Mastodawn

All AI features will also be opt-in. I think there are some grey areas in what 'opt-in' means to different people (e.g. is a new toolbar button opt-in?), but the kill switch will absolutely remove all that stuff, and never show it in future. That's unambiguous.

…

I'm not asking for faith in our direction - the thing I love about the Firefox community is how open, honest, and technical it is.

But I do ask that you don't have the opposite of faith. Like, try not to be determined that we're going to do the wrong thing here.

…

I hope we can (re)gain your trust here.

I don't personally work on this stuff, but I'll try hard to answer any questions you have.

And other than that, I'll get back in my lane, and stick to web platform stuff.

- Jake (@jaffathecake)

Just be glad this thread wasn't a long-ass video. It almost was.

Christophe Henry Dec 18

@firefoxwebdevs Yeah I think most people mainly deplore the hype and the resources spent on technological trends whose benefits are not always obvious. Before that, Mozilla advertised about FirefoxOS, before killing it to focus on IoT, before moving on to blockchain, then crypto, then NFT's and now IA. In more that 10 years, none of this projects produced anything useful for the users.

Christophe Henry Dec 18

@firefoxwebdevs Right now, Mozilla would probably be the first company to be diagnosed with ADHD. It really can't seem to focus and do something productive. The question was never "should Firefox have IA?". The question is "to do what?". Mozilla is communicating that IA is coming. Not announcing a new feature. TBH, it's worrying. IA should be an implementation detail, not the central point.

Christophe Henry Dec 18

@firefoxwebdevs It's like Mozilla is a car company and it's advertising a new car with leather in it. Ok, cool but what is it? A berline, a pickup, a SUV? Will I recharge with electricity or fuel? And Mozilla's answer is: "it has leather in it!"

It's… not great.

@christophehenry @firefoxwebdevs look, you have a point about communication. It's hard and Mozilla isn't top notch at it, to be polite. But also, Mozilla never worked on IOT, nor blockchain nor crypto stuff. There were vague talks of transitioning some of the Firefox OS resources into IOT exploration for a very brief time, which didn't end up happening so I'll give you that one. But where the hell hell is the rest coming from?

Andrew Wigglesworth

@nical

There have been some hysterical responses to the Mozilla AI announcements, with a number of people instantly swearing off Firefox forever.

Frankly, I'll leave it and see what actually happens. Firefox is too important for the things I do.

They can play around with so-called "AI" a bit, so long as it's truly private, free software and I can completely remove it if I wish (which I probably do).

@ecadre agreed. Let's put the pitchfork away until something bad actually happens. Right now most of the the AI in Firefox is things like tiny models that do local translation (rather than send the whole text to Google who would use their own neural networks to do it), automatic captioning of images that lack alt text, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and other small neural nets that take less energy to train than a run of our test suite. Not all machine learning is chat-freakin-gpt.

liquidlamp Dec 18

@nical @ecadre Why isnt there already a kills switch or opt in for these "tiny models?"

Having a dozen about:config settings be the only effective configuration option to disable Mozilla's current forays into AI doesnt exactly inspire trust about its future plans when the new CEOs first post is all about Firefox's AI future.

We've seen the direction the browser is already moving in with AI and user consent, so it should be no surprise that people are even more skeptical now.

@liquidlamp @ecadre that's not my area so all I can offer is the following perspective: would you like a kill witch for all features that begin with the letter "t" or that are implemented with functional programming? That's about the same level of rationality. These huge LLMs that gobble up energy like there is no tomorrow are not making the world a better place (and don't get me started on training on the work of artists without their consent) but a neural isn't necessarily power hungry
...

@liquidlamp @ecadre ... a neural net doesn't necessarily require scrapping the entire internet, it doesn't have to pretend to replace jobs. It's just an approach to implementing a wide range of different things. Perhaps what you want is a kill switch to disable features that lead to energy hungry uses of LLM (that would disable the search field) or a kill switch for disabling neural networks trained on dubious data sources (without the consent of authors), but firefox doesn't have those

@liquidlamp @ecadre if you don't want to use anything that has a neural net, then make sure to not take pictures with your phone, search something online or call anyone (on your phone, on zoom or other). So much basic signal processing uses neural networks these days without requiring nuclear power plants or using people's data. Mozilla's biggest mistake in my opinion is calling these things "AI".

liquidlamp Dec 18

@nical @ecadre so just dodges and snarky comments about "what even, like, is AI bro?"

This and farcical games about how "AI is actually opt in because you have to click the button we auto enabled and prominently added to the UI and can totally opt out of with obscure menu settings" makes it pretty clear Mozilla is just redefining common terms to avoid admitting it doesn't stand by its old core principlies of privacy and user consent.

abben Dec 18

@liquidlamp @nical @ecadre except for the part where they extensively responded to false claims about their use of like a half dozen technologies? Information literacy seems to have truly collapsed.

ww 🩶Dec 18

@liquidlamp @nical @ecadre that's a valid question though? at the end of the day, you're probably running firefox on a new-ish cpu with a neural net-based branch predictor. do you want an opt-out of that? it doesn't make any sense, unless your opposition to ai isn't based on any specific moral or practical issues with it.

Andrew Wigglesworth Dec 18

@nical

Yes, a good distinction. I am referring to the so-called "generative AI", Large Language Models (LLMs) etc. The chat bots, not the local software tricks that, for instance, help with exposure on your phone camera.

⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️Dec 18

@nical @liquidlamp @ecadre well, things like "suggest tab group name" shouldn't go anywhere near LLM anyway!

Damien de Lemeny Dec 18

@nical @liquidlamp @ecadre huge LLMs that gobble up energy like there's no tomorrow are front and center in all the AI hype response deployed by Mozilla, from the gpt4 alt-text to the sidebar chatbot integration to the shake to summarize feature to whatever is "AI Window" supposed to mean.
But yeah "what about perceptrons and Bayesian filters" you say ? Get outta here...

@ddelemeny @liquidlamp @ecadre that alt text generation model is 20MB and runs locally on a CPU. It is a great example of a thing that has the "AI" stamp but isn't an ecological and intellectual property disaster. Features like this one are so important for accessibility. If you want to blanket disable it along with unrelated things that happen to use a neural net under the hood, you do you, flip a few prefs. It's irational but you are in control.

@ddelemeny @liquidlamp @ecadre don't like the chat bot thing in the side bar? Me neither, don't use it. Don't like Google, me neither switch to another search engine. These things do have engagement so just let other users have what they want and configure your browser how you like it. I am pretty sure I won't like the AI window thing whatever that will be, I won't have to use it and the folks who do want to use it will be able to

yoasif Dec 18

@nical @ddelemeny @liquidlamp @ecadre Some of us don't like that Mozilla thinks its job is to make money (double bottom line) as the commons is robbed by the AI companies.

Where is Mozilla's moral clarity?

Nick Dec 19

@nical @ddelemeny @liquidlamp @ecadre I hope you realise the logical conclusion to this is, don't like Firefox? don't use it.

And that's exactly what I'll be doing if Firefox continues down this path.

soc Dec 19

@nhinck @nical @ddelemeny @liquidlamp @ecadre It's really amazing that Mozilla employees cannot help themselves to not act like complete dumbfucks in the comments for a single minute.

@nhinck @ddelemeny @liquidlamp @ecadre the message I am trying to to convey is that Firefox caters to many users. There are functionalities that are important to you and functionalities that are important to others. You have control over your own installation and are welcome to customize or disable features. You sound like you are demanding that your own preference be the only available option.

@nical @nhinck @liquidlamp @ecadre then you're not listening. I repeat, you have an extension platform. You are usually very much able to let the user customize their experience by installing the set of optional extra features they want as add-ons. In fact installing add-ons is for many the only way to have a decent browsing experience. So maybe don't ship the BS featureset as part of the default when you're fucking unable to have decent ad-blocking, script control and proxy config.

@nical @nhinck @liquidlamp @ecadre eat your own dogfood. Don't promote features that taint the social contract of a browser when you're unable to have actual empowering features as part of the baseline.

@ddelemeny @nhinck @liquidlamp @ecadre you are making a very bold claim about features being bullshit. The reality is that a lot of user research is done before putting time and effort into these things. There is hard data to back that a lot of people want even the most controversial features like chatbot in the side panel. That was a surprise to me, but that's how it is. It shouldn't have been a surprise in retrospect, looking at how popular chatgpt and whatnot have become.

@ddelemeny @nhinck @liquidlamp @ecadre I would like to impress on you the notion that the people working on these things are genuine and don't have an evil agenda. That would require a bit of trust which appears to be in short supply. In that case, I encourage you to wait until you get your hands on the real thing before you pass jugement (and make noise about it), and entertain the thought that some people do want some of the things you don't want.

@ddelemeny @nhinck @liquidlamp @ecadre I didn't address your point about making these features extensions and requiring users to go out of their way to find them. If you think than I am being dishonest about these features not being bullshit, then I don't think we can have a constructive discussion about this. There isn't a set of default features that matches everybody's preference. Yours (and mine) don't reflect the majority's in this case and that feels weird because it used to

@ddelemeny @nhinck @liquidlamp @ecadre circling back to the 20MB local model that powers the alt text generation, I genuinely think that it is a good, empowering, privacy respecting accessibility feature. I hate chatgpt but I want more of these. It is disheartening that the two gets put in the same "AI" bag because they have fundamentally different impacts on the world at every level. Do you disagree with this?

Nick Dec 19

@nical @ddelemeny @liquidlamp @ecadre You keep coming back to this as if it absolves everything else you are pursuing but it's irrelevant to the direction Firefox is heading.

How much money did Firefox take from perplexity to make it a part of search? What personal data is Firefox selling?

So the question will always be how much money will it take for Firefox to throw it's principles under the bus.

So until you start acting ethically consistently, you will garner no trust.

@nical @nhinck @liquidlamp @ecadre

https://famichiki.jp/@RachelThornSub/115612889599922384

It isn't that clear cut. Small models will produce garbage at an alarming rate when alt-text requires context and intent to actually pretend to improve accessibility. "a picture of 3 people in front of a candle" doesn't convey "a picture of my late grandmother's last birthday". The other features have potentially worse implications.

@nical @nhinck @liquidlamp @ecadre

I worry that Mozilla is now pushing blackbox features that make editorial changes to content the browser's mission has always been to distribute and represent faithfully and under the user's control.
And on the other hand, you know... users DO have to go out of their way to block ads, scripts and antipatterns on the web.

So yeah, I disagree with this interpretation and I worry that the stance is "we'll worry about footguns when we see a hole in the boot".

@ddelemeny @nhinck @liquidlamp @ecadre you don't have to take my word for it but I encourage you to talk about the candle example with a visually impaired person. I did, and the person was much happier with a vague description than zero indication of what is in the image. The idea is not to make editorial change, it's to fill gaps when people didn't bother to add alt text

@ddelemeny @nhinck @liquidlamp @ecadre by the way worrying is absolutely normal. It's good to approach these things with a good dose of scepticism but also try to give folks the benefit of the doubt if you don't have evidence that they are trying to be bad.
Neural networks are an engineer's nightmare. It's hard to understand, hard to test, if I could implement the same functionality with a good old for loop, I would

@nical @nhinck @liquidlamp @ecadre yeah, not quite sure that it's normal to worry about what the makers of a software that clocks a tremendous of hours of daily usage think their mission and their product are. I urge you to question your nonchalance here. This doesn't look good.

@nical @nhinck @liquidlamp @ecadre another point: this, if it is in any way useful, should be a separate software, available for other projects to integrate and benefit from. The collaborative way to do open source software, not the bloated product management one.

@ddelemeny @nhinck @liquidlamp @ecadre I think that it is, you can grab the model on huggingface and run it with a neural network inference library like llamacpp or onnx, et voilà. The rest is only integration. It would be useful in an image viewer in my opinion.
At this point you sound a little like you want to prove that Mozilla did something bad without knowing what

@nical @nhinck @liquidlamp @ecadre yeah, have the same line of idea about adblockers I'll take you seriously

@nical @nhinck @liquidlamp @ecadre Also note that you can return the favor of not considering that all detractors are grumpy elitists users angry at the idea of change. People I see putting my takes in favorites are quite diverse, and a huge part are also dedicated makers of the web. We're the rest of the team, your users are our users too, please listen!

@ddelemeny @nhinck @liquidlamp @ecadre absolutely. Look, all I want is to convey nuance in a online discourse that hasn't had much of it (well, I got annoyed by someone claiming that Mozilla was into NFTs and then things slipped). Nuance is everywhere on all sides of the discussion. I personally felt old, grumpy and adverse to change when I saw the rise of LLMs in people's everyday life. I don't mean to imply that everyone comes from the same place for sure.

@nical @nhinck @liquidlamp @ecadre not evil, shortsighted, and very quick to dismiss concerns that at least took the other players a proper layoff of their ethical boards.

@nical @nhinck @liquidlamp @ecadre also, pet peeve of mine about "being evil", picking any of your C-suite in the Forbes top 50 anything should be considered a capital sin. I believe they're molded as destroyers of community and empowerment, but I guess you think it's "pretty normal" too.

@ddelemeny @nhinck @liquidlamp @ecadre hey I'm not on a quest to convince the internet that Mozilla is perfect. I reacted to something I disagreed with and must have gotten carried away because folks are coming at me with their list of Firefox grievances. I definitely share your concern about the CEO's background (I also wasn't happy about learning about his promotion in the news rather than internally), and the company for sure has its fair share of actual problems

@nical @nhinck @liquidlamp @ecadre there's also hard data to back the claim that LLMs are unreliable and chronically misrepresent information, so promoting features that introduce black box tampering of the content that the browser is supposed to represent faithfully tends to register as BS.

Nick Dec 19

@nical @ddelemeny @liquidlamp @ecadre Firefox is certainly free to do whatever it wants.

If Firefox wants to partner with corporations that steal wholesale, please go ahead.

I don't understand why you are acting so incredulous over the fact that these decisions have consequences.

draeath Dec 18

@nical @liquidlamp @ecadre somewhere that boolean is being checked to enable a code path.

It shouldn't be that hard tweak that so two bools are checked, the "master" AI enable and the feature-specific one.

I know enough rust so if it really isn't that simple, pointing me to where that's actually implemented so I can eat my crow would be welcomed.

This feels more like a "we didn't think it would be so controversial so we didn't bother yet." (I'd say "read the room next time first")

Kilgore Trout Dec 21

@[email protected]

training on the work of artists without their consent

No artist would consent, if given the option.
@liquidlamp @ecadre

ilinamorato Dec 18

@liquidlamp Those tiny models were present long before the current AI hype cycle. They're the same things that on-device translation has been using for a decade or more; the current iteration started development in 2019, based on a model from 2017 (five years before ChatGPT). IMO we don't need a kill switch for it for the same reason we don't need a kill switch for the bookmarks toolbar; if you don't want that, you just turn it off or ignore it.

deutrino Dec 18

@nical @ecadre I'll be switching away from Firefox because I was already on the fence given my perception of poor management for at least a couple years now, and if I'm going to contribute any sort of energy to a project, even if it's only bug reports and recommendations to friends, I won't be contributing it to one where the designated leader reifies a pivot to generative AI as the most important development project, and drops hints that banning adblockers was on the table. no thanks. I'm out.

Val Packett 🧉Dec 18

@nical @ecadre #Firefox Translate is great.

Image captioning is great, as long as it's as clear it could be wrong as with translate.

Automatic tab groups are in theory fine and okay for ppl who want that, but there's been a lot of reports of big CPU usage% from it (odd tbh).

Link preview summaries are very much "nobody asked for this, stop dumbing everything down to summary slop, reading is good actually" >_<

Sidebar button for the big cloud chatbots is the one that feels the most offensive. Yes, it's not invasive and it would be great for Firefox to diversify its funding, but these big "AI" companies are so bad that one would hope an explicitly principled and "on our side" foundation could take a stand against them rather than effectively building promotions for them…

https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/14/mozillas-firefox-adds-perplexitys-ai-answer-engine-as-a-new-search-option/

yoasif Dec 18

@nical @ecadre Firefox is already partnered with Perplexity, who is a content pirate.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/new-york-times-sues-perplexity-ai-infringing-copyright-works-2025-12-05/

Something bad has already happened.

@yoasif @nical @ecadre You mean adding Perplexity as an optional search engine? What's the big deal? They already have google and bing, of which google is the default. Both companies are TERRIBLE. Especially Microsoft that supports the genocide in Gaza. Perplexity is cute by comparision. But none of them are integral to the browser. It's up to the user what search engine they want to use.

@Azarilh @nical @ecadre If nothing matters why are you talking about genocide?

@yoasif I didn't say nothing matters. I am just confused at why adding Perplexity as a choice is that such a big deal.

@Azarilh Because that makes Mozilla complicit. It is a new partner too, so it's not like it was grandfathered in like their Google search deal.

@yoasif Partnered? To me it sounds like they simply added the option like any other search engine. Am i missing something?

@Azarilh Mozilla gets paid to put search engines there, friend.

@yoasif I am aware of that. This sort of thing is inevitable when you got a for-profit organisation. Most people dislike that Google is the default but i cannot blame them for doing that. Their current business model is incompatible with donations and i don't know if it's possible at this point. I'd rather they get paid to add search engines than be paid by adding ads like any other major browser.

@Azarilh So you understand that they are partnered.

PS they show ads too: https://www.admarketplace.com/news/mozilla-expands-partnership-with-admarketplace-on-the-journey-to-protect-consumer-privacy-while-delivering-value-to-advertisers

Mozilla Expands Partnership with adMarketplace on the Journey to Protect Consumer Privacy While Delivering Value to Advertisers

The partnership names adMarketplace as Mozilla’s preferred partner to sell its privacy-preserving homepage tiles while expanding the relationship into additional surfaces.

@yoasif Yes, i am aware of that too. I am not completely against ads, if they are not in the way and don't violate privacy. Although i don't trust it as of today. If those ads actually truly respect people's privacy, and they replace the ads we see on the Internet, that would be better for everyone. Especially all those people that don't block ads.

@Azarilh I think ads are preferable to wholesale copyright theft, too.

KielKontrovers Blog Dec 18

@ecadre @nical actually the alarm for me was as AI features with a sidebar was activated and i was pressured to choose my AI. The announcement just added to my fears and thought "shit i have to switch to another browser" . I will never go back. On my chromebook i seem to be stuck with chrome, because every other browser does not work, but on all other devices i have other than chrome and FF. The damage is done.

Mehrad

Dec 18

@ecadre
@nical
@firefoxwebdevs

To me this is not about AI part. It's about jumping wagons again without clear plan or future. @christophehenry put it best: "to do what?"

Firefox crossed multiple lines in the past especially on the management front (e.g., extravaganza salaries, mass layoffs,...) but this time around, I think perhaps it I should acknowledge my Stockholm Syndrome and jump off this sinking ship. It might not sink, but it for sure doesn't deserve my attention and trust.

1/2

@ecadre
@nical
@firefoxwebdevs

Mehrad

Dec 18

Despite lack of essential features (e.g., changing keyboard shortcuts), relatively slow speed, polluting home folder, outdated UI design (until few years back), community stayed behind #Mozilla, and more specially #Firefox. Look where 1.5 decades of trust and support have got us to. Don't answer me, just be honest with yourself. After 15 years of being in the community, I cannot recall a single instance that user feedback was taken into account.

2/2

@[email protected]
@nical @firefoxwebdevs

Mehrad

Dec 18

I just stumbled upon @ThePrimeagen on this very topic:

https://youtu.be/3tHOhMjB498?si=I1zd_62UEIRcILeH

The Firefox Situation

YouTube