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.
But I don’t trust the CEO at all.
Repeat after me. “There is no such thing as a non physical kill switch”
Yep. Have no reason to trust it does what it says it does. Only way to prove that is for someone to dig into the browser while its running to debug/investigate/etc, things that are way above most peoples capability.
and even if it does what it says it does, no reason to believe that it wont default to on with the next update.
I’m just gonna say this. The former head of CIA had his laptop camera taped over. If he doesn’t trust the digital toggle. Neither should you.
Did he remove his microphone? That’s the first thing I do with every new computer, physically remove the microphone. Microphones pick up much more data than cameras.
I don’t know. Difficult to see on the outside if he removed an internal microphone or not.
Hackers have already proven that your webcam can be activated and monitored without the indicator LED even turning on.
If hackers are capable of it, you know the CIA have been doing it for even longer.
“Software controls are sufficient and hardware controls are expensive. Robust software protections are just as safe as hardware based lockouts.” - people who have never heard of Therac-25
Funny how companies and applications default to features being auto implemented by default. Baked into the applications.
What happened to having the user select what they want rather then “a kill switch” for an application, whatever that means. Features shouldn’t be on by default. I should be able to turn what I want on and off
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.
the actual thinnest is only having a choice between “yes” and “later”
Have you attempted to turn of AI in Firefox? It’s literally like two checkboxes and it’s off
that’s not about just me. defaults matter a lot.
let’s see what they implement though, their translation engine is nice so far, tbf.
That’s fair, but also if you search AI in the settings it shows you all the options
It’s like saying cosmic is optional on Pop_OS.
Sure, you can rip it out if you really try… but is it really optional?
Have you attempted to turn of AI in Firefox? It’s literally like two checkboxes and it’s off
Flip the script man.
Imagine if enabling AI was like two check boxes and it’s on, for those people who really want it.
Sounds great.
I mean yeah that would be better, I’m not disagreeing
In their defense a very tiny percentage of users even open options and of those an even smaller actually change stuff.
Maybe slighlty different for Firefox as probably more power user use it than other random programs. But basically if something is not enabled by default, it doesn’t exist.
Because they’re counting on people who know nothing about technology using the AI stuff when it’s placed in front of them.
This should just have been an extension. Having this as a core integration makes the browser have more surface area for attack.
If compromised, it won’t be an easy fix like disabling/removing an extension.
Looks like execs behind closed doors are just trying to water down the Firefox brand until it’s hollow and then jump ship.
All AI features will also be opt-in. I think there are some grey areas in what ‘opt-in’ means to different people (e.g. is a new toolbar button opt-in?), but the kill switch will absolutely remove all that stuff, and never show it in future. That’s unambiguous.
Sounds like they will be opt in, not opt out
No, go deeper into that mastodon thread.
The dev has a really hinky defention of “opt-in” thats basically “yes we push all this on by default and realize it will be the norm for most of our users because of that, but you technically dont have to interact with it so thats opt-in.”
Somehow, eventually having a buried menu option that “opts out” of AI is also part of how it will be opt-in as well? Its a self serving mess of rationaliztions and doublethink, no matter the claim on the tin.
I mean yeah, that’s a fair point, and the dev said that themselves, that the definition of opt in is ambiguous. The definition they seem to use is that AI won’t run unless you explicitly tell it to, and I think that’s ok. There’ll be a button that you can press to do some AI action and you can hide it using the kill switch.
I do hope the kill switch isn’t hidden behind 5 layers of menus
Thats not ambuguity. AI will be opt out in firefox, which is them abandoning core principles like user choice and privacy.
They can do that, but playing like they aren’t by redefining well established terms in UI/UX is disengenious, and cuts right through the “we will earn your trust back” messaging made by the same dev.
A feature that will not do anything unless you explicitly press a button to start using it is quite literally opt-in, though? Opt-in doesn’t mean “I won’t even know the feature exists without hunting through the settings”. It just means that it won’t start doing things without your consent. Presenting a way to provide that consent in a more visible place than buried deeply in the settings does not make it opt-out. It might be a bit annoying to you, but it has no effect on your user choice or privacy, especially if there’s also a way to globally hide it and any other features like it, including new ones that might be added in the future.
I think it’s quite clear there’s ambiguity (hence this discussion). How would you define opt in? Should a user not even see the button for an opt in feature?
Nah, I think it should be optional. Some AI features may even be useful — like an AI script to get rid of AI slop or something, idk.
In my opinion there is no ambiguity at all.
Opt-in means that the feature is disabled by default and until the user enables it. This is NOT what Firefox will be doing.
Opt-out means that the feature is enabled by default and can be disabled by the user. This is what Firefox will be doing.
Whether the user actually uses or not the feature is not a factor in determining if it is opt-in or opt-out.So if you never press the AI button, it’s never enabled. It is opt-in in the strictest semantic sense.
What you say here applies for things that run automatically, like the anonymous usage reports, which is opt out, not for things you activate yourself.
I don’t see why there is a big outrage. Sure I’m not a fan of the AI features and I certainly will disable them but it’s tot like they’re forced upon me. Some people like (want) AI in the browser and good for them, this makes the browser better and easier to use for them. For me, it doesn’t change my experience at all
(Commented this separately on purpose)
Come to think of it, I do enjoy the translation feature in Firefox
The alt-text tagging is pretty amazing according to my sister (blind), too.
I’ve been thinking the same thing. The online tech community is a very small part of a much larger pie and they need to serve multiple audiences. As long as it can be turned off and truly be off, who cares?
Many people love AI, I have a lot of acquaintances who actively seek out the best “AI browser” whatever that means. It makes sense for mozilla not to fall out this bandwagon just yet.
“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.”
CEO : Panik
They could save themselves all that bullshit by just not bothering with any of it!
Or they can give people to option to use or not use it.
Absolutely it should be opt in not opt out
Why put the user through the issue of turning it off instead of having it off by default and letting those who want to use it turn it on? That’s some bullshit on Mozilla’s end. Fuck them.
Jesus you guys are so fucking whiny. Takes two seconds.
It’s not about the effort, it’s about the default. The US considered breaking Microsoft up over this. “You can always uninstall it” isn’t the point
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.
That’s not an educated opinion. 90% of users don’t read shit, they just use things, badly. If you don’t care about those doofus’s protection and you think “It’s their own fault”, you’re accidentally being a bit of a douche canoe.
If a person doesn’t have any issues, then is it actually a problem they need to read up on and disable? Why is there any fault to be had at all in that case? Assuming everyone’s use case is the same is also not an educated opinion.
If individuals start having problems, the tools to fix them are there and it’s on the individual to use them. If large swaths of the user base start having problems, that’s Mozilla’s issue to fix. Right now, any prediction of which way this goes is just a guess.
I am whiny as fuck, which is why I fucking dropped everything by Mozilla from my life. Those are 2 seconds I can add to my porn addiction streamline.
If you want it, it’s already there for you. Nonconsentually shoved into every single thing you use.
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
So, an actual artificial brain?
Can I secretly upload mine?
EDIT: Don’t worry! It’s small enough to fit!
We already have a term for “true” AI, it’s AGI - Artifcial General Intelligence.
Both AGI and LLMs are types of artificial intelligence, as are things like OCR, speech to text systems, or chess engines, and a ton of other things, it’s a vast field of computer science.
AGI is a hack term that is only necessary because people have been misusing the term AI. All that other stuff is just really fancy scripting and math. There’s no I involved, A or otherwise.
It’s really not. The people who invented the term “artificial intelligence” both meant something different than you’re thinking the term means and also thought human level intelligence was far simpler to model than it turned out to be.
You’re thinking of intelligence as compared to a human, and they were thinking of intelligence as compared to a wood chipper. The computers of the time executed much more mechanical tasks, like moving text into place on a printer layout.
They aimed to intelligence, where intelligence was understood as tasks that were more than just rote computation but responded to the environment they executed in. Text layout by knowing how to do line breaks and change font sizes. Parsing word context to know if something is a typo.
These tasks require something more than rote mechanical action. They’re far from human intelligence, and entirely lacking in the introspective or adaptive qualities that we associate with humans, but they’re still responsive.Using AI only to refer to human intelligence is the missuse of the term by writers and television producers.
The people who coined the terms would have found it quaint to say something isn’t intelligence because it consists of math and fancy scripting. Their efforts were predicated on the assumption that human intelligence was nothing more than math, and programming in general is an extremely abstract form of math.
To add an example, in video games we call it AI whenever the enemy appears to make a choice.
Yup, that’s a good one.
Purely for discussions sake, I’d say that the video game entity is making a choice, but it lacks volition.
No freewill or consciousness, but it’s selecting a course of action based on environment circumstances.
Or they could just ship it without the AI
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.
What? They’ve been talking about features that are now being called the “kill switch” for the better part of a year. Literally all they did that’s new was give it a dumb name.
Just to point out that per the discussion in the screenshot: Synthetic datasets are typically generated from models that were trained by poverty-pay Kenyans. This is basically ethics-washing.
That’s literally not true, though? They’ve spoke about it for ages.
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.
Librewolf
Until the bad press dies down and they feel like removing it
The Microsoft way:
“Why do you disable that”
“You’re weird. Everyone uses that”
“You cannot disable that”
I think it says something that they’re backpedaling at all. This isn’t just “bad press”, its a real market for people who want products that are “AI Free”. And since Firefox is the other-other browser, its a market they’re feeling obligated to fill.
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.
The term snake oil is actually especially fitting for this, due to its origins.
In Britain in the 1700s there was a somewhat common recommendation for using rattlesnake oil from the fat of the snake for skin diseases/rheumatism. The efficacy is debated but it’s got some amount of potential for change (if not help).
This turned into people in the US selling mineral oil as “snake oil” as a total panacea. So a product that actually could do stuff being used as the poster child for a completely useless product that can solve every issue ever, buy as much as you can today.
Snake oil indeed.
You reminded me that one use for AI I’d really like is removing all photos of Trump, Musk and Putin from my screen. Another is filtering the twenty reposts of every event in US politics and the incessant whining about prices. Alas, I need these in phone apps more than the browser.
You don’t need LLMs for that. An iPhone is plenty powerful enough for image recognition and text classification.
That’s sorta the funny thing about AI. There’s tons of potential, but it’s just unimplemented. Even on PC, you pretty much have to have some Nvidia GPU and fight pip setting up python repos to get anything working.
That stuff is commonly included in the AI umbrella.
Eh, I draw a distinction between oldschool visual recognition and matching some keywords, versus full-blown LLMs. I used ‘AI’ to mean the latter in my comment above, as intended by the post itself. I also have doubts about the effectiveness of the older approaches in regard to the uses that I mentioned.
I would use it to block all the people whining about AI
I’d like a AI feature that bounces back on any ads or intrusive crap including propaganda. But AI is being pushed by the same people so if it happens it won’t be genuine and it will just evolve to give the illusion of not being pushed.
FF, any browser, any social media platform , I can select ‘I don’t wanna see this’ or go adjust settings to disable but nah, an update later and it’s back, or it comes back under another form.
It’s still manipulation. And I can’t trust it to manipulate ever.
Does anyone even talk about what the “AI features” are?
The one I use the most is their offline translation. I don’t have to send my data to Google Translate.
My sister (blind) uses the new screen reader stuff a lot.
Mozilla is certainly adding good AI features, but the chatbot integration isn’t something I have much use for.
Translation and screen reader have been a solved thing for a while, no “AI” browser necessary. I’m all for nice features, but bolting in a chat bot that phones home with activity data ain’t one of them.
Could I, liked recolor webpages? Automate ublock filters? Detect SEO/AI slop?
This is an excellent point: there are potential features I wouldn’t mind trying out. But of course those features aren’t available, because aren’t the features that Mozilla leadership’s buddies in tech are pushing, and often work against what big tech wants.
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?
