Technology

They could save time and efforts and just not implement AI features

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

But I don't trust the CEO at all.

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.

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.

Well they're clearly not taking it all that seriously as it should be an Opt-IN feature, not an Opt-Out. They're banking on a majority non tech savvy userbase to not even bother disabling it. fine, whatever, that's on the user.

But it's just more Firefox bloat that I have zero desire to deal with. If I wanted bloat in my browser I'd go use Vivaldi.

This will be like all those times tech companies promised us they aren't harvesting our data only to find out they were harvesting our data. Years from now we will find out the AI was lurking in the background watching us, learning from us the whole time.

They could save themselves all that bullshit by just not bothering with any of it!

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.

"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."

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.

Or they could just ship it without the AI

Y'know what's even better than a Kill-switch?

Not including it at all.

And that's why I've switched to Waterfox, which honestly, everyone should, show them that it's not good enough, by switching browser.

!waterfox@programming.dev

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.

Until the bad press dies down and they feel like removing it

I hope librewolf will have it killed by default

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

https://librewolf.net/

CEO : Panik

i wish they would release a second browser instead of whatever this is

This is a response to all the backlash. Oops, we"forgot" to mention you can completely turn this all off... (Quick, vibe code a kill switch guys!)

Why not start with disabling it by default and see how many people switch it on?

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.

I have a better kill switch: Waterfox and LibreWolf. Don't have to worry about of that nonsense right out the gate.

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?

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"?

Mozilla shared this important update earlier today to make it clear to everyone that Firefox will still be a trusted web browser.

It would be trusted if that shit wasn't in there to start with. Isn't firefox like the big "extensions" browser? Why not make this an extension that people could download if they're stupid enough to want it?

They're acting like they're Microsoft tying IE to Windows 98.

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.

It has to be opt-in or they can go fuck themselves