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Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux (9to5linux.com)
submitted 8 months ago* by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 98 points 8 months ago* (21 children)

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.

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  • [–] 28 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Right right. If they had real innovation, they would have defined it clearly as you suggested. But they didn't, so they don't. It's all snake oil, again, because that's the entire AI industry.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago

    The term snake oil is actually especially fitting for this, due to its origins.

    In Britain in the 1700s there was a somewhat common recommendation for using rattlesnake oil from the fat of the snake for skin diseases/rheumatism. The efficacy is debated but it's got some amount of potential for change (if not help).

    This turned into people in the US selling mineral oil as "snake oil" as a total panacea. So a product that actually could do stuff being used as the poster child for a completely useless product that can solve every issue ever, buy as much as you can today.

    Snake oil indeed.

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  • [–] 16 points 8 months ago* (7 children)

    You reminded me that one use for AI I'd really like is removing all photos of Trump, Musk and Putin from my screen. Another is filtering the twenty reposts of every event in US politics and the incessant whining about prices. Alas, I need these in phone apps more than the browser.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    You don’t need LLMs for that. An iPhone is plenty powerful enough for image recognition and text classification.

    That’s sorta the funny thing about AI. There’s tons of potential, but it’s just unimplemented. Even on PC, you pretty much have to have some Nvidia GPU and fight pip setting up python repos to get anything working.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    That stuff is commonly included in the AI umbrella.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Eh, I draw a distinction between oldschool visual recognition and matching some keywords, versus full-blown LLMs. I used 'AI' to mean the latter in my comment above, as intended by the post itself. I also have doubts about the effectiveness of the older approaches in regard to the uses that I mentioned.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    I’d like a AI feature that bounces back on any ads or intrusive crap including propaganda. But AI is being pushed by the same people so if it happens it won’t be genuine and it will just evolve to give the illusion of not being pushed.

    FF, any browser, any social media platform , I can select ‘I don’t wanna see this’ or go adjust settings to disable but nah, an update later and it’s back, or it comes back under another form.

    It’s still manipulation. And I can’t trust it to manipulate ever.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    you don't even need AI for that and can do it on your phone. Piefeed for example asks you when initially setting up an account "Hey do you want to see stuff about Trump, Musk, etc? no? cool we won't show you that" and that's it. works great.

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago (7 children)
    • AI chatbot in sidebar (you can choose which chatbot you want, similar to how you choose default search engine)
    • Shake to summarize page (on mobile)
    • AI Window (separate from Normal and Private window, upcoming). Apparently it lets you chat with an AI agent to power-browse the internet.
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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    The last feature is the mildly interesting one, but in my experience just not useful enough to do much, even on specific browsing finetunes or augmented APIs.

    I guess shake to summarize is mildly interesting, but not really? I simply can’t trust it. And I can just paste the (much more concise) relevant text into a chat window and get a much better answer.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    I agree. They're quite vague about what the feature would actually do, and I have a hard time believing that I would use it.

    I think it would probably be wiser spending time and effort on other things (like a really good built-in Dark mode or better memory management), but I don't fault them for experimenting. Worst case scenario they make something that sucks and either remove it later, or you can fork it off.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Does anyone even talk about what the “AI features” are?

    The one I use the most is their offline translation. I don't have to send my data to Google Translate.

    My sister (blind) uses the new screen reader stuff a lot.

    Mozilla is certainly adding good AI features, but the chatbot integration isn't something I have much use for.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    Translation and screen reader have been a solved thing for a while, no “AI” browser necessary. I’m all for nice features, but bolting in a chat bot that phones home with activity data ain’t one of them.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Could I, liked recolor webpages? Automate ublock filters? Detect SEO/AI slop?

    This is an excellent point: there are potential features I wouldn't mind trying out. But of course those features aren't available, because aren't the features that Mozilla leadership's buddies in tech are pushing, and often work against what big tech wants.

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