Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery

darwinmac writes: Firefox 141 rolled out a shiny new AI-powered smart tab grouping feature (it tries to auto-organize your tabs using a local model), but it turns out the local "Inference" process that powers it is acting like an energy-sucking monster. Users are reporting massive CPU spikes and battery drain and calling the feature "garbage" thats ruining their browsing experience.

As one Redditor puts it: "I dont want this garbage bloating my browser, blowing up my CPU, and killing my battery life. There is absolutely no reason for it, its not a good feature, and its absolutely humiliating for Firefox to be jumping on this bandwagon. The point of a browser is to DOWNLOAD AND RENDER WEB PAGES."

If your laptops fans sound like a jet taking off, you can kill the AI tab groups by heading to about:config and setting browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled to false.

Might be worth keeping that in mind before letting generative AI roam free in your browser.