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.
They could save time and efforts and just not implement AI features
I hope librewolf will have it killed by default
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.
“Kill switch” is a bit dramatic. It’s an on or off toggle. Would be funny though to call every toggle a kill switch. “Yeah, using the kill switch on GPU acceleration may help with rendering on some systems.”
“Use the kill switch for preventing Firefox of starting a new session without restoring the old tabs.”
“Kill all of your browser data upon exiting Firefox by enabling the kill switch.”
“Make Firefox your default browser by enabling the ‘set as default browser kill switch’.”
Extended to other UI interaction classes: “You don’t like English? Kill it by using the battle royale language selector to choose only the one language you like.”
Waterfox for android and librewolf for desktop sounds good all of a sudden
This is the Mozilla Foundations version of “we dun goofed”
How about you ship with it off by default and users can choose to turn it on? No? That won’t serve your corporate goals, will it?
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.
Or they could just ship it without the AI
i wish they would release a second browser instead of whatever this is
Add a compile flag!
Would be nice if folks stopped calling LLMs AI. If they are true AI, they would be able to learn how a kill switch works and disable it
Until the bad press dies down and they feel like removing it
