The saga continues! A Firefox developer has taken to social media to note there will be some sort of “kill switch” to completely remove AI features in the wake of the news about more AI features coming along with the new CEO.
Shouldn’t AI features be added as extensions and not in the main browser? This was the reason they killed live bookmarks, and I have to believe those were way easier to have as a feature. Shoehorning AI into the browser seems like it’s going to add a ton of bloat and support effort just to have “Now with AI!” on the tin.
I mean, ya as long as they keep to the “All AI features will also be opt-in.” promise, fine whatever. But, this seems like such an odd choice.
*until we silently remove it once the outrage dies down
I could definitely see it from other companies but I think Mozilla will keep it
It’s been roughly a decade since Firefox began shipping with DRM available. The kill switch is still there.
But I do ask that you don’t have the opposite of faith. Like, try not to be determined that we’re going to do the wrong thing here.
Well, they’ve been consistently doing the wrong thing for a long time now, so it’s not like it’s baseless.
I do feel bad for some of the developers in Firefox. I imagine lots of them, maybe even the one who answered here, joined because they believed in Mozilla or Firefox. And they might be trying to steer things back, but there’s only so much they can do against the direction of the company. And the company has been trying so hard to lose loyal Firefox users…
I hope we can (re)gain your trust here.
I’m afraid it’s too late for that. The only way I can imagine that happening is Firefox gets moved away from the Mozilla Corporation into a new thing that just focuses on making a decent privacy oriented web browser.
It sounds like they’re trying to be as transparent as possible while leaving lots of flexibility and freedom for users. I honestly don’t understand all the butthurt and hate.
You get a whole browser for Free (in both senses of the word) FFS. All this contempt is unjustified.
The butthurt and hate over AI sounds like a new thing but I think it’s basically your 2001: A space odyssey monolith monkey scene ⬛️🐒. It’s how we’ve reacted to every big sudden advance in technology that we weren’t quite ready for. There’s going to be a whole lot more leaping and screaming and throwing things. There will probably be some big fights over it and then some of the more sensible monkeys will just settle down, decide to just use the useful things and ignore the dumb things. There’s probably something much much worse than AI coming up anyway. Guarantee that there will be some people 30 years from now, trying to survive whatever it is and reminiscing about how we thought it was AI that was going to destroy us.
This isn’t about AI as a whole. The hatred is over AI being crammed in to a browser that was originally, proudly about privacy and user control. This move towards integrating AI has also had them removing the privacy angle, and admitting they’re now selling user data.
AI is a tool that can be great in the right place. Firefox is not the right place for many people, myself included, and I work in the field of AI.
I think the market will turn out to be the real kill-switch, possibly for Mozilla ss a whole.
