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.
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.
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.
Waterfox needs to get on f droid. Trying to never use Google play store, disabled it.
Until google kills sideloading
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…
right now for android i recommend ironfox
Check out weblibre
But I don’t trust the CEO at all.
Already ahead of ya, about:config is a great thing
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 😟
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.
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
And also … will the kill switch turn off the AI entirely … or partially? Since the AI system is baked in, will elements of it still operate in the background even if you turn off the switch?
What he wrote doesn’t seem ambiguous on this at all. But we’ll see.
So you agree that it will be baked in and impossible to actually turn off. Yep.
Otherwise, they would have made it an extension, right? If it’s optional, it needs to actually be optional … that’s what am extension is. That’s the whole point of them.
No
You can not push the button that says AI.
You can also hit the kill switch that completely removes that button.
That’s opt-in enough.
If it starts reading pages or doing things without you pushing a button, that’s an issue.
If it starts reading pages or doing things without you pushing a button, that’s an issue.
And therein lies the rub. The question is whether or not people trust that it won’t be doing that regardless of whether or not you hit the kill switch.
Good thing it’s open source and we’ll immediately see that they aren’t doing the thing you’re claiming.
No, you don’t have to trust anything. It’s open source, you can read the code.
And if you’re feeling paranoid, you can compile it yourself.
Not sure what you mean by “will it operate in the background”? The current (and planned) features collect no data. They “operate” when you use them. Disabling them will remove them from the UI.
lol … so they won’t change how they function … just remove them from sight
out of sight, out of mind, right?
Whenever I trust big corporations … or even big organizations with a lot of power in their hands … it’s never usually good for common people like me and you.
No, they won’t be used at all, and will be hidden from view, if turned off.
It’s an open source browser.
The publicly available code is the most verifiable system of trust you’ll find.
Because they’re counting on people who know nothing about technology using the AI stuff when it’s placed in front of them.
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.
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)
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.
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.
No, go deeper into that mastodon thread.
The dev has a really hinky defention of “opt-in” thats basically “yes we push all this on by default and realize it will be the norm for most of our users because of that, but you technically dont have to interact with it so thats opt-in.”
Somehow, eventually having a buried menu option that “opts out” of AI is also part of how it will be opt-in as well? Its a self serving mess of rationaliztions and doublethink, no matter the claim on the tin.
Let’s have a look at how it works now, so we don’t need to speculate.
When I configured Firefox for AI, I got to choose my LLM of choice. I chose Claude. Now, if I select some text, I get a context menu option that says “Ask Anthropic Claude”, which branches into these options:
- Summarize
- Explain
- Quiz me
- Proofread
- Remove Anthropic Claude
Notice the last one? That’s not a “buried” option. That’s as front and center as the options to use it. Mind you, if I decide to not use it, then nothing happens. The only thing that’s changed is that I now have an optional shortcut for LLM features that open in a sidebar instead of a new tab.
Oh, the humanity.
I mean yeah, that’s a fair point, and the dev said that themselves, that the definition of opt in is ambiguous. The definition they seem to use is that AI won’t run unless you explicitly tell it to, and I think that’s ok. There’ll be a button that you can press to do some AI action and you can hide it using the kill switch.
I do hope the kill switch isn’t hidden behind 5 layers of menus
Thats not ambuguity. AI will be opt out in firefox, which is them abandoning core principles like user choice and privacy.
They can do that, but playing like they aren’t by redefining well established terms in UI/UX is disengenious, and cuts right through the “we will earn your trust back” messaging made by the same dev.
I think it’s quite clear there’s ambiguity (hence this discussion). How would you define opt in? Should a user not even see the button for an opt in feature?
In my opinion there is no ambiguity at all.
Opt-in means that the feature is disabled by default and until the user enables it. This is NOT what Firefox will be doing.
Opt-out means that the feature is enabled by default and can be disabled by the user. This is what Firefox will be doing.
Whether the user actually uses or not the feature is not a factor in determining if it is opt-in or opt-out.So if you never press the AI button, it’s never enabled. It is opt-in in the strictest semantic sense.
What you say here applies for things that run automatically, like the anonymous usage reports, which is opt out, not for things you activate yourself.
I think the big defining question is what will the AI features that they will implement do exactly and how will they run. If it’s something that runs in the background (even as unintrusive as the summaries on a search engine like DDG), then it’s opt out by default as it’s constantly running whether you want it to or not. If it specifically and exclusively runs when you hit the button to activate it and doesn’t run at any other time, then I’d say it’s unequivocally opt in. And regardless of what a company says that their software will do, at this point I won’t believe it until somebody has done a full teardown and discerned what exactly it does behind the scenes. I’ve seen enough nonsense like the Epic Games Store accessing your browser history and recording keyboard inputs or whatever the other absurd incident was.
Nah, I think it should be optional. Some AI features may even be useful — like an AI script to get rid of AI slop or something, idk.
A feature that will not do anything unless you explicitly press a button to start using it is quite literally opt-in, though? Opt-in doesn’t mean “I won’t even know the feature exists without hunting through the settings”. It just means that it won’t start doing things without your consent. Presenting a way to provide that consent in a more visible place than buried deeply in the settings does not make it opt-out. It might be a bit annoying to you, but it has no effect on your user choice or privacy, especially if there’s also a way to globally hide it and any other features like it, including new ones that might be added in the future.
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.
The bubble is AI and they want some of that bubble investor money is my guess, so they put optional AI
“On by default unless you run down a setting buried in a menu” is the thinnest type of optional in computing.
That’s fair, but also if you search AI in the settings it shows you all the options
It’s like saying cosmic is optional on Pop_OS.
Sure, you can rip it out if you really try… but is it really optional?
Have you attempted to turn of AI in Firefox? It’s literally like two checkboxes and it’s off
Flip the script man.
Imagine if enabling AI was like two check boxes and it’s on, for those people who really want it.
Sounds great.
I mean yeah that would be better, I’m not disagreeing
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Have you attempted to turn of AI in Firefox? It’s literally like two checkboxes and it’s off
.
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.
Waterfox for android and librewolf for desktop sounds good all of a sudden
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.
A very vocal portion of the user base, but we don’t actually know what absolute portion cares. I’m personally unlikely to use possible AI features outside translation, but Mozilla has generally done enough that I don’t feel particularly worried they’re going to mess with my privacy or force me to use a feature I don’t want.
They could do a survey amongst Firefox users about what they want.
But if the result is anti-AI they can’t claim anymore that they weren’t aware of their users opinions.
The issue is that there aren’t many of us Firefox users left, so asking us while FF wants to get NEW users to expand the market share (which is badly needed, so they do not lose their seat at the table regarding web standards, and to make them less dependent on googles payments) is not helpful at all.
As long as i can switch it off with one click, i couldn’t care less and will continue using FF, but as you can see many existing users will bitch and moan even if it’s just one click.
so asking us while FF wants to get NEW users
This is a balancing act and Mozilla behaves like an elefant in a porcelain shop right now. Worst case they loose their current users without attracting new ones.
existing users will bitch and moan even if it’s just one click
I’m one of them. Why not make it one click for people who want it instead?
Worst case they loose their current users without attracting new ones.
And where to?
Ladybird, Servo and Floorp are all not useable as a daily driver and will take years to get there (and btw, the ladybird guy is a major shithead and last i heard of Servo was that they were going to cater to the embedded market, not a full blown browser).
Firefox forks can do what they want, even switch off the AI button, but i’d still say they help keeping the browser engine itself afloat, because they still depend on Firefox - there’s not one fork with enough dev staff to keep up. That leaves us with chromium based browsers and safari. I’d say the commitment to the current userbase to make the changes optional is good enough to keep most of them.
I ’m one of them. Why not make it one click for people who want it instead?
I’d put current Firefox users much more in the department of “able to find the settings” than the vast majority of users. The majority wants something that works with everything they throw at it out of the box without rummaging through settings.
And where to?
If both noteworthy browser engines are made by companies who make decisions against their user’s interest I might as well switch to the one with higher development budget.
The majority wants something that works with everything they throw at it out of the box without rummaging through settings.
And where does AI come into play here? It’s not like a browser without AI doesn’t work.
At least Firefox isn’t an extension of the worlds largest ad company, no amount of dev budget can fix that.
Context aware search, summarizing in side view or importing an agent directly from a repository into your browser are things that come to mind without much thinking, and i am not a developer.
Chill out. It’s literally just a sidebar for your LLM of choice.
Don’t like it? Don’t use it.
Don’t want it to clutter up your context menu? The same menu contains the option to disable it. Boom! Problem solved.
Gonna use Chromium-based with no µBlock because your feelings got hurt? Have fun.
Getting stuck on Lemmy can get us into an echo chamber. A lot of the mass public actively uses AI and may even appreciate these features.
[citation needed]
This sounds like an opinion from the LinkedIn echo chamber.
According to top results for a few searches,
ChatGPT has 700 million weekly active users, as of September 2025.
Gemini has 350 million monthly active users, as of April 2025.
ChatGPT is the number 1 app on the Google Play top downloaded apps currently.
Some numbers may be slightly inflated for a number of reasons, but another source is speaking to people IRL. I often overhear conversations mentioning ChatGPT or AI in general.
“AI bros” are definitely cancerous but a lot of average consumers do in fact use AI frequently
We need valve but for browsers.
It seems to me that the issue is how we consume the web versus games: We’re used to pay to play but not to browse the internet. Valve is able to make money without relying on affiliations or donations.
Ehh, I’d pass on Ladybird. I’ve been donating to Servo myself.
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).
No idea why Floorp has garnered attention but other seem interested.
Floorp misses the mark for me. Waterfox and librewolf seem to be a better fit for most people.
Always celebrate more options, though. I hope ladybird does well and doesn’t shit the bed the moment it gets some market share.
These days I’m tempted to just write myself a super minimal front end to Servo though because I don’t want 90% of what modern browsers ship with.
Funny. That’s exactly what Mozilla used to be.
Yup, RIP
If all Firefox users donated to Mozilla it could work. Alas, we don’t.
Pretty much this.
They are making market based decisions because they have to, and all the users bitching and moaning about them making financially driven decisions don’t donate anyways.
I would donate if I ever had spare money but I never do.
$5?
Make fun of the poors yeah?
No, I just don’t believe they really can’t spare $5.
Maybe they can’t but I’m skeptical.
They? You mean me? Lmao you are replying to the same person.
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I probably would, if the organizational structure and its spending focus(es) weren’t so fucked up. They have been spending insane amounts of money on bullshit like AI instead of core browser features, and their leadership has extremely high wages for something that should be a non-profit open source organization. And it has been like this for years at this point.
Well to be fair they only had that or onlyfans to get paid to sit there playing with themselves.
They’d have done less damage going for the OF option.
I mean, I bet they’d make a killing off of Firefox themed thigh highs…
Their CEO makes more than I think CEOs should earn in general, but the rest of their executives earn relatively normal to low salaries for their roles and the sector.
Non-profit doesn’t mean everyone works for free.
Then let’s
How? Where? I’ll donate, take my money, and ads a voting system where paying users can vote for the next features
https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/ if you’re actually interested in donating.
You can donate to Mozilla, you cannot donate to Firefox.
Which is probably a good thing. I appreciate projects like Thunderbird as well.
No money you donate to Mozilla Foundation goes to either Firefox (MozCorp) or Thunderbird (MZLA).
They are separate entities.
It has to be opt-in or they can go fuck themselves
Or they could just ship it without the AI
They could save time and efforts and just not implement AI features
clearly some damage control strategy here… but good news if true
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.
- Mozilla makes decisions based on market data
- Users complain they never wanted those features
- Mozilla makes a decision based on user feedback
- Users shit on them for backpedaling or damage control
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.
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.
Hahahahahaha, he thinks none of this data will be sold 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣 it’s literally the only reason to spend all this money developing it
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.
Nobody wanted AI as a feature
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.
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
In my books that comment was far from complaining about damage control.
Just a objective observation.OP said that they are happy if true.
- Mozilla makes decisions based on market data
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 is the Mozilla Foundations version of “we dun goofed”
Just don’t add the surveillance and spam features in the first place. 👍 Fuck off, Mozilla.
How about you ship with it off by default and users can choose to turn it on? No? That won’t serve your corporate goals, will it?
