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.
I think it's quite clear there's ambiguity (hence this discussion). How would you define opt in? Should a user not even see the button for an opt in feature?
I think the big defining question is what will the AI features that they will implement do exactly and how will they run. If it's something that runs in the background (even as unintrusive as the summaries on a search engine like DDG), then it's opt out by default as it's constantly running whether you want it to or not. If it specifically and exclusively runs when you hit the button to activate it and doesn't run at any other time, then I'd say it's unequivocally opt in. And regardless of what a company says that their software will do, at this point I won't believe it until somebody has done a full teardown and discerned what exactly it does behind the scenes. I've seen enough nonsense like the Epic Games Store accessing your browser history and recording keyboard inputs or whatever the other absurd incident was.
Nah, I think it should be optional. Some AI features may even be useful — like an AI script to get rid of AI slop or something, idk.
In my opinion there is no ambiguity at all.
Opt-in means that the feature is disabled by default and until the user enables it. This is NOT what Firefox will be doing.
Opt-out means that the feature is enabled by default and can be disabled by the user. This is what Firefox will be doing.
Whether the user actually uses or not the feature is not a factor in determining if it is opt-in or opt-out.
So if you never press the AI button, it's never enabled. It is opt-in in the strictest semantic sense.
What you say here applies for things that run automatically, like the anonymous usage reports, which is opt out, not for things you activate yourself.
That's obviously not what enabled means, at all.
If there is a button visible that executes a function when receiving a click, that feature is enabled.
That does not mean that the feature is actively in use, of course. Enabled and active are different states for a program's functionality to be.
I believe it's pretty easy to understand, there are people like me who don't want to have AI functions popping up in our browsers without explicit enabling on our part.
I understand that you disagree, but it is not a difficult position to understand.
You don't need to re-define opt-in and opt-out just because you support Mozilla in adding AI features to Firefox.
And you can take approximately 3 seconds to click on the kill switch if you so desperately need not to see an AI button somewhere.
Like I can understand (and I agree) the stance on AI in general, but this is just a knee jerk reaction. Your browsing experience is 99.9% unchanged even if there is a button somewhere...