Some users report their Firefox browser is scoffing CPU power

Summary

People are noticing Firefox gobbling extra CPU and electricity, apparently caused by an "inference engine" built into recent versions of Firefox. Don't say El Reg didn't try to warn you. Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference. All we have so far is a smoking gun, but it does look like Mozilla's product management has maintained its laser-like aim at its own feet. This looks like an unfortunate sequel to a series of recent stories from The Register. First, in March, we reported that Firefox had built-in vertical tabs. In the second screenshot in that story, you can see something that reminded us of the wisdom of Douglas Adams and John Lloyd: a quietly terrifying ely of looming "AI" integration into Firefox. The worrying sign to which we are referring here is the first button in the group at the bottom of the tab sidebar: AI chatbot. As soon as we found it, this vulture immediately disabled it. The Irish Sea wing of Vulture Towers is a proudly and resolutely LLM-bot free zone. Due credit to Mozilla here: this chatbot integration is easy to turn off. You can do it via the GUI – it's on the Settings screen behind the last button, ⚙️ Customize Sidebar. The first option in the section headed Firefox tools is AI chatbot. Untick for instant relief. It's not just us. Quite a few users are asking for this, with pleas such as Remove Firefox "AI Chatbot" Feature or how to remove AI from my Firefox? or Please keep AI out of Firefox. Even so, it's metastasizing. In April, we reported on the new Tab Groups feature in Firefox 138 – although at the time we noted that we didn't seem to have it in our copy yet, presumably due to Mozilla's "phased rollouts" which means that new features aren't immediately enabled for all users. Mozilla has instructions on how to use them, either by drag...