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.
Why not just ship it without any of the AI stuff and give users the option to install and use it instead of bloating the application? This also confirms that the stuff is essentially OPT OUT instead of OPT IN
The bubble is AI and they want some of that bubble investor money is my guess, so they put optional AI
“On by default unless you run down a setting buried in a menu” is the thinnest type of optional in computing.
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Have you attempted to turn of AI in Firefox? It’s literally like two checkboxes and it’s off
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Is there nobody with sanity left? This has blown up so much the user base clearly does not want it. Focus your efforts elsewhere. You gain marketshare by putting users first. Also fuck markets.
If all Firefox users donated to Mozilla it could work. Alas, we don’t.
I probably would, if the organizational structure and its spending focus(es) weren’t so fucked up. They have been spending insane amounts of money on bullshit like AI instead of core browser features, and their leadership has extremely high wages for something that should be a non-profit open source organization. And it has been like this for years at this point.
Their CEO makes more than I think CEOs should earn in general, but the rest of their executives earn relatively normal to low salaries for their roles and the sector.
Non-profit doesn’t mean everyone works for free.
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.
IDK guys, do you think a web browser should be a “broader ecosystem of trusted software” or a web browser?
The real issue is not whether we are going to be force-fed this features or not, but the fact that a foundation with limited resources is going to spend any sizable amount of them developing a solution its users are not interested in.
Waiting for Ladybird at this point.
Repeat after me. “There is no such thing as a non physical kill switch”
That’s nice but it’s not good enough. There needs to be a compile flag so the AI code isn’t even included at all.
I have a better kill switch: Waterfox and LibreWolf. Don’t have to worry about of that nonsense right out the gate.
I don’t really know what an ‘ai browser’ is and at this point I feel like i really need to ask. What makes a browser “AI”?
Serious and long answer because you won’t find people actually providing you one here: in theory (heavy emphasis on theory), an “agentic” world would be fucking awesome.
Agents
You know how you have been programmed that when you search something on Google, you need to be to terse and to the point? The worst you get is “Best Indian restaurants near me” but you don’t normally do more than that.
Well in reality most of the times when people just love rambling on or providing lots of additional info, so the natural language processing capabilities of LLMs are tremendously helpful. Like, what you actually want to do is “Best Indian restaurants near me but make sure it’s not more than 5km away and my chicken tikka plate doesn’t cost more than ₹400 and also I hope it’s near a train station so I can catch a train that will take me home by 11pm latest”. But you don’t put all that on fucking Google do ya?
“Agents” will use a protocol that works in completely in the background called Model Context Protocol (MCP). The idea is that you put all that information into an LLM (ideally speak into it because no one actually wants to type all that) and each service will have it’s own MCP server. Google will have one so it will narrow down your filters to one being near a train station and less than 5km away. Your restaurant will have one, your agent can automatically make a reservation for you. Your train operator will have one, so your agent can automatically book the train ticket for you. You don’t need to pull up each app individually, it will all happen in the background. And at most you will get a “confirm all the above?”. How cool is that?
Uses
So, what companies now want to do is leverage agents for everything, making use of NLP capabilities.
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Let’s say you maintain a spreadsheet or database of how your vehicle is maintained, what repairs you have done. Why do you want to manually type in each time? Just tell your agentic OS “hey add that I spent ₹5000 in replacing this car part at this location in my vehicle maintenance spreadsheet. Oh and also I filled in petrol on the way.” and boom your OS does it for you.
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You are want to add a new user to a Linux server. You just say “create a new user alice, add them to these local groups, and provide them sudo access as well. But also make sure they are forced to change their password every year”.
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You have accounts across 3 banks and you want to create a visualisation of your spendings? Maybe you want to also flag some anamolous spends? You tell your browser to fetch all that information and it will do that for you.
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You can tell your browser to track an item’s price and instantly buy it if it goes below a certain amount.
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Flying somewhere? Tell your browser to compare airline policies, maybe checkout their history of delays and cancellations
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And because it’s natural language, LLMs can easily ask to clarify something
Obvious downsides
So all this sounds awesome, but let’s get to why this will only work in theory unless there is a huge shift:
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(Edit thanks to /u/korazail@lemmy.myserv.one, can’t believe I forgot this) LLMs have the capacity to know literally EVERYTHING about you!!! It’s a big privacy nightmare waiting to happen if companies aren’t careful, and not to mention Governments and other organisations trying to get data for surveillance!!!
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LLMs still suck in terms of accuracy. Yes they are decent but still not at the level where it’s needed and still make stupid errors. Also currently they are not making as generational upgrades as before
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LLMs are not easy to self host. They are one of the genuine use cases of making use of cloud compute.
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This means they are going to be expensiveeeeee and also energy hogs
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Commercial companies actually want you to land on their servers. Yes its good that your OS will do it for you and they get a page hit but as of now that is absolutely not what companies want. How are they going to serve you ads and steal all your data from your cookies?
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People will lose their technical touch if bots are doing all the work for them
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People do NOT want to trust a bot with a credit card. Amazon already tried that with Alexa/Echo devices and people just don’t like saying “buy me a roll of toilet paper” because most people want to see what the fuck is actually being bought. And even if they are okay, because LLMs are still imperfect, they are going to make mistakes now and then.
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There are going to be clashes of what the OS will do agentically vs what a browser will do. Agentic browser makers like Perplexity want you in their ecosystem but if Windows ships with that functionality out of the box then how much reason is there really to get Perplexity? I expect to see anti-competitive lawsuits around this in the future.
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This also means there is going to be a huge lock-in to Big Tech companies.
My personal view is that you will see some of these features 5-10 years down the line but it’s not going to materialise in the way some of these AI companies are dreaming it will.
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The reason the “kill-switch” wasn’t made clear originally was because it literally didn’t exist until users very vocally tool them where to shove their AI crap.
It was added on afterwards.
Not buying it. Kill switch will migrate further and further into about:config until it eventually too goes away without notice in an update six months from now.
No that’s way too paranoid. Honestly 20 years not 6 months. And by then ladybird will be viable so nbd
No six months to a year is probably about right. They’ll have enough data by then to say “most people don’t turn it off” because realistically most people will use the default, which is on.
Twenty years from now Firefox will be in a new controversy that we can’t even begin to guess.
Plus, while I can’t predict when the AI bubble will pop, whatever they add in the next year will be removed within the next five years. AI isn’t like browser tabs, or extensions, stuff that will always be a great idea, it’s just the current fad.
Well time will tell won’t it, but we’re both just guessing at the end
But Lemmy told me Firefox was over and AI would be forced upon every single text field, and that we should migrate to Chrome forks maintained by 15 year old children!
That part of Lemmy didn’t hear of Librewolf, Floorp or Waterfox apparently. Btw, i was rightfully shitting on Firefox for this (i still do). The new ceo “ideas” wasn’t very agreeable, and i’ll totally drop the old Fox the exact second they touch the Adblocks.
didn’t hear of Librewolf, Floorp or Waterfox apparently
So projects that depend entirely on Firefox, and therefore the idea of boycotting Firefox and making it economically not viable means also killing these forks… Hmm… I feel like there might be a logical flaw somewhere here…
That’ what i mean. Using a clean derivative is better that going back to chromium.
He’s saying if enough people stop using firefox the base for all of those other ones (Firefox) won’t be able to be maintained and therefore will kill all the forks that you mentioned.
