After the controversial news shared earlier this week by Mozilla’s new CEO that Firefox will evolve into “a modern AI browser,” the company now revealed it is working on an AI kill switch for the open-source web browser.
On Tuesday, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo was named the new CEO of Mozilla Corporation, the company behind the beloved Firefox web browser used by almost all GNU/Linux distributions as the default browser.
In his message as new CEO, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo stated that Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software while remaining the company’s anchor, and that Firefox will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.
What was not made clear is that Firefox will also ship with an AI kill switch that will let users completely disable all the AI features that are included in Firefox. Mozilla shared this important update earlier today to make it clear to everyone that Firefox will still be a trusted web browser.
Firefox has pulled the “settings you didn’t want enabled by default” so many times in a row that switching to Librewolf felt like when I switched from Windows to Linux
Does anyone even talk about what the “AI features” are?
Could I, liked recolor webpages? Automate ublock filters? Detect SEO/AI slop? Create a price/feature table out of a shopping page?
See, this would all be neat like auto translate is neat.
But I’m not really interested in the 7 millionth barebones chatbot UI. I’m not interested in loading a whole freaking LLM to auto name my tabs, or in some cutsie auto navigation agent experiment that still only works like 20% of the time with a 600B LLM, or a shopping chatbot that doesn’t do anything like Amazon/Perplexity.
That’s the weird thing about all this. I’m not against neat features, but “AI!” is not a feature, and everyone is right to assume it will be some spam because that’s what 99% of everything AI is. But it’s like every CEO on Earth has caught the same virus and think a product with “AI” in the name is like a holy grail, regardless of functionality.
Is there nobody with sanity left? This has blown up so much the user base clearly does not want it. Focus your efforts elsewhere. You gain marketshare by putting users first. Also fuck markets.
We need valve but for browsers.
Ladybird I follow since it’s an entirely new browser engine and can help restore a little democracy to the web, but why Floorp? I’m looking through its website and it seems to be a more customizable Firefox, which is nice, but doesn’t seem particularly revolutionary (and forks of Chromium/Firefox are kinda a dime a dozen).
[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
This is good enough for me. If they have an on boarding step/popup to say “Try our AI crap” and I have an option to say “No and don’t ever bother me about this again”, then it’s fine.
You don’t actually believe that “don’t ever bother me about this again” is gonna be in the realm.of possibilities, do you? They’ll accidentally “forget” your choice on every second update and pester you again. Fuck mozilla.
What browser do you use?
I’m getting a bit tired of website incompatibility with Firefox but when the alternative is Chrome, I’m sticking with FF.
I am still stuck with Mozilla, but I hate the organisation nonetheless. :( It sucks that the web standards have been made so complicated (extensive) that it takes a major organisation to implement them in a browser.
On the phone I use DDG browser, but not happy with it because ublock origin isn’t available.
On computer I am frustrated that debian repos do not yet have a privacy friendly fork, such as (from what I hear) waterfox or LibreWolf.
I am with you that Chrome-derivates are not an alternative at all.
Hasn’t been the case so far with sidebar, Firefox view, Pocket or any other stuff I’ve not wanted in the past. If they did start doing dark patterns bullshit with this AI stuff, then yeah, I’d switch. In the meantime, I’ll use FF until it gets worse than the alternatives, or an alternative gets better than FF, whichever comes first.
Well, I can’t condemn you, I have only partially made the move myself for lack of options :(
