After the controversial news shared earlier this week by Mozilla’s new CEO that Firefox will evolve into “a modern AI browser,” the company now revealed it is working on an AI kill switch for the open-source web browser.
On Tuesday, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo was named the new CEO of Mozilla Corporation, the company behind the beloved Firefox web browser used by almost all GNU/Linux distributions as the default browser.
In his message as new CEO, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo stated that Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software while remaining the company’s anchor, and that Firefox will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.
What was not made clear is that Firefox will also ship with an AI kill switch that will let users completely disable all the AI features that are included in Firefox. Mozilla shared this important update earlier today to make it clear to everyone that Firefox will still be a trusted web browser.
What he wrote doesn’t seem ambiguous on this at all. But we’ll see.
So you agree that it will be baked in and impossible to actually turn off. Yep.
Otherwise, they would have made it an extension, right? If it’s optional, it needs to actually be optional … that’s what am extension is. That’s the whole point of them.
No
You can not push the button that says AI.
You can also hit the kill switch that completely removes that button.
That’s opt-in enough.
If it starts reading pages or doing things without you pushing a button, that’s an issue.
And therein lies the rub. The question is whether or not people trust that it won’t be doing that regardless of whether or not you hit the kill switch.
Good thing it’s open source and we’ll immediately see that they aren’t doing the thing you’re claiming.
No, you don’t have to trust anything. It’s open source, you can read the code.
And if you’re feeling paranoid, you can compile it yourself.