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.
This is good enough for me. If they have an on boarding step/popup to say “Try our AI crap” and I have an option to say “No and don’t ever bother me about this again”, then it’s fine.
You don’t actually believe that “don’t ever bother me about this again” is gonna be in the realm.of possibilities, do you? They’ll accidentally “forget” your choice on every second update and pester you again. Fuck mozilla.
What browser do you use?
I’m getting a bit tired of website incompatibility with Firefox but when the alternative is Chrome, I’m sticking with FF.
can you give an example of a website that doesn’t work in FF? I’ve been an exclusive FF user for many years (maybe at least 8), and I can’t remember ever encountering a compatibility issue. The worst is when a website lies about needing chrome, but if you change the useragent it works perfectly.
Recently I switched to LibreWolf for better privacy, and that one has a lot of features disabled to combat fingerprinting. This does break a lot of sites, but ut’s easy to disable that in settings.
I am still stuck with Mozilla, but I hate the organisation nonetheless. :( It sucks that the web standards have been made so complicated (extensive) that it takes a major organisation to implement them in a browser.
On the phone I use DDG browser, but not happy with it because ublock origin isn’t available.
On computer I am frustrated that debian repos do not yet have a privacy friendly fork, such as (from what I hear) waterfox or LibreWolf.
I am with you that Chrome-derivates are not an alternative at all.