After a seemingly endless stream of tone deaf news from Mozilla, we’ve finally got some good news for Firefox users. As the company’s been hinting at for a while on social media now, they’ve added an “AI” kill switch to the latest Firefox nightly release, as well as a set of toggles to disable specific “AI” features.
You can choose to use some of these and not others. If you don’t want to use AI features from Firefox at all, you can turn on the Block AI enhancements toggle. When it’s toggled on, you won’t see pop-ups or reminders to use existing or upcoming AI features.
Once you set your AI preferences in Firefox, they stay in place across updates. You can also change them whenever you want.
↫ Ajit Varma at the Mozilla blog
I’m particularly enamoured with the specific mention that the setting will remain unaffected by updates. It’s incredibly sad that Mozilla even has to mention this, but they have nobody to blame but themselves for that one. None of this is enough to draw me away from Librewolf and back to Firefox, but at least it gives those of us who prefer to keep using Firefox the option to disable all of this “AI” nonsense. Also, there’s no Librewolf for POWER9, so I have to use Firefox somewhere.
It’s unlikely Chrome or Safari will get such clear “AI” kill switches, so it might become a reason for some to switch to Firefox from Chrome or Safari.
I’m glad they are finally stepping up and doing what they promised, though ideally they should ship a browser completely free of any “AI” nonsense. Actually they do, but only for mobile: Firefox Focus is about 99% of what most Firefox users need in a reliable, safe, private, and performant browser, but they won’t release it for desktop OSes and they won’t tweak it for use as one’s main browser on mobile, rather they position it as “private tab mode plus”.
Same, OpenBSD does not have a port for Librewolf, but their Firefox and Firefox-ESR ports are already most of the way there. It also helps that Firefox on OpenBSD is properly sandboxed with pledge(2) and unveil(2).
So its not off by default, and can be turned on magically by next update! I really dont trust these liars anymore!
If the biggest selling-point of what you’re trying to push is the off switch… Maybe that isn’t what you should be trying to push.