What a week they must be having at Mozilla. First Introducing new CEOThen, or practically in the same news report, they state that they will focus on making Firefox An AI-based browser, then they listen to user complaints, and we already have a new chapter in this saga, all in less than a week. Trying to calm things down, Mozilla developers have published New information on social media such as X and Mastodon.
The first thing, and the summary of that information, is that this future Firefox It will come with what is currently known as the "AI kill switch" (AI kill switch), although when it becomes available it will have a different name, if any. The idea is that all AI functions will be Opt-inIn other words, they will have to be activated manually, as they won't be enabled by default. Since there would be different AI functions and disabling them one by one would be complicated, the button they're talking about would deactivate them all at once.
Firefox will not turn on AI for you.
Once that switch is activated, the AI ​​features will no longer appear. Although Mozilla developers say this makes things perfectly clear, I have some questions, such as: what happens if I want to reactivate them? From what I understand, they mean that if we click that button, the browser won't bombard us with pop-ups and such, but it will still be possible to reactivate them from the settings. If that's not the case, don't worry, we'll investigate on LXA and explain how to get them back, in case anyone is interested.
The latest stable version of Firefox is v146And in response to some comments, it is mentioned that this "kill switch" It should appear in Firefox 148Currently, Firefox Nightly is already at that version, and at least I can't find anything resembling that switch. What does seem clear is that they're rushing to get to that AI-based Firefox, so much so that we should have an option to disable it available within two months.
Much remains to be seen in this story, starting with how that AI is implemented and whether it is truly useful.