AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off.
How about you make it something people have to turn on, and make it useful enough that they will enable it?
this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
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Or, better yet, step down as CEO. Pick someone who is in touch with what the project's dedicated userbase actually wants.
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Right, opt-in not opt-out.
Or add it to the list of onboarding steps at the very beginning. Otherwise, it's either on by default or off by default, and our (or Mozilla's) definition of "easy" is entirely open to interpretation.
Headline is misleading. That is one sentence from a list of three points.
- First: Every product we build must give people agency in how it works. Privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off. People should know why a feature works the way it does and what value they get from it.
- Second: our business model must align with trust. We will grow through transparent monetization that people recognize and value.
- Third: 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.
I think the more important statement, and one that I agree with, is in the first point.
AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off. People should know why a feature works the way it does and what value they get from it.
If this is the goal then I agree. Mush as AI annoys me, I don't care if they build AI features into the browser. There are enough people that do want AI features for it makes sense to do so. But it needs to be optional. I don't want to have to keep going into about:config to disable AI features that should have been opt-in in the first place.
No.
AI is something that the user can easily turn on.
If somebody is forced to turn it off before they can use their browser, it's not actually optional.
The best choice is to let the user know that such a feature is available first, ask if they want it on, and tell them how to turn it on if they say no. The problem with having things off by default is that most people don't look around the options, they go with what they're given. This isn't even about AI, but features in general.
Myself on both Firefox and DuckDuckGo I saw the AI selection prominently displayed and I disabled it. Be transparent, but that includes letting your users know things are there.
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This word "optional", I do not think it means what you think it means.
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The possibility of choice is a relief. But if one has a lot of storage bloat for some "features" one doesn't use, that's annoying.
Personally, I find all this talk of "choice" from Mozilla to be a red herring. What exactly does it mean?
When Mozilla introduced telemetry, they had to give us a reason. They had to promise it was good because it would help them develop their browser. But with talk of "choice," Mozilla simply implies AI is good without explaining how.
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Sheesh. Out of the 20 comments in this thread this is the only one that actually addressed the contents of the article, the rest of them were all talking about what other browser they were using or going to be using now or just vaguely griping about how much they hate AI.
Are there any other Firefox communities that are actually about Firefox?
I've used Firefox for a long ass time but let's be honest here.. a LOT of recent history has been trying to figure out how to turn off whatever new feature they've been putting energy into. Their community sees them as a tool and they see themselves as an ecosystem. That disconnect is a problem.
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It's weird that they want firefox to grow into an ecosystem. They only recently kicked Thunderbird out of the ecosystem.
Third: 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.
Oh, geez.
My same reaction. Sometimes you just need to do one thing well, particularly when they thing you're doing is this very general use multipurpose interfacing tool.
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Dear AI Techbros.
Why is AI in my browser something desirable for the common man?
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What I want: a secure browser that does just that and nothing more.
I'm so sick of AI everything.
No. One. Wants. That.
We have nowhere better to go. But that's only for now, you short-sighted dumbass...
I’ve already switched to librewolf because of the ai update
It’s really just a matter of trust and they’ve clearly chosen to trust ai first and users second. That’s why you must turn it off instead of having to turn it on.
sad state of affairs
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I guess im looking for a new browser. Anyone have a good alternative?
How about LibreWolf?
As there seems to have been recent confusion about this, just a quick "official" toot to then pin: we haven't and won't support "generative AI" related stuff in LibreWolf. If you see some features like that (like Perplexity search recently, or the link preview feature now) it is solely because it "slipped through". As soon as we become aware of something like this / it gets reported to us, we will remove/disable it ASAP.
First: Every product we build must give people agency in how it works. Privacy, data use, and AI must be clear and understandable. Controls must be simple. AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off. People should know why a feature works the way it does and what value they get from it. Second: our business model must align with trust. We will grow through transparent monetization that people recognize and value. Third: 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.
Are the first and third points not contradicting? Having control over AI in the browser means that the browser cannot be AI first. Maybe they need to step back and look at their core audience and a shifting user preference for less big tech and more control.
I think the biggest thing that they can do is look at what the Firefox forks are doing and try and implement the features that led to people leaving. I'm using Zen not only for the addition features and UI elements it brings, but also the things that it chooses not to include.
They can also look at what IronFox and LibreWolf do to create a new built in profile that maximizes privacy and security trading off convenience.
Finally, they have failed to capture new users when google is blocking ad blockers. When you have a smaller market share you need to take advantage of your competitor's mistakes.
I'm so fucking tired of CEOs and their shit-ass ideas
You either die a hero or live long enought to become the villain
Everyone hated that
What a douche.
Fucking yikes.
"Modern", "AI" - buzzwords for shareholders
Hey Mozilla, any chance you could add the ability to add tags to bookmarks on mobile during this evolution?
Or make add-on settings/configuration container specific (noscript forex)?
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Gross.
Damn. Any good recommendations for alternatives?
Your choices are basically FF spinoffs (waterfox, librewolf, etc), Chrome spinoffs, straight up AI browsers, crypto browsers, and a couple that are a sort of mix/match of the above.
The web is cooked.
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We meager 2% of browser users are not the customer base Mozilla is targeting for with stuff like this. This isn't for us - it's for the other 98% that Mozilla desperately wants to attract. I wouldn't necessarily say we 2% don't matter to Mozilla, but the fact is, losing us to gain something like 10% of the market would be a huge success for Mozilla.
This definitely sounds like what Mozilla wants to do, but who will care? People who want AI in the browser already have Edge and browsers developed by AI companies. Mozilla is just arriving late to the party, the same way they did with VR.
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Mozilla is a lost cause, and Firefox is too big to be rescued by one singular web-browsing development entity (that's because the web has become too complicated so as to allow for terminal capitalism).
The solution is, honestly, for a well-constituted organization to hard-fork the web standards model as a whole package, to start a sort of "re-web" project. Pick up something like gemini but iterate it to a level where it can actually be useful (gemini, nifty as it is, is actually less capable of layout and styling than the printing press from the 1500s and that's saying something). Maintain a "convertible subset" of HTML+CSS as an input option for people who want to maintain and develop simple sites that might want to eventually convert to re-web.
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