Firefox makes AI optional, like it probably should have been all along

Mozilla has decided that if AI is going to live in your browser, you should at least be able to kill it when it gets annoying. The browser maker this week announced a new set of AI controls for Firefox, headlined by a global kill switch that lets users disable every current and future AI feature in one go. The change, rolling …

[Anonymous Coward]

Not good enough

Shouldn't be included in the browser at all, not even with a "toggle on" switch. If they were adamant they knew best (which they obviously are - despite serving a user base who will be naturally repelled by such decisions) it absolutely should have been implemented off by default, with a toggle button for on. The way it was forced on users was a disgrace.

The implementation (in this browser, of all browsers) was a terrible and desperate decision driven by an egomaniac.

Firefox's desktop market share in the past 12 months has dropped from 6.26% to 4.05%, and is still falling (source: statcounter) and remember that the decline is in spite of the uptake in Linux - where FF is almost always the default - as people look for alternatives to US tech (so the drop from established users is likely even more pronounced).

Imagine the headlines if any other tech company on the planet had shed more than 1/3rd of its user base in 12 months like FF has! It's absolutely baffling this hasn't been called out more.

And those users are never coming back, even if this decision was reversed in its entirety. Those users are now all using Waterfox, or Vivaldi, etc.

Be under no illusion - this has been an absolute disaster for FF. The person responsible needs to be held accountable!

[okand]

Re: Not good enough

Indeed. It bothers me that time was spent putting the features in there regardless.

[HXO]

Re: Not good enough

I do not understand the shouting about FFs addition of AI. When FF asked if I wanted an AI thing integrated, I clicked No, and have not heard from it again. (FF 147.0.2 now, mostly Windows.) Compared to other SW, that is OK.

And all SW will present new features: Ordinary users do not go looking for unknown features on their phones, computers, cars... Technical users may have read about the upcomming features or gone exploring for it. Ordinary users will only know if shown.

Still, the LLM AI experiment on the whole needs to end.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not good enough

Type about:config - if any of these are set to true FF dictated that you were going to have AI enabled, whether you like it or not:

Shortcut to finding them once inside config is to search for .ml. (dot-ml-dot) - ML: for machine learning. I can almost guarantee you that some, it not all, of these are turned on!

browser.ml.enable

browser.ml.chat.enabled

browser.ml.chat.page

browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled

extensions.ml.enabled

sidebar.notification.badge.aichat

browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge

browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge

browser.ml.chat.menu

[HXO]

Re: Not good enough

Yeah, but does that mean AI is active? I have no AI account (anywhere or attached to FF), and have *zero* indication that AI is active. The best I can tell, those (and other) switches are just defaults for when a user activates AI on the main switch. Again I do not think this is wrong for ordinary users. (Apart for the underlying LLM part.)

[cd]

Re: Not good enough

Training...

[RedGreen925]

Re: Not good enough

Indeed I was shocked when I did that and seen all of those in there enabled,that is when I dumped it after more than twenty-five years of use since the Netscape days into the Phoenix for the rebirth then onto Firefox. I have had enough of them morons at Mozilla and their anti-user changes they keep making and them clowns wonder why the browser share is dropping like a stone. Well continuing to go out of your way to piss off your users at every turn by proving you are the same as the parasite corporations you claim not to be does not work with us. We see all the f'n lies they tell every day time they pull this garbage with something new. Perhaps like the Phoenix it used to be called something good will rise out of the ashes of this dumpster fire they have been having these last few years. Because they have certainly have lost the way of developing open source software and someone/thing has to give and take that code in a new direction not having them included to mess it up even more.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not good enough

Strangely Firefox on my corporate laptop has all these ml options disabled .. but it's on version 140 with updates disabled.

I say strangely because otherwise the powers that be are pushing AI like crazy ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not good enough

It can be turned off by policy.

[steelpillow]

Re: Not good enough

> The person responsible needs to be held accountable

Probably the person whose job it is to hold everyone else accountable. Moz lost its mojo a long time ago.

[RedGreen925]

Re: Not good enough

"Probably the person whose job it is to hold everyone else accountable. Moz lost its mojo a long time ago."

They certainly did and I kept letting it slide giving them the benefit of the doubt, this latest BS shows they are beyond redemption. They are a parasite for profit corporation in disguise as an open source project like more than a few of these places claiming to be open source are now. They keep mouthing the words but the actions behind them show they are the same as any other parasite corporation there is out there. As such they are not to be trusted one little it to be acting in the interests of us users

[ABugNamedJune]

Re: Not good enough

Absolutely, I entirely agree, remove the features entirely.

And barring that, I wish they'd make it opt-in rather than opt-out. Same with DDG, who I've been trying to replace as my primary search engine, but haven't yet found one that I like. I think it's great that the foxes and ducks are making these features opt-in, but I am constantly reimaging my machines and clearing cache and cookies, and it adds extra steps to a process to manually rid myself of these intrusions.

[QET]

Re: Not good enough

Honestly, Mozilla should've made all the AI things optional extensions/addons from the beginning instead.

And if features are missing from the extensions/addons framework for that to happen? Well, add it if they're not gonna be security/performance nightmares.

I'm still reeling in from all the features lost when XUL got ditched in favor of copycatting Chrome.

[IGotOut]

Re: Not good enough

"Same with DDG, who I've been trying to replace as my primary search engine, but haven't yet found one that I like"

Startpage.

[M.V. Lipvig]

Re: Not good enough

noai.duckduckgo.com is what I use.

[David Hicklin]

Re: Not good enough

DuckDuckGo for a while had a poll running if you clicked the logo asking do you want AI yes or no - it was over 95% no in the responses

[MonkeyJuice]

Re: Not good enough

https://html.duckduckgo.com/ is even nicer.

[M.V. Lipvig]

Re: Not good enough

I went to the About on the html one and it bragged about having the most advanced AI around for browsers. noai.duckduckgo.com on the other hand has zero AI.

[MonkeyJuice]

Re: Not good enough

Well. Don't click on the general duckduckgo about page link that takes you out of the pure html POST form then. Or if you must use the no-ai version, you might want to ensure the impression.js tracker on the noai page is blocked.

Do what you want, I'm not your mum.

[quigley]

Re: Not good enough

Ironfox has this built in.

[staringatclouds]

Re: Not good enough

Try https://noai.duckduckgo.com/

[Tron]

Re: Not good enough

The tech bros all live in their own little bubble and only speak to acolytes. It takes a while for reality to impinge upon their egos. The penny is finally dropping.

Maybe accept that it takes time for this sort of thing to happen. We don't live in a perfect world.

They have finally given us a kill switch, which is what we wanted. Accept it with good grace and maybe they will be a little less dense next time.

The non-mainstream tech community is not in a strong enough position to be excessively picky, and start fights with each other, despite its penchant for doing so. Non-GAFA is a small world. We don't need it to get smaller. Peace treaties should be accepted when they are offered.

[Inventor of the Marmite Laser]

"Basically, what we are finding is that people hate AI"

In other news, creatures of a ursine persuasion are understood to defecate in areas of arboreal vegetation.

[Gavsky]

Giraffes? What have they got to do with it? I asked AI, see...so it must be right.

[Artem S Tashkinov]

Nothing like that in Chrome which brings us to ( accessible via chrome://flags ):

#ai-mode-omnibox-entry-point

#omnibox-allow-ai-mode-matches

#enable-lens-overlay

#prompt-api-for-gemini-nano

#prompt-api-for-gemini-nano-multimodal-input

#summarization-api-for-gemini-nano

#writer-api-for-gemini-nano

#rewriter-api-for-gemini-nano

#proofreader-api-for-gemini-nano

#permissions-ai-v3

#permissions-ai-v4

#permissions-ai-p92

This one is debatable, suit yourself:

#autofill-enable-ai-based-amount-extraction

Took me half an hour to find because the experimental flags page has grown out of proportion.

Cheers!

[Anonymous Coward]

FFS!

I just spent ages shit posting about FireFox (see first post) and here you are pointing out that Chrome is loads worse.

Look, there's no point in me running interference for Google if you do-gooders are going to ruin it with facts!!

[Dan 55]

I wonder if they'll pay me for my idea.

Still, the difference between Enabled and Available is somewhat... ambiguous?

[Gavsky]

I can fix this confusion - definitively*

*Only applies to software environments. Please read the T&C.

'Enabled' - It's ON, You made the decision.

'Available' - It's ON, but pretending not to be. You didn't make the decision, but our service to you depends on bits of it being 'ON' regardless, plus - we make money by selling your data to 3rd parties & that can't collect itself, can it?

[Alumoi]

'Enable' - It's ON by default so it's too late for you to turn it off, we've already slurped everything.

'Disabled' - You think it's not enabled but, according to our T&C, it's still slurping the basic info we need to sell.

There's no other option.

[Naich]

It's two separate directories in the Apache configs.

[Art Slartibartfast]

There are better alternatives out there

Too late, Mozilla, already switched to Waterfox that does not have AI built in, exactly for that reason.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: There are better alternatives out there

Same. Bye FF. It was nice knowing you.

[MaChatma CoatGPT 2.0]

Re: There are better alternatives out there

About a year ago I switched from Firefox to Zen and it has worked well for most of the time. Hugely tweakable but I ended up with something that looked like standard Firefox. Muscle memory is tricky to retrain. Just a couple of days ago I changed yet again to Konform, yet another Firefox derivative. Feels a tad quicker than Zen and a bit more stable. I'll probably go full time with it tomorrow.

[Gavsky]

Re: There are better alternatives out there

You'd better inform Microsoft - "...Muscle memory is tricky to retrain", hence I can't use the Edge browser.

[DJV]

Re: hence I can't use the Edge browser

Nobody in their right mind wants to use the Edge browser!

[TrickParadox]

Re: There are better alternatives out there

I also switched to Waterfox. It literally is just Firefox but with the enshittification either gone or disabled by default. There is basically no reason for anyone to still be on Firefox at this point, at least not on Windows where you don't have to question whether your package manager has it available easily.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: There is basically no reason for anyone to still be on Firefox at this point

Firefox is on my front room pc for streaming (with noScript and Ublock Origin).

can I watch all my uk streaming services on WaterFox?

CopilotShort answer: Not reliably.

Here’s the current situation based on recent evidence:

✔ Waterfox does support DRM (Widevine)

Waterfox added official DRM support in G5.1.7, enabling playback for services that require Widevine, such as Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ etc. [reddit.com]

✘ But many UK streaming services still fail

Even with DRM enabled, Netflix, Prime Video, and others frequently break in Waterfox due to Widevine version mismatches, Netflix browser‑support checks, and Linux packaging issues.

✔ What does usually work

Services that don’t use strict DRM (e.g., YouTube)

✘ What typically doesn’t work reliably

BBC iPlayer, ITVX, Channel 4, My5, Netflix, Prime Video: all require robust Widevine + recognised browser identification. These services are not officially supporting Waterfox, and may reject it even when DRM is working. [askwoody.com]

Bottom line

Waterfox is not a dependable browser for all UK streaming services.

Even though Waterfox supports DRM, major UK platforms regularly break due to compatibility and certification issues.

If you need consistent playback for all UK streaming services, you will need to use a formally supported browser such as Firefox, Chrome, Edge, or Safari.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: There are better alternatives out there

"There is basically no reason for anyone to still be on Firefox at this point..."

Except the various forks cannot exist without Firefox as a base. If everyone abandons firefox, firefox no longer exists, and the forks go with it.

I don't think any of the various forks has the resources or inclination to take over development as a whole.

(None of which excuses Mozilla, who seem to be actively trying to drive their remaining users away.)

[An_Old_Dog]

"Disabled"

But it's still there.

[Hubert Cumberdale]

Re: "Disabled"

Maybe it should get PIP to help it.

[deeredd]

'Enhancements'

I note it says 'enable ai enhancements' and not, for arguments sake, 'turn off LLM slop'

I moved to waterfox when they changed the t&c's so whatever. Always a shame Mozilla has pissed all that money and opportunity up the wall though.

[Catweazl3]

Firefox ai edition

If they can release a developer edition then they can release an ai edition.

Call it FAE and stop bothering the rest of us with your ai schemes.

[Tron]

Re: Firefox ai edition

They could call it FireFlai.

[Elongated Muskrat]

Wrong way round

The browser maker this week announced a new set of AI controls for Firefox, headlined by a global kill switch that lets users disable every current and future AI feature in one go.

If included in Firefox at all (and there is a strong argument that if it exists at all, then it should be an optional extension and not included in the main product, for reasons of bloat), then it should be turned off by default, and strictly opt-in.

Still, using Firefox is still a million times better than letting Chrome hoover up all your personal info and send it home to Alphabet.

[Michael Strorm]

After two years of being told that AI was the future and we'd all learn to love it, vendors are now discovering an awkward truth: a number of users would prefer an off switch and a quiet browser.

The "truth" they're discovering is that their assumption that AI would end up being used and ultimately accepted by default if they simply kept shoving it into peoples' faces turned out to be wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Too late. Already switched to Waterfox and realised how much better it is.

[JimmyPage]

Off ? How about out ?

As in not there to begin with.

[Gavsky]

No, no, no! This isn't how it works! You make AI compulsory - forcing any user who doesn't want it, to download software tools of uncertain virtue, off the interwebnet. Then, they remove some of it, whilst simultaneously sending their banking details to North Korea - unwittingly.

Idea©Microsoft - 'What's choice?' ®Microsoft

[PhilipN]

“when it gets annoying”

Not “if”. Exactly so.

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile,

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/16/mozilla_corporation_new_ceo/

Dec 16, 2025, an article about a new CEO at Mozilla.

> "We absolutely hear that some people want AI and some people don't," he said. "And so one of the things we're doing is looking at how we provide AI in the browser in a way that reflects Mozilla's values to those people who want it, and leave it completely optional so that it's not there for people who don't."

Maybe they forgot already.

[MonkeyJuice]

Re: Meanwhile,

The correct, and simplest approach would have been to develop a separate binary distribution, and offer it alongside vanilla ff in the downloads page. Did you know that you don't _have_ to take your product development tips directory from Redmond, Anthony?

[Bebu sa Ware]

CFLAGS += -DISABLE_ALL_AI_CRAP=1

make

Although make clean and removing the source tree might wiser.

You might take the evil out of the developer but I doubt anyone can now take the developer out of the evil.

[M.V. Lipvig]

Excellent!

But I'd still check the config to make sure.

[BartyFartsLast]

Good

These days, if you're not on the bus you're not anywhere and they've admitted the bus is speeding straight into a wall.

I'm glad they listened, Google and MS won't.

[TrickParadox]

I recently reinstalled my system, switched to Waterfox and never looked back. The pile of chores you have to do after a fresh Firefox installation to un-enshittify it is absurd.

When I installed Waterfox, the default settings turned out to be exactly what an un-enshittified Firefox is, I really don't see why anyone would keep jumping through Mozilla's hoop after hoop that they have added over the years.

And for the record, Mozilla almost certainly violates the GDPR by sharing your searches with all enabled search engines by default (which you can disable but not remove, so if you have a custom &udm=14 search provider you cannot have it replace the @google keyword, even though this works fine in Waterfox).

[Conundrum1885]

AI

It is everywhere, and taking over.

Folks, myself included being 'sucked in' and getting more and more unhinged spending my own money on projects that had no chance of working.

Case in point, caught one of them giving advice on a repair with no concept of the risks, such as 'Well it should work' - yes, if it catches on fire then

that is generally a bad thing. You simply can't modify a PC power supply that way and they are exceptionally dangerous to work on.

If people are looking at an AI generated picture and getting emotionally agitated then that is a very bad sign, suggesting that perhaps yes the

technology should be highly restricted and more importantly, watermarked so people KNOW that the images/text/etc are artificially generated.

Latest 'oops' is being put on the anti-terror watch list for looking up nuclear stuff without knowing what the risks were, with a result that I now

can't renew my passport potentially for decades.

[Prst. V.Jeltz]

thats all well and good but when are they going to sort out the basic shit ... and I mean basic

"choose a home page"

something the first browser no doubt got right in version 0.0.0.01

In Firefox it has always been a constant losing battle to control what happens when 1) you open it 2) click "home" 3) click new tab - which should all be the same setting and easily set !

its still my browser of choice but by god its a bitch about default pages .

I guess showing the "annoying page of crap" earns it money somehow

top tip - there are 3rd party extensions available to combat this stubborn behavior

[Dan 55]

Settings > Home and then:

Blank page

Blank page

Untick everything underneath

Doesn't work for you?

[Prst. V.Jeltz]

"living in browser"

Its only a link though isnt it ?

its not "Living in the browser" its just an offer to pass the search result to ai for translation or something ?

[Dan 55]

Re: "living in browser"

Firefox translation is on device and is a genuinely useful feature. Unfortunately it's become a victim of being tarred with the same brush as LLMs under the "AI" umbrella, but it's completely different.

[Blogitus Maximus]

I read an estimated 700,000 tech jobs lost of the last 4 years [BBC], and many of those were related to this AI slop giving bonus hungry CEOs the impetus to fire their underlings. I've been working in the tech sector for 26 years and wonder where this is all really going and how long till the AI bubble will burst. I don't like how the web is today with its corporate enshittification, spying, government intrusion and advertising infestation.

Bring back the small web of circa 2000, which incidentally was around the time of the last dot-com bubble.

[Anonymous Coward]

The people who are going to switch browser are the same people who are likely going to be pissed of when the supplier of the browser decides to exploit them without consent or awareness to generate revenue from AI training data it gathers. And are also likely to either do something about it or move on again.

A bit like Porsche, maker of cars for enthusiasts keen on german engineering, switch to electric, flat screened corner cutting enshittification like everyone else and funnily enough the core market decides not to buy (irrespective of your personal position on EVs Porsche sales are tanking).

[Anonymous Coward]

Are there actually any mainstream-ish Windows browsers which have absolutely no AI shit in them?

[sarusa]

Close enough

If you're currently using Firefox just move to Waterfox. It's just FF fork with the shite removed. Very transparent. If you're using FF Sync everything just comes across, all your cookies, settings, extensions, bookmarks, etc. There are other FF options like LibreWolf and Zen but they are more locked down and less transparently compatible. But a lot of people like them!

If you're using Chrome, try Vivaldi. They're explicitly no AI. Even more of your Chrome extensions will work than in modern Chrome.

[sarusa]

Yeah, don't think you're safe

The CEO now is the scumbag who's been aggressively pushing the enshittification of FireFox for a couple years now and has outright stated he wants to make it 'your AI browser'.

So you know how this goes:

- Company introduces shitty thing everyone hates.

- Big backlash.

- 'Oh no, so sorry, we will make it opt-out!' (when it should be opt-in)

- It's opt-out for a while.

- They start sneakily turning it back on with updates.

- You can't opt-out of everything.

- The opt-out opt disappears.

This is all tried and true evil pioneered by Facebook. Until he goes, this is the plan. And even if you have the option to turn it off it's still in there bloating it up and wasting space and dev time.