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.

Nicolas Silva Dec 18

@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 Dec 18

@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).

Nicolas Silva Dec 18

@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.

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.