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Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

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Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#271

Post by protocolture »

brokencode wrote: post #180
samschooler wrote: post #23

I'm going to chime in here, I think 1. This is great and Mozilla is listening to it's core fans and 2. I want Firefox to be a competitive browser. Without AI enabled features + agent mode being first class citizens, this will be a non-starter in 2 years. I want my non-tech family members/friends to install Firefox not because I come over at Christmas, but because they want to. Because it's a browser that "just works.…

I totally agree. It’s just going to become an expectation that AI is in the browser. It’s so nice just to be able to ask the browser to summarize the page, or ask questions about a long article. I know a lot of people on Hacker News are hostile to AI and like to imagine everybody hates it, but I personally find it very helpful.

>It’s just going to become an expectation that AI is in the browser.

Why? Is there evidence to back this up? Are there massive customer write in campaigns trying to convince browser companies to push more AI?

>I know a lot of people on Hacker News are hostile to AI and like to imagine everybody hates it, but I personally find it very helpful.

I love it. I love going to the AI place and knowingly consulting the AI for tasks I want the AI to perform. That relationship is healthy and responsible. It doesnt need to be in everything else. Its like those old jokes about how inventions are just + .

I dont need AI on the desktop, in microsoft office, replying to me on facebook, responding to my google searches AND doing shit in my browser. One of these would be too much, because I can just access the AI I want to speak to whenever I want it. Any 2 of these is such substantial overkill. Why do we have all of them? Justify it. Is there a user story where a user was trying to complete a task but lacked 97% accurate information from 5 different sources to complete the task?

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#272

Post by johnnyanmac »

asadotzler wrote: post #258
johnnyanmac wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a translation extension for a good 2 years before it was built into FF

You and a few others. Now it's well over 100 million who have it. We didn't make the back button an extension even though we could have. There's good reasons for making some features default and high on that list is "most people would use it and find it valuable for everyday browsing" which well covers web page translation.

I see it as 100 million who didn't care enough to find a translation extension. Which is fine. Most people stay on the same 20 sites, after all (and some of those even have built in translation tools).

>We didn't make the back button an extension even though we could have.

The back button isn't even a KB of extra data and and I'd put navigation as the primary job of a web browser.

I'm not against a built in translator, but it's a strange comparison to a back button.

On a slight tangent, I think there's an under talked about boon yo machine translation: it's widely agreedbti be a comoromise and not a source of truth. That wariness has been missing as of late.

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#273

Post by [deleted] »

Intermernet wrote: post #175
tsimionescu wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't mean anything, it's just a name change. They're the same kind of unit. And whatever accelerator you try to put into it, you're not running Gemini3 or GPT-5.1 on your laptop, not in any reasonable time frame.

Over the last few decades I've seen people make the same comment about spell checking, voice recognition, video encoding, 3D rendering, audio effects and many more. I'm happy to say that LLM usage will only actually become properly integrated into background work flow when we have performant local models. People are trying to madly monetise cloud LLMs before the inevitable rise of local only LLMs severely diminishes…

[deleted]

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#274

Post by wkat4242 »

homebrewer wrote: post #74
JoeBOFH wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am speaking from only my personal experience, but I would say the vast majority of Firefox users are using Firefox to avoid Chrome and Chrome likes. That being said I would say they are then more likely and inclined to also utilize extensions.

According to Mozilla's own stats, most Firefox users do not have any extensions at all: > Has Add-on shows the percentage of Firefox Desktop clients with user-installed add-ons. > December 8, 2025 > 45.4% https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior Note that language packs are counted as extensions. Some have disabled telemetry, of course, but how many? Here we can only rely on our own observations, and of all…

I think the correlation of people using extensions and people disabling telemetry is pretty high. I do both myself. Even a decent password manager requires one (though not on android because it has an API for that). On android I do use others obviously.

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#275

Post by johnnyanmac »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #160

I'm not sure why people still believe this, especially developers. We're starting to literally just build AI into everything... you're not even going to know what's AI and what's not. The phase of labeling everything with cute little sparkles is starting to end and AI is going to be used similarly to external libraries. If you don't like AI you need to seek legislation and pressure your local politicians. It's the on…

>If you don't like AI you need to seek legislation and pressure your local politicians. It's the only way to stop it.

Yup. So we're screwed for up to 3 years. Maybe much less depending on nature or the result of certain hot topic issues.

That might be a minor factor why we seem to be speedrunning everything in 2025. Get ahead of the crash, of the legislation, of the wool coming off the common citizen's eyes.

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#276

Post by johnnyanmac »

yoavm wrote: post #53
gldrk wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti-AI ‘movement’ is a minority like all partisans are a minority. You shouldn’t be comparing them to passive consumers but to enthusiasts who actively demand ‘AI’ in their browser/Paint/Notepad.

True, and a reasonable PM will ignore both the anti-AI and the AI-in-everything groups.

We don't really have reasonable PM's though. Or rather, they are being paid to be unreasonable. They are ignoring everyone because the CEO 5 levels uo wants it.

And then others wonder why customers are frustrated.

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#277

Post by shakna »

AuthAuth wrote: post #236
pessimizer wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto has proven that it can bribe governments into pouring tax money into it. It still hasn't shown any use.

Thats not a reason for crypto being useless, anything can bribe corrupt governments to pour tax money into it. Crypto has shown people are willing to use it as a currency for investment and day to day transactions. Its held value for a significant amount of time. The tech is evolving still and people see a lot of value in having a currency that operates outside of Governments in a decentralized way even if some peopl…

Money laundering? Certainly.

Black market goods? Of course.

Avoiding taxation? Absolutely.

Day to day purchases? Not that I've seen.

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#278

Post by johnnyanmac »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #85
joduplessis wrote: post #11

> We've been calling it the AI kill switch internally. I'm sure it'll ship with a less murderous name, but that's how seriously and absolutely we're taking this. Honestly, is anybody reading what's getting written anymore? If it gets taken seriously it would ship with an enable-AI button, not the other way round.

No, it wouldn't. Because the average user might actually want the features, and if you default to "no" without asking people even once, the users who want it won't find it. That's why it should ask - once. And offer a "FUCK OFF NEVER ASK ME AGAIN" button rather than "Ask me again later".

>and if you default to "no" without asking people even once

I'm still waiting for the polls and statistics and feature requests of this. The "without asking" is the primary problem.

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#279

Post by FridgeSeal »

nicoburns wrote: post #266
LexiMax wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla is certainly paddling upstream. Of all of the AI-integrated apps and sites that I'm subjected to, I can think of exactly two where it wasn't obnoxious and a pain in the neck to disable. Kagi. Zed. That's it, that's the list.

Apple's Preview is my favourite. It uses AI to allow you to copy text from images. And that's it.

This is my go to example of “ai features that are actually useful to me”. Ubiquitous OCR, and ubiquitous semantic search in photos.

Not a chat bot. Not an “ask ai” button, just those things.

Re: Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features

#280

Post by MarsIronPI »

nicoburns wrote: post #266
LexiMax wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla is certainly paddling upstream. Of all of the AI-integrated apps and sites that I'm subjected to, I can think of exactly two where it wasn't obnoxious and a pain in the neck to disable. Kagi. Zed. That's it, that's the list.

Apple's Preview is my favourite. It uses AI to allow you to copy text from images. And that's it.

That's not "AI" in the sense of LLMs, which is what the recent trend in AI complaints is about.
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