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.
Why not just ship it without any of the AI stuff and give users the option to install and use it instead of bloating the application? This also confirms that the stuff is essentially OPT OUT instead of OPT IN
The bubble is AI and they want some of that bubble investor money is my guess, so they put optional AI
In their defense a very tiny percentage of users even open options and of those an even smaller actually change stuff.
Maybe slighlty different for Firefox as probably more power user use it than other random programs. But basically if something is not enabled by default, it doesn’t exist.
Because they’re counting on people who know nothing about technology using the AI stuff when it’s placed in front of them.
All AI features will also be opt-in. I think there are some grey areas in what ‘opt-in’ means to different people (e.g. is a new toolbar button opt-in?), but the kill switch will absolutely remove all that stuff, and never show it in future. That’s unambiguous.
Sounds like they will be opt in, not opt out
I don’t see why there is a big outrage. Sure I’m not a fan of the AI features and I certainly will disable them but it’s tot like they’re forced upon me. Some people like (want) AI in the browser and good for them, this makes the browser better and easier to use for them. For me, it doesn’t change my experience at all
(Commented this separately on purpose)
Come to think of it, I do enjoy the translation feature in Firefox
The alt-text tagging is pretty amazing according to my sister (blind), too.
I’ve been thinking the same thing. The online tech community is a very small part of a much larger pie and they need to serve multiple audiences. As long as it can be turned off and truly be off, who cares?
The reason the “kill-switch” wasn’t made clear originally was because it literally didn’t exist until users very vocally tool them where to shove their AI crap.
It was added on afterwards.
What? They’ve been talking about features that are now being called the “kill switch” for the better part of a year. Literally all they did that’s new was give it a dumb name.
That’s literally not true, though? They’ve spoke about it for ages.
The real issue is not whether we are going to be force-fed this features or not, but the fact that a foundation with limited resources is going to spend any sizable amount of them developing a solution its users are not interested in.
Waiting for Ladybird at this point.
Librewolf
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.
You reminded me that one use for AI I’d really like is removing all photos of Trump, Musk and Putin from my screen. Another is filtering the twenty reposts of every event in US politics and the incessant whining about prices. Alas, I need these in phone apps more than the browser.
You don’t need LLMs for that. An iPhone is plenty powerful enough for image recognition and text classification.
That’s sorta the funny thing about AI. There’s tons of potential, but it’s just unimplemented. Even on PC, you pretty much have to have some Nvidia GPU and fight pip setting up python repos to get anything working.
That stuff is commonly included in the AI umbrella.
Eh, I draw a distinction between oldschool visual recognition and matching some keywords, versus full-blown LLMs. I used ‘AI’ to mean the latter in my comment above, as intended by the post itself. I also have doubts about the effectiveness of the older approaches in regard to the uses that I mentioned.
I would use it to block all the people whining about AI
Does anyone even talk about what the “AI features” are?
The one I use the most is their offline translation. I don’t have to send my data to Google Translate.
My sister (blind) uses the new screen reader stuff a lot.
Mozilla is certainly adding good AI features, but the chatbot integration isn’t something I have much use for.
Could I, liked recolor webpages? Automate ublock filters? Detect SEO/AI slop?
This is an excellent point: there are potential features I wouldn’t mind trying out. But of course those features aren’t available, because aren’t the features that Mozilla leadership’s buddies in tech are pushing, and often work against what big tech wants.
Or they could just ship it without the AI
Would be nice if folks stopped calling LLMs AI. If they are true AI, they would be able to learn how a kill switch works and disable it
Until the bad press dies down and they feel like removing it
I think it says something that they’re backpedaling at all. This isn’t just “bad press”, its a real market for people who want products that are “AI Free”. And since Firefox is the other-other browser, its a market they’re feeling obligated to fill.
Funny how companies and applications default to features being auto implemented by default. Baked into the applications.
What happened to having the user select what they want rather then “a kill switch” for an application, whatever that means. Features shouldn’t be on by default. I should be able to turn what I want on and off
“Kill switch” is a bit dramatic. It’s an on or off toggle. Would be funny though to call every toggle a kill switch. “Yeah, using the kill switch on GPU acceleration may help with rendering on some systems.”
“Use the kill switch for preventing Firefox of starting a new session without restoring the old tabs.”
“Kill all of your browser data upon exiting Firefox by enabling the kill switch.”
“Make Firefox your default browser by enabling the ‘set as default browser kill switch’.”
Extended to other UI interaction classes: “You don’t like English? Kill it by using the battle royale language selector to choose only the one language you like.”
Why not start with disabling it by default and see how many people switch it on?
It is off by default.
Not buying it. Kill switch will migrate further and further into about:config until it eventually too goes away without notice in an update six months from now.
No that’s way too paranoid. Honestly 20 years not 6 months. And by then ladybird will be viable so nbd
No six months to a year is probably about right. They’ll have enough data by then to say “most people don’t turn it off” because realistically most people will use the default, which is on.
Twenty years from now Firefox will be in a new controversy that we can’t even begin to guess.
Plus, while I can’t predict when the AI bubble will pop, whatever they add in the next year will be removed within the next five years. AI isn’t like browser tabs, or extensions, stuff that will always be a great idea, it’s just the current fad.
Well time will tell won’t it, but we’re both just guessing at the end
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.
can you give an example of a website that doesn’t work in FF? I’ve been an exclusive FF user for many years (maybe at least 8), and I can’t remember ever encountering a compatibility issue. The worst is when a website lies about needing chrome, but if you change the useragent it works perfectly.
Recently I switched to LibreWolf for better privacy, and that one has a lot of features disabled to combat fingerprinting. This does break a lot of sites, but ut’s easy to disable that in settings.
I cannot, because it’s not something I track. It’s usually some site ive only ever visited that once, worked around their shit engineering, and moved on with my life. So it’s not that specific sites don’t work, it’s that ive had to use Chrome or edge 6 times this year.
I can’t remember a browser ever saying I needed chrome. Even Google Meet works fine…just functionality is reduced. A small price to pay for not giving Google the keys.
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 :(
I don’t really know what an ‘ai browser’ is and at this point I feel like i really need to ask. What makes a browser “AI”?
Serious and long answer because you won’t find people actually providing you one here: in theory (heavy emphasis on theory), an “agentic” world would be fucking awesome.
Agents
You know how you have been programmed that when you search something on Google, you need to be to terse and to the point? The worst you get is “Best Indian restaurants near me” but you don’t normally do more than that.
Well in reality most of the times when people just love rambling on or providing lots of additional info, so the natural language processing capabilities of LLMs are tremendously helpful. Like, what you actually want to do is “Best Indian restaurants near me but make sure it’s not more than 5km away and my chicken tikka plate doesn’t cost more than ₹400 and also I hope it’s near a train station so I can catch a train that will take me home by 11pm latest”. But you don’t put all that on fucking Google do ya?
“Agents” will use a protocol that works in completely in the background called Model Context Protocol (MCP). The idea is that you put all that information into an LLM (ideally speak into it because no one actually wants to type all that) and each service will have it’s own MCP server. Google will have one so it will narrow down your filters to one being near a train station and less than 5km away. Your restaurant will have one, your agent can automatically make a reservation for you. Your train operator will have one, so your agent can automatically book the train ticket for you. You don’t need to pull up each app individually, it will all happen in the background. And at most you will get a “confirm all the above?”. How cool is that?
Uses
So, what companies now want to do is leverage agents for everything, making use of NLP capabilities.
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Let’s say you maintain a spreadsheet or database of how your vehicle is maintained, what repairs you have done. Why do you want to manually type in each time? Just tell your agentic OS “hey add that I spent ₹5000 in replacing this car part at this location in my vehicle maintenance spreadsheet. Oh and also I filled in petrol on the way.” and boom your OS does it for you.
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You are want to add a new user to a Linux server. You just say “create a new user alice, add them to these local groups, and provide them sudo access as well. But also make sure they are forced to change their password every year”.
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You have accounts across 3 banks and you want to create a visualisation of your spendings? Maybe you want to also flag some anamolous spends? You tell your browser to fetch all that information and it will do that for you.
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You can tell your browser to track an item’s price and instantly buy it if it goes below a certain amount.
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Flying somewhere? Tell your browser to compare airline policies, maybe checkout their history of delays and cancellations
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And because it’s natural language, LLMs can easily ask to clarify something
Obvious downsides
So all this sounds awesome, but let’s get to why this will only work in theory unless there is a huge shift:
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(Edit thanks to /u/korazail@lemmy.myserv.one, can’t believe I forgot this) LLMs have the capacity to know literally EVERYTHING about you!!! It’s a big privacy nightmare waiting to happen if companies aren’t careful, and not to mention Governments and other organisations trying to get data for surveillance!!!
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LLMs still suck in terms of accuracy. Yes they are decent but still not at the level where it’s needed and still make stupid errors. Also currently they are not making as generational upgrades as before
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LLMs are not easy to self host. They are one of the genuine use cases of making use of cloud compute.
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This means they are going to be expensiveeeeee and also energy hogs
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Commercial companies actually want you to land on their servers. Yes its good that your OS will do it for you and they get a page hit but as of now that is absolutely not what companies want. How are they going to serve you ads and steal all your data from your cookies?
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People will lose their technical touch if bots are doing all the work for them
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People do NOT want to trust a bot with a credit card. Amazon already tried that with Alexa/Echo devices and people just don’t like saying “buy me a roll of toilet paper” because most people want to see what the fuck is actually being bought. And even if they are okay, because LLMs are still imperfect, they are going to make mistakes now and then.
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There are going to be clashes of what the OS will do agentically vs what a browser will do. Agentic browser makers like Perplexity want you in their ecosystem but if Windows ships with that functionality out of the box then how much reason is there really to get Perplexity? I expect to see anti-competitive lawsuits around this in the future.
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This also means there is going to be a huge lock-in to Big Tech companies.
My personal view is that you will see some of these features 5-10 years down the line but it’s not going to materialise in the way some of these AI companies are dreaming it will.
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Using existing LLMs functionality with fewer steps. You can have a chatbot in the side bar, no doubt keeping track of all your browsing habits to better assist you which incidentally builds a very valuable profile of the user companies would love to buy. Summarizing large texts so AI generated slop and search algorithm filler content can be filtered out more efficiently vs a decent chance at introducing errors. Rewording text so you can make it more simple, translated, adhering to your world view. All of this with minimal clicks, automatically done if possible.
It will goon for you that’s what make the browser AI
This made me switch to waterfox
I switched to LibreWolf when the privacy policy fiasco happened a while ago. It’s funny how every few weeks Mozilla manages to demonstrate why I won’t switch back.
The new CEO has also already lost me with this gem:
He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
Even taking the statement at face value, it’s unacceptable for it to just “feel off-mission”. It should be a clear “no, never” instead of some wishy-washy answer.
But reading between the lines, such a statement is not just an off-the-cuff remark, but at best a threat to their users, and at worst a way to gauge the blowback of such a decision. They must have already taken it seriously enough to come up with the $150 million.
If I had to put up a number, I’d guess there’s a 25+% chance that Firefox will drop Manifest V2 in the next few years.
Hearing this genuinely disgusts me
That’s cool while it lasts. I don’t have a ton of faith in a project that’s just one guy’s personal crusade to create a non-shit browser, though.
I did for my phone but can’t get Teams to share screen on my desktop (Linux desktop) while Chromium can… once I have that one figured out, I will switch to Waterfox on the desktop as well
