Firefox 141: AI Tab Groups Outcry

At the end of July , Mozilla released Firefox 141. The desktop version allows users to create tab groups using artificial intelligence suggestions. Many users have reported excessive CPU usage and reduced battery life on laptops.

Too many resources for AI groups

As is often the case, Reddit is the main outlet. The first reports date back three days. A user on the Firefox subreddit wrote that after installing version 141, fan noise increased. He later discovered that the Inference process is using a lot of CPU. Closing the process causes the browser to crash.

Another user confirms the problem, which also causes a decrease in battery life. The fault lies with the feature that uses artificial intelligence to suggest tabs to group and the names of the groups. As specified on Hugging Face , Mozilla uses a custom version of Google's T5 model. Its functionality is described on GitHub .

The template is downloaded locally to ensure privacy , but should only run if the user uses the feature. Some users speculate that this is a bug . There is no mention of this issue in later versions (141.0.2 and 141.0.3).

Users who experience excessive CPU usage (increased fan rotation on laptops) and reduced battery life can disable the "smart tab grouping" feature in the advanced settings. In about:config , set browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled to false . AI chatbot integration can also be disabled by setting browser.ml.chat.enabled to false (this will remove the icon in the sidebar).