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.
Not implementing any AI is stupid.
I for one appreciate having offline, private language translation. Sending it to a Google Translate server is a privacy nightmare.
My sister appreciates the better screen-reader functionality.
Plenty of people do want AI features.
Translation is already a part of Firefox and I don’t see too many have complained about this. It is also completely offline, AFAIK. What people are afraid, myself included is agentic AI capable of autonomous web browsing. That is a privacy and security nightmare, as is already demonstrated by openai’s browser, which was exploited the first day it was launched. Beyond translation, I personally am not interested in any other AI features. In fact, I don’t use the translation feature more than a few times a year.