Sadly, this feels very true. I used to donate money to Firefox back in the day, but since Mozilla seems to focus on anything but making Firefox a good -browser- - those days feel very distant.
We got tons of local AI services of acceptable quality thanks to them: Translation, text to speech, speech to text.
Let them cook, I'm sure a few of theses features will be really useful.
Better searchability of your history sounds very practical.
I figured someone is hammering cloudflare, or did cloudflare make another change that is killing some sites ?
I wonder if that is part of the problem. FWIW, this is on Linux.
> Update (August 13, 2025, 03:57 GMT): While the community correctly identified a performance issue, their attribution of the cause was mistaken. A Firefox spokesperson provided the following statement, clarifying the situation:
> We're working to improve client-side matching in the address bar, which makes it possible for users to recall previously visited websites without remembering exact keywords in the URL or page title.
> We unintentionally shipped a performance bug during the phased rollout of this feature, which processes information privately on-device. After receiving reports of issues that hadn't come up in our testing, we reversed the rollout, and the performance issues should be resolved.
The article from The Register cites this too but still comes to the wrong conclusion it's for naming tab groups. The author has no idea what he is writing about.
As it stands, your article is highly misleading, with that "uncertainty" sharing an acronym with "fear" and "doubt". I'd prefer to assume that ain't intentional.
As it stands this article is just embarassing, dishonest and pure clickbait. If you can't be bothered to research (you even LINKED the Bugzilla bug AND quoted a Firefox spokesperson) then stop being a journalist and stop making the world a worse place.
We (El Reg) did include a comment from Mozilla itself about this in the story.
Now a German site claims the story is all wrong:
https://www.soeren-hentzschel.at/firefox/richtigstellung-cpu...
I have disabled all the `browser.ml` functions I can find, and translations do seem to still be working. I just read that link, translated DE->EN, in Firefox 141! (Ich kann ein bisschen Deutsche verstehe, aber hier, es genug nicht war.)
For me this means some uncertainty remains. Mozilla told me that the "inference" process is for translation, among other things. But with ML off, translation still works. Odd.
Personally I am deeply opposed to genAI and would prefer Mozilla to ignore and remove all this kind of functionality.
The instructions here do not pan out whatsoever, at least in Firefox v141.0.3 EME-free 64-bit on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
What you need to do is open the sidebar, go to the bottom, and click on the gear icon there at the far left. Then the “customize sidebar” settings will open on the right of the sidebar’s own content, and provide you with the required options.
Nothing exists within the normal settings pages that can bring this up. Only by going through the sidebar can you get to this.
homarp•5mo ago