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.
Repeat after me. “There is no such thing as a non physical kill switch”
They could save time and efforts and just not implement AI features
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.
Right right. If they had real innovation, they would have defined it clearly as you suggested. But they didn’t, so they don’t. It’s all snake oil, again, because that’s the entire AI industry.
The term snake oil is actually especially fitting for this, due to its origins.
In Britain in the 1700s there was a somewhat common recommendation for using rattlesnake oil from the fat of the snake for skin diseases/rheumatism. The efficacy is debated but it’s got some amount of potential for change (if not help).
This turned into people in the US selling mineral oil as “snake oil” as a total panacea. So a product that actually could do stuff being used as the poster child for a completely useless product that can solve every issue ever, buy as much as you can today.
Snake oil indeed.
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’d like a AI feature that bounces back on any ads or intrusive crap including propaganda. But AI is being pushed by the same people so if it happens it won’t be genuine and it will just evolve to give the illusion of not being pushed.
FF, any browser, any social media platform , I can select ‘I don’t wanna see this’ or go adjust settings to disable but nah, an update later and it’s back, or it comes back under another form.
It’s still manipulation. And I can’t trust it to manipulate ever.
you don’t even need AI for that and can do it on your phone. Piefeed for example asks you when initially setting up an account “Hey do you want to see stuff about Trump, Musk, etc? no? cool we won’t show you that” and that’s it. works great.
What indicates that Piefed does this on the client side?
I would use it to block all the people whining about AI
- AI chatbot in sidebar (you can choose which chatbot you want, similar to how you choose default search engine)
- Shake to summarize page (on mobile)
- AI Window (separate from Normal and Private window, upcoming). Apparently it lets you chat with an AI agent to power-browse the internet.
So, nothing.
Yeah, basically a nothingburger.
Can’t wait to power browse.
Are we goong to get power browse or drunk browse?
The last feature is the mildly interesting one, but in my experience just not useful enough to do much, even on specific browsing finetunes or augmented APIs.
I guess shake to summarize is mildly interesting, but not really? I simply can’t trust it. And I can just paste the (much more concise) relevant text into a chat window and get a much better answer.
I agree. They’re quite vague about what the feature would actually do, and I have a hard time believing that I would use it.
I think it would probably be wiser spending time and effort on other things (like a really good built-in Dark mode or better memory management), but I don’t fault them for experimenting. Worst case scenario they make something that sucks and either remove it later, or you can fork it off.
Apparently it lets you chat with an AI agent to power-browse the internet.
… I feel I have an idea of what this means, but it still breaks my brain just a little bit.
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.
Translation and screen reader have been a solved thing for a while, no “AI” browser necessary. I’m all for nice features, but bolting in a chat bot that phones home with activity data ain’t one of them.
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.
That’s nice but it’s not good enough. There needs to be a compile flag so the AI code isn’t even included at all.
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.
Just to point out that per the discussion in the screenshot: Synthetic datasets are typically generated from models that were trained by poverty-pay Kenyans. This is basically ethics-washing.
That’s literally not true, though? They’ve spoke about it for ages.
Well they’re clearly not taking it all that seriously as it should be an Opt-IN feature, not an Opt-Out. They’re banking on a majority non tech savvy userbase to not even bother disabling it. fine, whatever, that’s on the user.
But it’s just more Firefox bloat that I have zero desire to deal with. If I wanted bloat in my browser I’d go use Vivaldi.
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
These guys played host to one of the tech world’s most prominent homophobes for decades. I like the browser but the foundation has been trying to fuck everything up since the beginning of the web.
Huh? The board ousted him when his political donations came out
According to your link below he was co-founder of Mozilla in 1998. Based on the other information on that page, he had a very significant role in shaping Mozilla and their tools, so as disagreeable as his personal views may be, it’s not impossible that Firefox might not even exist today were it not for his work there.
Someone else has already pointed out that he was pushed out, but he actually resigned due to public pressure (he was only CEO for 11 days, and one of the board members even left due to him being appointed) before going on to found Brave and becoming the CEO there lol.
If I chose not to use products based on the personal beliefs of the people who worked on them I don’t think I’d have very many options. Mozilla has made heaps of questionable decisions over the years, but the other options are generally much worse.
Obviously, as a Firefox user myself, I’m making similar choices.
But I’ll be dammed if I let an opportunity go to waste to remind people that Brandan Eich is disgusting human trash. He’s responsible for JavaScript, and that’s only least of his sins.
Yep I got the feeling that we were of similar minds about it but I wanted to provide some balance in case anyone else was weighing up switching to a different browser.
I knew JS was his handiwork, but I wasn’t aware of his significant role at Mozilla or that he is also behind Brave, so thanks for sharing that link.
Out of the loop, who was that?
Eeesh, and an anti-masker too 😟
They could save themselves all that bullshit by just not bothering with any of it!
Y’know what’s even better than a Kill-switch?
Not including it at all.
And that’s why I’ve switched to Waterfox, which honestly, everyone should, show them that it’s not good enough, by switching browser.
Exactly my case as well. There are several Firefox-based browsers better than Firefox itself without the bullshit: Zen, Mercury, LibreWolf, Floorp… All are good options. But the dev behind Waterfox made a public commitment to keep this AI crap out of the browser. That sealed the deal for me.
Now if only I knew the best Android replacement for Firefox…
Check out weblibre
right now for android i recommend ironfox
Waterfox needs to get on f droid. Trying to never use Google play store, disabled it.
There’s Fennec, which is similar
Serious question: I looked into it but there are no deb packages for Waterfox. What’s the best way to advocate the devs or a distro to make one? Don’t tell me to do it myself since I lack both the time and skill.
They’ve a public git repo, I would say to raise an issue there, I’ll edit in the link in a sec, cause I forget the URL for it
Edit: that URL - https://github.com/BrowserWorks/waterfox/issues
Edit edit: you tried these? https://linuxcapable.com/how-to-install-waterfox-browser-on-debian-linux
There is an official flatpak but I like deb better. Running the flatpak for now.
Or they could just ship it without the AI
Until the bad press dies down and they feel like removing it
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
“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.”
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 will be like all those times tech companies promised us they aren’t harvesting our data only to find out they were harvesting our data. Years from now we will find out the AI was lurking in the background watching us, learning from us the whole time.
