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.
Y’know what’s even better than a Kill-switch?
Not including it at all.
And that’s why I’ve switched to Waterfox, which honestly, everyone should, show them that it’s not good enough, by switching browser.
Serious question: I looked into it but there are no deb packages for Waterfox. What’s the best way to advocate the devs or a distro to make one? Don’t tell me to do it myself since I lack both the time and skill.
They’ve a public git repo, I would say to raise an issue there, I’ll edit in the link in a sec, cause I forget the URL for it
Edit: that URL - https://github.com/BrowserWorks/waterfox/issues
Edit edit: you tried these? https://linuxcapable.com/how-to-install-waterfox-browser-on-debian-linux
Waterfox needs to get on f droid. Trying to never use Google play store, disabled it.
There’s Fennec, which is similar
Until google kills sideloading
Its really too bad we cant outlaw that. Why are we allowing 2 companies to control our mobile devices (apple, google)?
Another reason to just get rid of the stupid phone. My laptops work fine.
If Google kills sideloading, they will get sued out of the wazoo and won’t be able to get new apps since devs won’t be able to test their code.
Exactly my case as well. There are several Firefox-based browsers better than Firefox itself without the bullshit: Zen, Mercury, LibreWolf, Floorp… All are good options. But the dev behind Waterfox made a public commitment to keep this AI crap out of the browser. That sealed the deal for me.
Now if only I knew the best Android replacement for Firefox…
right now for android i recommend ironfox
Check out weblibre
Just don’t add the surveillance and spam features in the first place. 👍 Fuck off, Mozilla.
That is nice and all I rather not have AI baked into it at all. I switched to Watefox instead.
For now…
The frog must boil slowly.
Well they’re clearly not taking it all that seriously as it should be an Opt-IN feature, not an Opt-Out. They’re banking on a majority non tech savvy userbase to not even bother disabling it. fine, whatever, that’s on the user.
But it’s just more Firefox bloat that I have zero desire to deal with. If I wanted bloat in my browser I’d go use Vivaldi.
Firefox updates
New Features Popup
“NEW: AI enchanced features!”
“Enable?”Its not rocket science. Enable the AI crap to pay the heads of your stockholders andale it Opt-IN to keep users happy.
How about you ship with it off by default and users can choose to turn it on? No? That won’t serve your corporate goals, will it?
I’m already trying out LibreWolf on desktop and IronFox on mobile.
So far everything is working, probably another week of testing/using and then I’ll just uninstall Firefox.
Wasn’t Mozilla Corp. supposed to be an ethical enterprise? How’s this ethical at all in any respect? How companies like these got convinced that so-called AIs are something users overwhelmingly want to use? Why, by default, users would want to fuck the atmosphere and several markets, so they can have shitty tweaked images and probably bad answers to the most simple questions?
The reason the “kill-switch” wasn’t made clear originally was because it literally didn’t exist until users very vocally tool them where to shove their AI crap.
It was added on afterwards.
What? They’ve been talking about features that are now being called the “kill switch” for the better part of a year. Literally all they did that’s new was give it a dumb name.
Just to point out that per the discussion in the screenshot: Synthetic datasets are typically generated from models that were trained by poverty-pay Kenyans. This is basically ethics-washing.
That’s literally not true, though? They’ve spoke about it for ages.
I’ll believe it when I see it
They must’ve noticed people fleeing in droves to librewolf or floorp.
Those who can read articles, know that the new CEO said in the original interview that there will be the option to turn the AI features off.
Reading is useful, more people should learn to do it.
Floorp
And they wanted to accelerate it?
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.
Any Firefox forks that support HDR? I know ff doesn’t on its own but I also don’t really want to use chrome or edge. I’m open to suggestions.
Oh, it “wasn’t made clear” SUUURE. Addressing a blowback could be way better if you admitted a mistake instead of gaslighting your users. Not the way to earn back lost trust.
Will stick to Librewolf and Ungoogled Chromium but thanks anyway
