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.
You can also disable ai via toggling browser.ml.enable to false on about:config. For now at least...
What is it actively doing now with AI? There is the ai sidebar, but if you don't use that it isn't used, right?
There's the slow-and-not-very-capable link preview thing... and I could've sworn the "what's new" page the other day said they were adding an on-device model to improve search results or something, but I can't find the reference to it now.
Maybe they removed it after all the AI backlash. 😬