Mildly Infuriating

I don't see the problem. The paragraph of text explains exactly what it's doing. Do you also have a problem with the "enabling" of your ad blocker "disabling" the ads? There's nothing "dark pattern" about this at all.

On device translation is amazing and exactly what this software should be approved for, I think it’s good that they let you pick this separately. I don’t care for surrendering my cognitive functions to an advertising panopticon machine, but translating pages without letting Google know what sites I’m looking at? Yes please

If you refer to a traffic light as a "stop" light then you can interpret red as "do not stop".

This is just my opinion, but I think it's reasonable to require your user to go to the settings if they want to remove a context menu item.

In fact, I think they're going above and beyond here. Most people never use "Inspect Accessibility Properties", yet they added it here with no option to remove it, and yet no one's complaining.

I think the cause of this outrage is people reading too much into Firefox's AI features. Firefox doesn't bundle an LLM or make requests without your permission. It doesn't put AI overviews on your pages. It didn't remove existing functionality to make room for the new buttons. And it doesn't shove any of the features into your face. It's just a context menu item that opens a website in the sidebar if you choose to click on it.

I hate inverted booleans with an agenda

Yes but I would argue that its function is properly described. I mean, it says what it does and if you want you can enable what it actually says.

i would say it's an intentional dark pattern

As they say, no AI is a feature.

Luckily, due to the nature of Firefox, this feature is free

I'm okay with this one, since it's effectively an opt-in/opt-out toggle. One click on the toggle, then confirm and all the AI features get disabled as a result. Two clicks versus five is easier in my book, and at least it wasn't one of those awful, non-compliant cookie popups where there's no "reject all" button and you have to manually go through each toggle if it's on a site you actually need to access.

What exactly is this disabling? Firefox's built-in AI tools? Or is it disabling AI tools on websites you visit? Because "blocking" seems like a very misleading term to be using if it's an internal presence being turned off. We typically only "block" remote things we know to be harmful to our experience, like harassing users on internet platforms or websites known to contain malware.

This is honestly some selfawarewolves shit at this point, Mozilla.

I don't recommend disabling the on-device translations and speech to text feature. Yes, they are "AI" but they are the good on-device offline AI services that are actually useful. Without the on-device translation feature, you'll have to rely on web based Google Translate. Same with the speech to text feature.

Using Librewolf solves the issues.

Also, why does it say "blocked" instead of "disabled"? This kinda leads me to imply that their AI features are spyware

I have to go into chrome://flags and disable AI in Chrome too. Fuck that “CIA sniffer” on my “typing.”

And I believe my Firefox… eh, I gotta check because why this opt-in to disable?

As soon as someone forks a “AI free” browser, I’m switching. Goddamm, this is all a setup for “too big to fail” (or get a Y2K disaster thingy) so gimme a bail out. Thieves in a few years.

i think you just blocked things you already blocked. that button is for blocking all at once, as per their statement

This is proper UI design. What they're doing is defaulting to have AI updates installed automatically. If you don't want that to happen you can stop it.

its a kill switch to disable everything otherwise you can enable or disable the things you don't want

Use librewolf

It's intentional.

As someone who has gone through Windows group policy, the amount of weird policies and regedits we have to do to disable AI, recall, anayltics, etc. it's insane and the process flip flops with tricky wording. Enabling something here and disabling stuff somewhere else, it gets annoying

At least they are brave enough to make the switch for free.

Pushing the opt out responsibility on the user is why I left Windows and never looked back. I recommend Waterfox which I started using a couple months back when Firefox started going in this direction. Waterfox is great on desktop and Android (which I'll hopefully shed soon too when my current phone stops working).

I think whoever coded that views toggles as a yes/no.

Mistaaaaake

I agree. This is a double negative. Language usually goes with positive statements instead of double negative. You don't say "I didn't fail". You say "I succeeded". With that logic, the UI should say "Enable AI features" instead of "Disable AI blocker".

Someone has been studying up on the Microsoft Group Policy way of wording things.

For the record, I know it was marketed as "AI killswitch". I know it functions as one.

But it's still hella confusing as presented in the configuration! Don't do double negatives! If your design goal is "disable everything", maybe give the users the option to, I don't know, "disable everything".