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.
What is it actively doing now with AI? There is the ai sidebar, but if you don't use that it isn't used, right?
I think the biggest issue people have with it is if you can't trust a company not to shill AI then you also can't trust them not to shove it even further down your throat and train it on you.
It's just a bottom line trust issue, regardless of actual features or capability.
The way they talked about making an Agentic Browser implies they want AI to eventually be the primary default method of interaction.
There's the slow-and-not-very-capable link preview thing... and I could've sworn the "what's new" page the other day said they were adding an on-device model to improve search results or something, but I can't find the reference to it now.
Maybe they removed it after all the AI backlash. 😬
I think there's some alt-text generation for websites that don't have proper accessibility, though not certain if it's released yet
Alt-text generation for screen readers (amazing feature)
Private, offline translation (amazing feature)
Chatbot sidebar (I have very little use for it, but some may like it)
All of these are opt-in.