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.
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.
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.
And this is something normal users require?
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.