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Firefox 148 introduces the promised AI kill switch for people who aren't into LLMs
(www.xda-developers.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca @technology@lemmy.world
The problem still remains: why's this thing "opt-out" and not "opt-in"? Why not make it an official, totally optional (as in voluntarily wanting to have it and, only then, proceeding to have it) plug-in or extension that the user (let us remember the meaning of "User Agent": an agent acting on behalf of the user, not a piece of software who's become "the user") could install at any moment, out of their own will?
I'm far from being an anti-AI person, I myself use those clankers on a daily basis. However, I use them because I want to, while I still want to, not because they were pushed unto me.
Mechanisms of "opt-out" where there should be an "opt-in" is a form of dark pattern.
In fact, the very concept of "opting-out" is a dark pattern per se, because it implies something pushed unto a person, something from which they were "allowed" the "right to leave".
Yeah, it's awesome to have means of "opting-out" from something, but having an "opt-out" mechanism in place doesn't mitigate the very fact that it was coercively pushed unto the person beforehand and didn't require explicit consent from the person unto which the thing was pushed.
Speaking of "consent", situations like these are not that much different from the dark pattern "Yes / Not now" we've been seen everywhere: in certain scenarious, this insistence and disregard for explicit consent would verge the criminal (e.g. harassment), but suddenly it's "okay" when corporations (and the State itself) do it.
If, say, a situation where someone is being harassed and, only after having started to harass, the harasser offers the harassed a means to leave the harassment, does this make the harasser less of a harasser? Because that's the same absurd logic behind the corporate advocacy whenever it's said "oh, but Mozilla is offering an opt-out, you can always turn off 'sponsored shortcuts' (that is, after having been faced by the shortcut from a Jeff Bezos corp as you proceeded to open a new tab for accessing the opting-out settings, but that's totally okay), 'sponsored wallpapers', and the 'Anonym tracking', and now you can, check this out, you can turn off the clankers, too! Wow, isn't that such a cute corp, the corp with the cute fiery fox mascot?".
Not to say how it's gonna end up cluttering the upstream with (more) binary blobs, adding to the Sisyphean struggle that WaterFox, IronFox, LibreWolf, Fennec, among other Firefox forks, have been experiencing upon trying to de-enshittificate the enshittificated and de-combobulate the combobulated.
"Mozilla needs to make money". Yeah, yeah, because the very fundamental, immutable principle of cosmic existence boils down to "there's no such thing as a free lunch", amirite? After all, "money" is clearly within the table of elementary particles alongside quarks and gluons, isn't it? And Mozilla needs to make money... We had a tool for that: it's called donations.
Other than link previews all the features they are opt-in in the sense you'd have to actually use the feature.
@Feyd@programming.dev @technology@lemmy.world
I'm not referring only to the feature per se, I'm also referring to any pop-up designed to appear throughout the navigation to "remind the user about the superb features".
Said pop-up is explicitly mentioned on their "confirmation dialog" upon turning off (screenshot attached below):
It speaks volumes about how much a dark pattern this is, the fact that the opt-off has a confirmation dialog, while the further proceeding with logging in with Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/Meta account doesn't seem to have a confirmation dialog.
And the fact that the confirmation feels "menacing" and defaulted to cancelling the opting-off (i.e. pressing "esc" or clicking outside the window; one must click the primary-colored "block" button which, contrasted to a grayish "Cancel" button, may psychologically induce the user into thinking "block" is a dangerous action), quite similar to the
about:configwarning screen.Ah, and the clanker options: notice the lack of alternative options for those who want a custom clanker, such as DeepSeek, Qwen, Z AI, Brazilian Maritaca IA and Amazônia IA (to mention some non-Chinese LLMs), or even something running locally through ollama. Seemingly no option for using a custom, possibly self-hosted LLM endpoint. The fact that all the options offered are all heavily corporate options (with Mistral being the "least corporate" of them all, but still Global Northern nonetheless) might tell us something...
All of these dark patterns, among others not mentioned, are the object of my critique, not just the fact that Mozilla is shoving clankers unto Firefox.
Whenever a feature needs an invasive pop-up and the opt-out brings up a second pop-up that requires further confirmation (but none seems to be offered upon actually using said feature), it is called a dark pattern, no matter if said feature requires further configuration.
@dsilverz @technology @Feyd
It would have been a dark pattern if, just as an example, the "block" button was set as secondary action (in white) and the primary blue action was "cancel".