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.
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.
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.
So, nothing.
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 feel I have an idea of what this means, but it still breaks my brain just a little bit.