I'm intensely curious what percentage of Firefox users are tech-savvy enough to use Firefox in 2025 but excited to use AI? I would think it's less than half.

"You know all of that unethical, privacy-invasive, environmentally damaging, frequently inaccurate technology you refuse to use? Well, have I got good news for you!"

What's next, built in NFTs?

I've now had at least four people, two of whom self-identified as Mozilla employees, claim that the above list of AI features--which were suddenly and rapidly added over the last few releases of Firefox, and were "on" (true) by default--could easily be turned off by flipping one master kill switch. This is not true, but folks keep claiming it or suggesting it anyway.

Here's a post from an official Firefox Mastodon account suggesting such a master kill switch does not exist yet, but will be added in a future release:

mastodon.social/@firefoxwebdev…

That's not as bad as it could be. It's bad they're stuffing AI into a perfectly good web browser for no apparent reason other than vibes or desperation. It's very bad if it's on by default; their dissembling post about it aside, opt-in has a reasonably clear meaning here: if there's a kill switch, then that kill switch should be off by default. But at least there will be a kill switch.

In any case, please stop responding to my post saying there's a master kill switch for Firefox's AI slop features. From the horse's mouth, and from user experience, there is not yet.

Furthermore, when there is a master kill switch, we don't know whether flipping it will maintain previous state of all the features it controls. In other words it's possible they'll have the master kill switch turn on all AI features when the switch is flipped to "on" or "true", rather than leaving them in whatever state you'd set them to previously. Perhaps you decide to turn the kill switch on because there are a handful of features you're comfortable with and you want to try them; will doing so mean that now all the AI features are on? We won't know till it's released and people try this. So, in the meantime, it's still good practice to keep an eye on all these configuration options if you want the AI off.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #web #tech #dev #Firefox #Mozilla #AISlop #NoAI #NoLLMs #NoAIBrowsers

It's possible to use Firefox's 'enterprise' policy system to hard-set known preferences in a way that sticks. I've resorted to doing it for my setup, with increasingly gritted teeth. Some documentation is at mozilla.github.io/policy-templ…

I learned about it from electric.marf.space/@trysdyn/s…

Electric Gremlin

2025-03-01 00:16:50

Reminder that Firefox has a pathway to specifying some settings, including ones not exposed to users any other way, with a config file stored on disk.

They call it enterprise policies but anyone can use it by just putting a file in the location indicated on that site.

You can disable entire features, opt out of Telemetry before your first launch of Firefox on a new install, declare you never want to be part of studies, turn off their ML integration and keep it off, force about:config preferences in a way that can't be "accidentally" reverted, etc.

policy-templates

Policy Templates for Firefox

^{policy-templates}

these solutions all have the problem that mozilla likes to replace those about config settings with settings that are the exact same but are named differently. So either the project you're using, like arkenfox, not only agrees with your choices and uses them as default, but also reliably provides updates to reflect Mozilla's changes, or you'll have to keep track of that and there is no warning whatsoever from Firefox when one of the settings you applied suddenly no longer exists after an update, you'll probably only notice it when Firefox misbehaves.

For example, arkenfox by default deletes all history and closes all tabs when you quit Firefox, so in my override file I changed that back to the Firefox default behaviour, only for mozilla to change the names of those settings and then when I updated arkenfox, it applied its defaults to those new settings and suddenly, the next time I reopened my Firefox, everything was gone. That was real fun. Luckily I had a backup.