Hardening Firefox – a checklist for improved browser privacy

Set the browser.ml.chat.enabled and browser.ml.enabled to false as they intensively use the processor and drain the battery. All that to just find the best name for your tab groups. I prefer to have my laptop last one more hour instead.

I took a brief gander at its code [0] and saw it mainly focusses on k-means clustering algorithms (in JS, no less). To my ken this is likely for suggesting new tabs, something a user is even less likely to use than renaming them.

Its constant drain even when not 'in use' seems to imply it's classifying tabs as they change page (though it might be telemetry or uncommented testing). If so, it's an example of premature optimisation gone very wrong.

It's a shame, because it overshadows the fact that naming tab groups is a perfect use case for an LLM, alongside keyboard suggestions and reverse dictionaries [1]. I'm ardently distrustful of LLMs for many, many purposes, but for the tiny parameter and token usage needed it's hard to not like. Which is a shame it's (somehow) such a drain.

[0] https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/blob/7b42e629fdef... exports a SmartTabGroupingManager, though how or why that is used without being asked eludes me

[1] https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/ Can be helpful in a pinch when a word's on the tip of your tongue, though its synonyms aren't always perfect.

I recall an extension (I think by a Mozilla dev) which could do automatic grouping of tabs (back before tab groups was removed). I'm surprised this hasn't come back.