Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery
Mozilla recently rolled out a new on-device AI feature in Firefox, but it's already drawing complaints from users reporting high CPU usage and faster battery drain.
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I wish Mozilla would just debloat the browser, focus on performance and making browsing a good experience. But unfortunately their revenue situation is bad. At this stage, they won't even manage to survive through donations after annoying their main user base.
Their revenue is fine. They just waste it on unnecessary bullshit.
They're a business, after all. They don't care about their products. They care about doing the least amount of work while making the most amount of money.
It's not about keeping the lights on. It's about living as luxurious a life as possible.
They care about doing the least amount of work while making the most amount of money.
I mean that's what capitalism does in a nutshell. Lower costs and increase the price. It's optimized for profit, not for the best product, unfortunately. The only thing that should keep it within lines is competition, but if the competition isn't any better it won't help
They haven't needed donations for years. In the current situations donos are, at best, part of the CEO and top-brass bonus.
it’s even worse than that tho: donations are for the mozilla foundation which is doing all the nonsense everyone hates… firefox is the mozilla corporation, which is a distinct entity
IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO DONATE TO FIREFOX
could be, I can't judge that. do you have any source for that info or is it based on an assumption?
Their public, reviewed 2023 financial statement and their official documents about administration salaries and bonus.
That's basically what LibreWolf does.
Yep, and it still works great. I even use LibreWolf on my work machine, and since it's running Linux I need to use all the Microsoft 365 stuff, like attending meetings via Teams, in my web browser. I just let it persist and share some site data to make things run smoothly. (which is a compromise, yeah)
The only real issue I had was when I installed the flatpak version, and it was the flatpak permissions screwing with me. Most of the time though I have been using the version from their repo.
How do you make browsling a good experience, other than performance?
I like the webpage translation it offers. I'd hate to lose it. Sync and tab sending is also very important to me, between desktop, mobile phone, and tablet.
I'm sure debloating would inevitably mean losing features that are required to catch the average internet user.
Well this is obviously personal to some degree, but for me it would be to fix bugs, don't crash, dont make me restart after an update and lose my incognito tabs, focus on being w3c compliant, block ads, maybe allow blocking annoying cookie banners and maybe allow good keyboard navigation. I like some features other browsers have, such as integrated tor browsing - but since I am not a big fan of bloat, I'm not sure whether that should be handled outside of the browser
block ads, maybe allow blocking annoying cookie banners and maybe allow good keyboard navigation.
those are/could be browsing extensions. i don't see why the browser should integrate ad blocking when it could just be an extension (that could be installed by default, like how librewolf has ublock origin installed by default).
Fair, I'm all in for de-bloating! The only problem with plugins is that it can become increasingly difficult to provide the same quality of testing and quality, because you can't possibly test all combinations of enabled plugins - even if most don't interfere with each other, it can easily break stuff
Why not add this features as browser extension?
Facebook Container comes to mind, they've done this before already.
Extending and managing extension APIs and extensions also comes at a cost. I certainly wouldn't be against that - but I'm not familiar with the technical details or cost of the features involved.
If a browser only aims at tech savvy people, practically no one will end up using it.
Yeah, a good browser should probably take an approach similar to Linux Mint.
It has to be easy to install and it has to work great for like 99.9% of normal uses without changing a single setting.
But, being free and open, if you are tech savvy then you can change and customize whatever you want. Sometimes it means I can lock down the privacy and data storage in my browser, and sometimes it means I can change the icon on my work computer's "start" button to be a check engine light. It's all just part of being able to use your computer the way you want to.
This is an UI issue. You could just show them a landing Page and ask them if they want this new feature, and then it installs the extension in the background, without explicitly ask the user to go to the extension page to install something by hand.
They aren't doing anymore for years. I moved to forks of ff instead.