Bro, several users have taken to the Firefox subreddit, this is definitely worthy of being the most upvoted post on Lemmy rn

It is though.

Altogether Imbecilic

Mozilla has stopped working on developing and improving their products, and is now entirely focused on adding trendy terms and garbage, to feed money to their C*Os.

Well, stupid people want it and they do use it when its shoved in their face. Like how samsung updated and BLATANTLY made their peice of shit AI button TAKE OVER THR POWER BUTTON so when you try to turn off your phone little old granny gets confused that an ai agent pops up and starts recording you. Absolutely infuriating and I wish torture on whoever implemented that shit.

Oh, so that's what the fuck it was. I was wondering why my tabs were getting grouped without any logic or reason. Impressive ability to make everything actively worse

I don't think the centralised approach works either. If you bake that grouping metadata of individual popular pages into Firefox you have an issue with keeping it current if page content changes. And you have a difficult trade-off between covering enough pages vs not blowing up the size too much. And the approach can't work for deep web pages, e.g. anything people can only see when logged in.

Ignoring all that: The groupings you could pre-process would be static and determined over some assumed average user behaviour, not an actual cluster of a specific users themes. You take some hardcore Warhammer 40k fan, and all his tabs on minis and painting techniques and rulebooks and fan media, and apply the static grouping then it all goes into "Warhammer". However if you ran it locally it might come up with "Painting" "Figures" "Rules" "Fanart" or whatever. It would produce a more fine grained clustering for someone who is deep into a specific niche interest, and a more coarse grained one otherwise.

So I think fundamentally it's correct to cluster locally and dynamically for a usable result. They need to make it opt-in, and efficient enough. Or better yet they could just abandon the idea because it's ultimately not that much use compared to the required inference cost.

They offer a fix behind a bunch of barriers? Is it not in settings with an obvious on/off toggle for the thing?

Why would they bury the option... are they being paid to include this AI feature or something...?

I'm fine with them pulling a Pocket as long it dies in the end.

It's still a way out but Ladybird might be the alternative going forward. However, they've stated that it's only going to support linux/mac with a windows version in the "eventually" column which makes it kinda hard to sell to people.