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?
People don’t trust that it can be truly turned off and that it won’t act maliciously in some way. That’s really the crux of the whole saga. We’re at a point where phone companies are getting survey results that say that 80% of users either don’t care about AI nor use it or find that it actively makes their user experience worse.
Did those people forget this is am open source browser and they can actually check it’s doing what it says it’s doing?
And if they’re that paranoid that they don’t trust the pre-compiled binaries, they can just compile them themselves.
This discussion is completely absurd to me.
Quite honestly, I don’t think the average person even knows what open source means. They just know that Mozilla, like every other company, is shoving AI into their product, and that AI has either been useless or actively harmful to their user experience.
This should just have been an extension. Having this as a core integration makes the browser have more surface area for attack.
If compromised, it won’t be an easy fix like disabling/removing an extension.
Looks like execs behind closed doors are just trying to water down the Firefox brand until it’s hollow and then jump ship.
Many people love AI, I have a lot of acquaintances who actively seek out the best “AI browser” whatever that means. It makes sense for mozilla not to fall out this bandwagon just yet.
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.
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.
Repeat after me. “There is no such thing as a non physical kill switch”
Yep. Have no reason to trust it does what it says it does. Only way to prove that is for someone to dig into the browser while its running to debug/investigate/etc, things that are way above most peoples capability.
and even if it does what it says it does, no reason to believe that it wont default to on with the next update.
I’m just gonna say this. The former head of CIA had his laptop camera taped over. If he doesn’t trust the digital toggle. Neither should you.
Hackers have already proven that your webcam can be activated and monitored without the indicator LED even turning on.
If hackers are capable of it, you know the CIA have been doing it for even longer.
“Software controls are sufficient and hardware controls are expensive. Robust software protections are just as safe as hardware based lockouts.” - people who have never heard of Therac-25
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.
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 😟
Librewolf
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.
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
Until google kills sideloading
Its really too bad we cant outlaw that. Why are we allowing 2 companies to control our mobile devices (apple, google)?
Another reason to just get rid of the stupid phone. My laptops work fine.
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.
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.
They could save themselves all that bullshit by just not bothering with any of it!
Or they can give people to option to use or not use it.
Absolutely it should be opt in not opt out
If you want it, it’s already there for you. Nonconsentually shoved into every single thing you use.
Until the bad press dies down and they feel like removing it
The Microsoft way:
“Why do you disable that”
“You’re weird. Everyone uses that”
“You cannot disable that”
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.
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
We already have a term for “true” AI, it’s AGI - Artifcial General Intelligence.
Both AGI and LLMs are types of artificial intelligence, as are things like OCR, speech to text systems, or chess engines, and a ton of other things, it’s a vast field of computer science.
AGI is a hack term that is only necessary because people have been misusing the term AI. All that other stuff is just really fancy scripting and math. There’s no I involved, A or otherwise.
It’s really not. The people who invented the term “artificial intelligence” both meant something different than you’re thinking the term means and also thought human level intelligence was far simpler to model than it turned out to be.
You’re thinking of intelligence as compared to a human, and they were thinking of intelligence as compared to a wood chipper. The computers of the time executed much more mechanical tasks, like moving text into place on a printer layout.
They aimed to intelligence, where intelligence was understood as tasks that were more than just rote computation but responded to the environment they executed in. Text layout by knowing how to do line breaks and change font sizes. Parsing word context to know if something is a typo.
These tasks require something more than rote mechanical action. They’re far from human intelligence, and entirely lacking in the introspective or adaptive qualities that we associate with humans, but they’re still responsive.Using AI only to refer to human intelligence is the missuse of the term by writers and television producers.
The people who coined the terms would have found it quaint to say something isn’t intelligence because it consists of math and fancy scripting. Their efforts were predicated on the assumption that human intelligence was nothing more than math, and programming in general is an extremely abstract form of math.
To add an example, in video games we call it AI whenever the enemy appears to make a choice.
Yup, that’s a good one.
Purely for discussions sake, I’d say that the video game entity is making a choice, but it lacks volition.
No freewill or consciousness, but it’s selecting a course of action based on environment circumstances.
Or they could just ship it without the AI
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.
Why? I have plenty of disk space, a few unused binaries wont hurt me
Why not start with disabling it by default and see how many people switch it on?
It is off by default.
that’s not what anywhere is reporting, where are you seeing that?
This depends on the AI feature and changes release to release
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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Not entirely clear, but my best guess is that it will basically have an MCP implementation so that the browser can be controlled directly by an LLM
I think that’s basically what e.g. the chatgpt browser is. Despite the… hostile… response on the fediverse, I suspect it will end up being the way a lot of people interact with the internet in a few years.
The implementation challenge currently is that they’re extremely vulnerable to prompt injection.
Removed by mod
What an eloquent and well researched argument you’ve put forward
Thank you, I make sure to do my own research
Okay, so would you like to now elaborate on what that research was, and why that research proves that it’s so impossible for me to be correct that it’s reasonable to call me an idiot? Or is it just the case that you hate AI, and thus merely thinking it’s possible that people may use it as a browser interface means I deserve to be insulted?
It should be self-evident, I’m surprised you can’t see it
So, to summarise, you have no actual evidence, you’re insulting me for not coming to the same conclusion you came to just based entirely on vibes?
Given that natural language interfaces are pretty ubiquitous (you almost certainly have Gemini/Google Assistant or Siri on your phone by default), I think “it’s self-evident” is not a compelling argument here
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.
Marketing
It will goon for you that’s what make the browser AI
IDK guys, do you think a web browser should be a “broader ecosystem of trusted software” or a web browser?
I wouldn’t mind a web browser being part of a broader system of trusted software, but shoving an AI chatbot into my web browser does not make me trust it more.
I like the accessibility features like offline page translation
It already is a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Have you looked at what is inside a modern browser? It’s not 1999 anymore, and tons of related stuff is embedded in a browser.
