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.
clearly some damage control strategy here… but good news if true
The news of being able to use or disable all of the AI features was in the original announcement as well, but it was pretty clear that most of Lemmy just read the headline and leaned into it.
not quite like this… the original form was not a total kill switch, it was a vague "you are in control" (of this thing you didn't ask for but we are activating for you by default)
This has been part of the news since the very beginning.
not quite like this… the original form was not a total kill switch, it was a vague "you are in control" (of this thing you didn't ask for but we are activating for you by default)
Firefox just can't win with their users.
It's absurd.
No, it's not. 1. Nobody wanted AI as a feature. 2. They didn't even completely backpedal, that would be not implementing AI. This sounds like it will be opt out maybe. They may remove it if they feel like it.
This is false, you don't speak for everybody and represent a small vocal minority of users.
Are you then a part of a vocal majority? Have you personally asked or been asked by Mozilla about AI features? What features are you exactly missing? See, I'm not against AI, but I am against needless, brainless hype following AI. I use AI, almost daily. But I'm not missing any of the features in the browser. Hell, most of the time, I'm using chatgpt from the browser. That's all I need and dont exactly have an idea what more I would need? OCR a page? Extract an image? That all could fit in an extension, which I claim almost no one would use. What does AI browser even mean? I don't speak for everyone but it doesn't mean I don't have at least an intuition that these are all empty words and that almost no one has asked for an "AI browser". And of those that did, I'm not sure they know what they mean by that, other than general curiosity about what an AI browser might look like, likely directly influenced by the hype, themselves.
Not implementing any AI is stupid.
I for one appreciate having offline, private language translation. Sending it to a Google Translate server is a privacy nightmare.
My sister appreciates the better screen-reader functionality.
Plenty of people do want AI features.
Translation is already a part of Firefox and I don't see too many have complained about this. It is also completely offline, AFAIK. What people are afraid, myself included is agentic AI capable of autonomous web browsing. That is a privacy and security nightmare, as is already demonstrated by openai's browser, which was exploited the first day it was launched. Beyond translation, I personally am not interested in any other AI features. In fact, I don't use the translation feature more than a few times a year.
Hahahahahaha, he thinks none of this data will be sold 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣 it's literally the only reason to spend all this money developing it
In my books that comment was far from complaining about damage control.
Just a objective observation.
OP said that they are happy if true.
What have they decided based on market data?
I think in this particular case at least Mozilla decided to introduce something that their users didn't want without asking, and our backpedaling and are being mocked for having done the thing in the first place.
Frankly I don't know what's going on in their collective brains. What Firefox needs more than anything else is refinement. There are no features that it's missing as far as I can think of.
pointing something out is not shitting on them