Are those the features this kill switch removes or was there a deeper issue here?
"- Translations, which help you browse the web in your preferred language.
- Alt text in PDFs, which add accessibility descriptions to images in PDF pages.
- AI-enhanced tab grouping, which suggests related tabs and group names.
- Link previews, which show key points before you open a link.
- AI chatbot in the sidebar, which lets you use your chosen chatbot as you browse, including options like Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Le Chat Mistral."
And calling translation "AI" seems like deceitful retroactive rebranding. Why is machine translation suddenly "AI" now? It was never branded as such before. Is "AI" here just used to mean machine learning?
Option 1: Being on a tab, copying the URL of the tab, switching to the chatbot tab, pasting the URL and writing some instructions about what to do with that tab.
Option 2: Clicking on the "summarise page" button (whether from the sidebar or from right-click context menu), and having the browser pre-fill the prompt with the URL + the reader view version of the content on that page.
It's also why I really don't understand the need for a kill switch to begin with (other than pleasing annoying users), you don't need to wait for it. You can already get rid of the chatbot integration, there's a remove button already. It's also kind of annoyingly easy to misclick it, so they're just gonna remove it from those places and put it away in settings and those same annoying users will consider that a win.
Can you do the same on Windows? Is it tucked away in settings on macOS? Can you disable it on Google? Can you disable it anywhere else? Why are you the most vocal about the integration that is literally the easiest to turn off? You need two clicks to do it right now, you're gonna need at least three once this kill switch is in settings.
I would've been equally outraged about Windows becoming an "agentic OS" if I had been a Windows user. I don't like what Apple is doing to my phone and laptop, but at least they haven't promised to make the iPhone an "AI phone".
More than one thing can be bad at a time, and right now, this conversation is about Mozilla. We can have a conversation about other bad things some other time.
Again, look at my comment history. I'm not discussing AI-as-a-whole because as you've pointed out it's not the topic of this discussion. I'm discussing how trivial it is to turn off as opposed to literally anywhere else, and that's not even discussing the provider choice you don't get anywhere else.
There's a whole section in macOS/iOS settings titled "Apple Intelligence and Siri" with ChatGPT being the only option, and you're seemingly happy with that compromise. Yet here you are complaining about an integration that's even easier to turn off and allows you to pick between 5 providers. There is literally no way of triggering it that doesn't immediately show you the "turn it off" button as it is right now (as in before this update reaches me).
I also invite you to go to firefox.com right now and find me a single mention of AI, since you for some reason are imagining that it is being advertised as an "AI browser".
If you read my comment again, it might occur to you that no, I'm not happy with what Apple is doing to iOS and macOS:
I don't like what Apple is doing to my phone and laptop
Is mozilla.com OK? If so, here you go: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozillas-next...
Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software.
Firefox will remain our anchor.
It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.
This is the grudging half-measure.
Many would have preferred the updates to come with a form asking for on or off. It didn't, so they complained, and this was the answer.
* Mozilla has a track record of forcing unwanted changes on its users. What with Pocket, data collection and telemetry defaults, sponsored links throughout the UI, all the good stuff.
* The enduring users are more likely to want to revert any Mozilla default the moment it's introduced. (This is why Firefox has disproportionately many projects to un-Mozilla the thing: Arkenfox, BetterFox, LibreWolf, Waterfox...)
This is from the annoying (sure hope so!) sporadic Firefox user who was actually pleased by the news. Honestly, I saw it and though: wow, Mozilla giving the tiniest part of control back to the user, that's actually good! Short-lived as the excitement was, in these fading moments of Firefox I'd like to see more of this and less of the user-hostile thing please.
If it wasn't because I find myself using the AI-sidebar all the time I would probably have shared your opinion.
I guess it's just quite convenient to have it separated from the "regular" tabs and their history.
> I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar
I answered:
> If it wasn't because I find myself using the AI-sidebar all the time I would probably have shared your opinion.
Perhaps they did actually test it. Perhaps the majority is like me and find it useful.
> Then you can install an AI extension.
As mentioned I didn't know that I'd like this feature. I wouldn't have reached for such an extension.
It's obvious that you don't want this functionality - which you can now easily disable. What if the majority of the users actually like this? Or the majority either like it or are not the slightest bothered by it? Is it not a good addition overall then?
I use Claude code, so I understand that paradigm; I don't grok this though. Is it any different then going to a web page i.e. gemini.google.com and typing your query there?
Could this side bar have been a "search bar" at the top? Now that I say it out lou, adding them to the 'search providers' isn't a bad idea.
Generally speaking I am against this being shoved at us, but I find it as a useful tool in a limited number of areas.
I'm using linux, so there are no official desktop apps I could use instead. Had there been, perhaps I'd have had a different opinion about the AI sidebar.
If I were to draw a line, I'd say AI is anything with a transformer model powering it.
As exhausted by 'AI' as I am, translation is one of the things neural networks (and especially transformers) have been constantly improving SOTA on.
This is also perfectly in line with how the word AI was used until circa 2022. The weird thing is this narrowing of AI to only mean transformer or diffusion based neural network approaches.
And many translation approaches would even fall under that, so not sure how narrow you perceive the term to be now. How do you even define AI to include everything OpenAI calls AI but not include modern translation approaches
1: https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmo...
2: https://web.archive.org/web/20180507195240/https://ai.google...
show me a screenshot or link of one website or app using AI to mean machine translation from prior to 2022, AI has re-entered the lexicon covering anything from an algorithm to Sora. if anything its broadened, not narrowed in scope. me and you might mean transformer when we say AI, but the average speaker doesnt make that distinction. they call video sites "social media", so can you really be surprised they dont quite use AI correctly either?
Admittedly I don't think this uses the term AI, but "deep learning" and "artificial neural network" are indeed AI, and if you follow those links in the Wikipedia article you will indeed find them described as such.
2020: "DeepL Pro, released in March of 2018, is our latest product, now allowing subscribers to unlock the full capacity of DeepL’s AI translation technology" https://web.archive.org/web/20200429002724/https://www.deepl...
If you are asking about examples of AI being synonymous with machine translation: no, I don't think that was ever a thing. But I also don't think that was claimed
https://web.archive.org/web/20030526120130/http://www.ensta....
There are four courses:
- Expert Systems
- Machine Learning
- Artificial Evolution
- Cognition and ReasoningIt tokenized your input, fed it into a model, then ran the model. Literally the same thing as any other local AI software. Except the model was for translation.
Then there's also people, like me, who just want the browser to browse the web. I don't want link preview (annoying feature), Firefox isn't my PDF viewer, I don't have that many tabs that I need to group them and I don't use AI chatbots.
So having a single button to disable all of these features is pretty great. I still want a Firefox Lite, that just does browsing and allows me to add the few extension I want to whatever feature I believe is missing.
When i saw this i expected something more... integrated, but when i tried it with a local LLM (using koboldcpp) after enabling the option to show localhost as an option (it is hidden by default for some reason) all it did was to local whatever webpage was running on the localhost URL (even though koboldcpp also provides an OpenAI compatible endpoint, which is what i expected Firefox to use to provide its own UI). It seems to have some sort of heuristic to find the input box where you type in queries and autofills that with the page text or parts of it (if you have it selected) and that's all.
I kinda expected it instead to use the API endpoint, have its own chat UI, provide MCP tools for accessing and manipulating the page's content, let you create reusable prompts, etc. The current solution feels like something you'd throw together in a weekend at most.
The translation feature should be entirely offline and actually predates the AI everything push. I think it's a great feature.