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.
This is good enough for me. If they have an on boarding step/popup to say "Try our AI crap" and I have an option to say "No and don't ever bother me about this again", then it's fine.
You don't actually believe that "don't ever bother me about this again" is gonna be in the realm.of possibilities, do you? They'll accidentally "forget" your choice on every second update and pester you again. Fuck mozilla.
Hasn't been the case so far with sidebar, Firefox view, Pocket or any other stuff I've not wanted in the past. If they did start doing dark patterns bullshit with this AI stuff, then yeah, I'd switch. In the meantime, I'll use FF until it gets worse than the alternatives, or an alternative gets better than FF, whichever comes first.
Well, I can't condemn you, I have only partially made the move myself for lack of options :(