Article author here.

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.

Is it possible that translation runs on the inference process, but is controlled by flags other than the browser.ml ones?