Disabled. By. Default.
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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And as always... There is no actual "AI" being used here.
It's especially hilarious how translation programs, which have existed for decades, are suddenly considered "AI". Likewise with all of "AI".
It's also pretty funny how mad people get about translations, image classification, grouping... These are just like basic 101 programs with zero "AI" involved. Not much to get mad about.
Agreed that it's not really AI, but forcing a thing that doesn't really do what is promised and uses a lot of energy to do it might might be something to be irritated about.
None of what is considered 'AI' is actually AI, it's just a rebrand of machine learning tech that has been around for a few years now (and is genuinely useful in certain circumstances). It's all 'AI', only the generative AI is worth getting mad about.
That's all well and good that they give you the ability to turn it off. What's not changing though is that most of their focus will be on integrating AI which most people don't want. As a result the pace of other new features being tested/implemented will probably slow significantly.
Since "AI" doesn't exist, anything can be "AI".
For example, a translation program is not "AI".
But people do want features like translation regardless of how they're dishonestly marketed.
What's not changing though is that most of their focus will be on integrating AI which most people don't want.
I agree that AI chatbots are absolutely useless and have no place in a browser, but out of the three ML features in the screenshot, one is great for blind people, and another one is great for making the web more multilingual, so their usefulness is quite self-evident. Regarding ethics, at least for the last one it's using a local model, and was trained using open-source datasets.[1]
What makes so-called "AI" bad is not the amount of users that can benefit from it, but how useful it is to the people that do use the feature, which usually means having experts tailor machine learning unto a single purpose.
I personally use the translation feature at least once a week when looking at news article that are not in English, and now I'm using a lot to translate Japanese webpages to plan a holiday there, so I'm very happy that Mozilla has invested time abd collaborated with universities to make this feature, I wish other people were less flippant about it just because it has "AI" in its name.
[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/06/training-efficient-neural-network-models-for-firefox-translations/
It seems pretty clear to me that despite the ambiguity of the term AI, people are specifically railing against LLMs, not ML. It also seems clear to me that the new Firefox direction as announced by their CEO is to incorporate more LLM specifically into the browser.
Plus, even if you can turn it off, the feature is still in the code, needing updates, etc., even if you don't ever use it. Literal bloat.
Don't forget adding additional surface area for security vulnerabilities. Does the off switch prevent a zero day attack via that code? Of course not.
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Can someone please put a responsible adult in charge of that damned organization?
I'll just leave this here
It's FireFox but
- no telemetry/spying-on-you
- no AI
- uBlock Origin enabled
In other words, it's the open source browser Mozilla was always supposed to be.
Plus it's typically not more than 12 hrs behind any FF release.
Accept one of our free tanks ! They get 100 MPG and go 100 MPH over any terrain!
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I mean this was announced months ago. I remember I think it was about a month ago there was articles on here talking about it and I specifically went on both blue sky and Mastodon and roasted Firefox for making this decision.
Pepperidge Farms remembers when Firefox had a control like that to turn JavaScript on and off. The rest of you are supposed to have forgotten. Oops.
Javascript? Y'all aren't using text only browsers??!?! Sellouts. \s
There is still NoScript, which is arguably much better than that, since it offers more granular control
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Waterfox is a great alternative
Librewolf as well!
I mean, there is a single button to disable all AI
How about they just... not include the LLM bullshit in the first place? Just make a browser that strictly renders text and images according to W3C standards?
The only LLM here is the chatbot which nobody is being forced to use.
The fact that it's part of the browser at all is a problem. It shouldn't ever be in a browser. All it should be is a tool to strictly download and render W3C compliant text and images. Everything else should be a unique program - and no, Electron is not "unique" - it's just another copy of an awful browser.
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So I can use AI to group my tabs but I can't even group tabs in the first place on mobile? Epic prioritization
Nah, there is no "AI" grouping your tabs. It's just a grift.
They actually listened to the community, thats very nice.
No. Listening to the community would involve not polluting the browser with that shit in the first fucking place.
Translations? Tab grouping? Link previews?
These very simple features (which have nothing to do with imaginary "AI") are probably useful to lots of people.
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