Firefox 148 introduces the promised AI kill switch for people who aren’t into LLMs

https://www.xda-developers.com/firefox-148-introduces-the-promised-ai-kill-switch-for-people-who-arent-into-llms/

24 Comments

  1. Cautious-Egg7200 on

    It is sad that they go here. I used Firefox for a decade until their terms update and all that.

  2. If Mozilla was consistent, they would rip the “AI” back out of Firefox and force it to be an add-on.

    Never mind, they only do that to functionality people actually want.

  3. tsarthedestroyer on

    It really speaks about the future of a technology when the most requested feature is to disable it lol

  4. The local translation is great and I much prefer it over sending all your text to google, but the other stuff seems pretty useless so far. But as long as it is local I think some of those features could become useful in the future.

  5. I do wonder what’s going to happen with AI as it seems like most people aren’t down with it. Yet companies are investing billions on it. Copilot is hated, ai in browsers is hated, ai in social media is hated. Yet it is being push so damn heavily.

  6. thesamenightmares on

    I’m sorry, I just can’t be convinced to use a browser that requires users to set dozens of toggles in a non-obvious configuration page that need to be collated into lists passed around privacy centric communities because the toggle names are so awkward, obscure, and change every few releases to make the browser even remotely not spy on you.

    A browser should browse the web. Nobody asked for this.

  7. Yeah, too late, I migrated away from Firefox when they made the “agentic browser” announcement. The damage is done.

  8. Shoutout to [JustTheBrowser.com](https://JustTheBrowser.com).

    It installs a device management profile for several browsers including Firefox that sets various policies on your behalf to disable all this crap.

    It makes even Edge a tolerable browser now, that says something about how abhorrently bloated web browsers have become.

  9. To go a step further, if you’re using a private DNS service such as NextDNS, you can (as I’ve done) add all of the major AI domains to a blocklist/denylist. That way, the APIs can’t be called in the background *just in case* this doesn’t fully disable everything.

  10. Firefox started adding the irritating AI stuff from v135. And thanks to the users on reddit complaining about it, I stopped updating Firefox and I am using v134 which is great.

  11. I’d like to see the numbers on people who use this to turn it off.

    Probably not the majority of people, since most people just accept the defaults for everything. But I suspect it’ll be a decent percentage

  12. ThouHastLostAn8th on

    I just updated and this is actually implemented really well. There’s now an “AI Controls” settings tab with the first option being “Block AI Enhancements” which disables everything but also turns the rest of the section into a Whitelist where you can one-by-one toggle on any specific AI feature you actually want (for example auto AI translations as you browse).

  13. Kinda annoys me a bit that it still defaults to “on/do not block” even though I had set all the .ml. features to False in about:config before..

  14. Unfortunately, most people that will use this have disabled all telemetry, so Mozilla will never know how often this is used. They will likely tell themselves that this switch is rarely used and remove it from a future release.

  15. They have the gall to say that a switch that defaults to “On” means the LLM features are “opt-in”.

    No, that’s the very definition of opt-out.