AI Controls (formerly 'kill switch') are landing in today's Firefox Nightly, and will land with Firefox 148 later this month.
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@jonny@neuromatch.social @jaffathecake@mastodon.social @duke_of_germany@mastodon.gamedev.place @firefoxwebdevs@mastodon.social And I mean it's not like this feature request was hugely popular or anything
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/no-ai-in-the-browser/td-p/51616@jonny@neuromatch.social @jaffathecake@mastodon.social @duke_of_germany@mastodon.gamedev.place @firefoxwebdevs@mastodon.social If there's any evidence of a "silent majority who loooooove LLM integration", you'd think it would pop up as something like, I dunno, high sales for copilot during the microsoft earnings call or some such
https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/02/microsoft_ai_spend_copilot/
and yetOnly 3.3 percent of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 users who touch Copilot Chat actually pay for it...
... What Microsoft did not articulate is how small that paid footprint looks against the vast base of Microsoft 365 users experimenting with Copilot Chat for free...
here's microsoft 'finessing' the copilot story to make the billions they've dumped not sound like a huge loss that people do not find compelling -
@ddelemeny @froztbyte how do you feel about a11y tooling that analyses images to describe them? Therefore providing people with visibility into things they otherwise wouldn't have.
That also is generating content in a format that was never on the web. Nobody had the opportunity to make sure it's right and nobody ever will.
@jaffathecake @ddelemeny @froztbyte It's worth noting that when it comes to altbot here on fedi, a lot of vision-impaired people have the opinion that it's not very useful
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@thehighseas@ioc.exchange @jaffathecake @duke_of_germany @firefoxwebdevs Jake is furiously throwing up anything he can to distract from the question of AI in Firefox. That is literally the job he is paid to be here to do, yes.
@davidgerard @thehighseas@ioc.exchange @jaffathecake @duke_of_germany @firefoxwebdevs Yeah, we've seen this before. One person phrases their objection in terms that can easily be misunderstood for a pithy answer, he zeroes in on them and ignores EVERYONE else.
(Hey Jake, here's an easy one for you to latch on to by pointing out that you don't ignore LITERALLY everyone else!)
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Stop portraying Mastodon users as the "anti-AI crazies".
Instead, ask yourself: "What is the relation between Mastodon users & Firefox?"
The answer:
An overwhelming number of Mastodon users used to be your champions.
They are tech people who used to recommend Firefox to the normies in their life. A crowd of mini-influencers, recommending your product.
And I don't understand why you go out of your way to alienate exactly these people.
@duke_of_germany @jonny @jaffathecake @firefoxwebdevs @davidgerard I just think we on Mastodon have a low tolerance for bullshit, which is ‘AI features nobody asked for’ in a nutshell.
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@fennix to be clear, I'm not playing this off as a mastodon thing. I mean… if my intent was to ignore people here, I've done a pretty bad job of that given I've engaged with people most of today.
My point was that if you run a poll about AI preference on Mastodon, it's pretty obvious what the outcome will be. That doesn't mean it isn't valid, it just means that putting effort into discovering what's already discovered is a misuse of time.
@jaffathecake
I'm not sure you've actually "engaged" in any meaningful sense of the word. Certainly you've been conversing but it's not as though there's been concrete answers to questions. Upthread you've mostly avoided actually answering points and even here feigning confusion. Or, if it's not feigning, it paints a bleak picture of how prepared you are to interact with the Firefox userbase about this topic.In case you aren't familiar, this might help:
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/firefox-labs/share-your-feedback-on-the-ai-services-experiment-in-nightly/td-p/60519The overwhelming response to this feature was:
- Don't do it.
- If you have to do it, keep it off by default.
- If it can't be off by default make it an extension or put it in another build.
- Dear god why won't you people listen?
Engagement would look like you're acting upon those concerns, or answering the direct questions you were presented with.
It doesn't look like picking sidequest arguments and deflecting from the actual poignant questions that were posed to you -- that's damage control, not engagement. -
@duke_of_germany @jonny @firefoxwebdevs @davidgerard mate you directly said I was portraying people here as crazies. I see why you'd want to try and wriggle out of that, but your message is right there.
@jaffathecake
I’d work on that reading comprehension before you make a complete fool of yourself, “mate”.
@duke_of_germany @jonny @firefoxwebdevs @davidgerard -
AI Controls (formerly 'kill switch') are landing in today's Firefox Nightly, and will land with Firefox 148 later this month.
For the full details, see the Firefox blog https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/ai-controls/
@firefoxwebdevs Thank you for the option. But why can't I trust that you won't reactivate this option behind my back after a few updates?
Oh, I know... That's maybe because you've already abused this mechanism in the past with pushing 'sponsored suggestions' on my search bar, homepage, search engines, etc...
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Stop portraying Mastodon users as the "anti-AI crazies".
Instead, ask yourself: "What is the relation between Mastodon users & Firefox?"
The answer:
An overwhelming number of Mastodon users used to be your champions.
They are tech people who used to recommend Firefox to the normies in their life. A crowd of mini-influencers, recommending your product.
And I don't understand why you go out of your way to alienate exactly these people.
@duke_of_germany @kboyd @jonny @jaffathecake @firefoxwebdevs @davidgerard I use Firefox for years and years on my Macs. It was actually the incompatibilities with certain websites that drove me back to Safari (of all things). But all this AI nonsense is definitely not going to bring me back to Firefox.
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@giacomo the features don't do anything until you interact with them (like in this screenshot).
At this point, a local model is downloaded, and the processing is done entirely on device, preserving privacy.
Same goes for translation. It happens on device whereas most other browsers send the text off-device.
@firefoxwebdevs @giacomo What about accidental clicks? Fuck you and your browser.
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AI Controls (formerly 'kill switch') are landing in today's Firefox Nightly, and will land with Firefox 148 later this month.
For the full details, see the Firefox blog https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/ai-controls/
@firefoxwebdevs just take it all out and make them browser extensions, like they should be
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Stop portraying Mastodon users as the "anti-AI crazies".
Instead, ask yourself: "What is the relation between Mastodon users & Firefox?"
The answer:
An overwhelming number of Mastodon users used to be your champions.
They are tech people who used to recommend Firefox to the normies in their life. A crowd of mini-influencers, recommending your product.
And I don't understand why you go out of your way to alienate exactly these people.
@duke_of_germany @jonny @jaffathecake @firefoxwebdevs @davidgerard I've always thought of Firefox as the standard default browser (I'm a Linux user, and Firefox is *the* browser installed on Debian (and Ubuntu I believe) out of the box). I always used to assume that it was the default most used browser on Windows as well, but apparently I'm wrong on that. I've not thought about other browsers in over a decade.
Until recently, of course, and I'm not seeing any other option really.
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AI Controls (formerly 'kill switch') are landing in today's Firefox Nightly, and will land with Firefox 148 later this month.
For the full details, see the Firefox blog https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/ai-controls/
@firefoxwebdevs Would it be possible to have a separate build of Firefox containing just the browser?
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@jaffathecake @reflex @froztbyte @ddelemeny allll the world is misinterpreting you SO BADLY. How EVER could that have come to pass?
sheesh.
@spz @jaffathecake relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1984/
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@firefoxwebdevs Thank you for the option. But why can't I trust that you won't reactivate this option behind my back after a few updates?
Oh, I know... That's maybe because you've already abused this mechanism in the past with pushing 'sponsored suggestions' on my search bar, homepage, search engines, etc...
@davidrevoy @firefoxwebdevs i would trust the person writing the mastodon posts here to tell you. I dont know him personally, but he acts very different than mozilla management.
It is @jaffathecake -
@ada would you feel comfortable filing a bug report about this on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/home?
@firefoxwebdevs
Not quite, sorry.
I rolled back to older version already. -
@allwelikeworms@mastodon.social atleast they did something. Get a life. Touch some grass and call some friends. They miss you
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@wojtek
@wariat @fabio @firefoxwebdevs Because it exposes users to a wide variety of technical and cognitive hazards, has a significant labor rights and ecological impact, is changing the structure of public discourse in ways that are broadly incompatible with democracy, and represents a fundamental change in what the piece of software the users are installing does, ontologically. Why do you think it's justified forcing that change on anyone who doesn't notice it's there or understand why they might not want it?@dymaxion @wariat @fabio @firefoxwebdevs considering all that - should we just ban the browser altogether?
Let's break it down:
- cognitive and technical hazzards: browser allow opening any "social"-network -- check
- public discourse -- as above
- having AI as a feature doesn't change what the software does as noone from mozilla puts a gun to user head to click on "summarise the page" button -- this is still on the user
EDIT: also - should we also force Mozilla/Firefox to blacklist all "AI" websites if we are at it? Because if we don't then all those points that you mentioned can still be valid as user can just open the webpage with selected AI service…
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@wojtek @firefoxwebdevs What do you think about the ethical concerns?
@nikclayton @firefoxwebdevs of the AI? I would dance on the bonfire on bigtech
alas -- I do find certain uses of LLMs (not necesarily what altman is doing) in general having some uses… that's all.
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@firefoxwebdevs @sarah maybe start by talking to your CEO:
> Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozillas-next-chapter-anthony-enzor-demeo-new-ceo/This vision is a huge reason why people are not convinced. That, and how getting Firefox to implement these controls at long last felt like pulling teeth.
Weird yet predictable that @firefoxwebdevs replies all over the place playing stupid word games and pithy semantics, but leaves this unreplied to.
I'm starting to think, maybe, this guy isn't interested in honest discussion!
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Weird yet predictable that @firefoxwebdevs replies all over the place playing stupid word games and pithy semantics, but leaves this unreplied to.
I'm starting to think, maybe, this guy isn't interested in honest discussion!
@TheEntity @sarah @firefoxwebdevs here's another such "loose end":
https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/116003478630992874
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