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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"hey, you know that place that has a strong representation of people who don't like AI? They don't like AI."
---I think you find that's called "the majority of the world population on the web that doesn't have a vested interest of profiting from the very flawed impression LLM AI is good at what the tech bros are trying to use it for". Why do you think nobody wants
Microslop Co-Pilot? Why do you think people are moving from Windows to Linux? Why do you think that OpenAI has woeful conversion to paid customers? Why do you think people are moving from Firefox to Vivaldi, that have stated they won't put AI in their products.
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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 Make it an extension that I can ignore. Until then, I'm sticking with #Waterfox.
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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 it's like putting a bomb on my wheelchair and saying "don't worry, you can turn it off and will only be activated once you've interacted with the bomb"
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@fabio @firefoxwebdevs survey only shows a tiny fraction of the total userbase. why it should influencethe default?
@wojtek @firefoxwebdevs What do you think about the ethical concerns?
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@dadadan @ddelemeny @jaffathecake @froztbyte @fasterandworse Zen and Waterfox have committed to keeping AI out of the default experience. I'm hoping they add Servo as an alternative renderer once they are ready to start taking on bugs, ideally done in a way where we can switch between engines until Servo can fully take over.
@ddelemeny @jaffathecake @froztbyte @fasterandworse @reflex I'll try them today
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@jaffathecake @duke_of_germany @firefoxwebdevs i keep seeing this cop-out, but i have yet to see any polling from mozilla that says a majority of their users do want AI in their browser.
e.g. 14 days ago i see an informal poll in reddit with the same conclusion - https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1qhfvkw/interested_in_your_views_on_ai_in_firefox/
the thread inviting people to comment on the AI window a few weeks ago was the same thing, overwhelmingly negative - https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-firefox-way-shaping-what-s-next-together/td-p/109922
so if in community after community people are nearly unanimous about the pivot to AI, it seems like the burden is on firefox dev team to show that there is some silent majority that is loving it rather than insisting that every community is an echo chamber
@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 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
