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- cross-posted to:
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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.
Sounds like they will be opt in, not opt out
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:
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.