Friday, November 27, 2020

Release 1.3.0 - Partial Fix for Firefox 83 Slowness!

 This release is an emergency release in response to the release of Firefox 83.

TL;DR - Firefox 83 broke things for some users and made browsing unbearably slow. While things get properly fixed, I can make it faster again, but not quite as fast as the plugin would be in Firefox 82.

The long version:
This plugin leverages another excellent library, Tensorflow.js, that runs the AI models created for this plugin. Tensorflow.js gives many different ways to run the AI models, called backends. They all give the same prediction, but some backends are much faster than others. The fast backend (WebGL) started failing in Firefox 83 for some users, which caused the default slow backend (CPU) to be used instead. For at least two users, this made the browsing experience so slow as to be unusable.
Fortunately Tensorflow.js recently added support for another relatively fast backend (WASM) that I have found does not seem to fail to load in Firefox 83. I am adding in support for that new backend as a fallback. It is not quite as fast, but makes browsing usable once again.

 If you are experiencing issues, please disable the plugin and let me know over at Github  - thanks!

For the technically curious, the Tensorflow.js team has a great writeup on the introduction of fast SIMD in the WASM backend over at their blog.

 One final note - this version also fixes one issue that caused downloads to sometimes show up as gibberish rather than prompting for download.

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