilla has been moving towards the concept of an AI-first browser with a focus on privacy for some time now. In this, it follows the trend of competitors: Google Chrome gets its own AI tools, Microsoft adds Copilot Mode to Edge, OpenAI and Perplexity are working on their own Chromium-based browsers.

Source: techspot