What's really funny about Firefox's new AI chatbot feature is you're probably *only* going to find out about it if it's by someone outraged about it on social media¹, because Mozilla snuck it in like a thief in the night.

¹ Sorry about that, by the way.

@mcc ugh again? how to get rid? 

@robbo At the moment, your options for killing the Firefox chatbot are:

- Go to about:config in firefox. Search for browser.ml.chat.enabled . switch it to FALSE.

or

- Switch to LibreWolf. You may want to turn off "Resist Fingerprinting", which breaks things like time zones and "dark mode".

or

- Switch to Waterfox. This is most similar to basic Firefox but I personally am not sure if I trust Waterfox yet (for example, do I trust them to rapidly deliver security bugfixes)

@mcc @robbo firefox chatbot?!??!?!? when did this get added into firefox?!

@nelson @robbo As far as I know, yesterday.

There was a precursor feature but it was under "labs" and you had to go specifically turn it on.

@mcc @robbo everything i love gets enshittified......
@nelson @robbo March 4. I've had it hiding in my browser for two weeks I guess. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/136.0/releasenotes/
Firefox 136.0, See All New Features, Updates and Fixes

Mozilla
I told you so: Mozilla working with Facebook to weaken Firefox’ privacy and anti-tracking features – OSnews