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.
clearly some damage control strategy here… but good news if true
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.
Firefox just can't win with their users.
It's absurd.
In my books that comment was far from complainong about damage control.
Just a objective observation.
OP said that they are happy if true.
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.
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.