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.
Are you then a part of a vocal majority? Have you personally asked or been asked by Mozilla about AI features? What features are you exactly missing? See, I'm not against AI, but I am against needless, brainless hype following AI. I use AI, almost daily. But I'm not missing any of the features in the browser. Hell, most of the time, I'm using chatgpt from the browser. That's all I need and dont exactly have an idea what more I would need? OCR a page? Extract an image? That all could fit in an extension, which I claim almost no one would use. What does AI browser even mean? I don't speak for everyone but it doesn't mean I don't have at least an intuition that these are all empty words and that almost no one has asked for an "AI browser". And of those that did, I'm not sure they know what they mean by that, other than general curiosity about what an AI browser might look like, likely directly influenced by the hype, themselves.