I’m sorry, I’m not often someone to whine about Firefox UI. Usually their changes have been for good actually. BUT! But but but. Proper UI design would require AI features to be disabled if the toggle is disabled. This is both highly silly and very confusing.
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.
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.
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.
Use librewolf
At least they are brave enough to make the switch for free.
As they say, no AI is a feature.
Luckily, due to the nature of Firefox, this feature is free
Someone has been studying up on the Microsoft Group Policy way of wording things.
i think you just blocked things you already blocked. that button is for blocking all at once, as per their statement
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 think thats not what OP is mildly infuriated about though. If I understood correctly its that you have to enable the setting “disable AI” instead of having a setting “use AI” (possibly enabled by default), which you would disable. Its just counterintuitive semantics
If it’s not an opt-IN feature, then it’s malicious, anti-consumer design. Full stop.
The lengths people will go to defend Mozilla are astounding. If Chrome did this, you’d be throwing a fit.
if chrome added a toggle to turn off ai features?
… and it was turned on by default and had misleading language as to what the button actually does, yes.
Most features in most software are either opt-out or unremovable, though. It’s clearly not about that to you, it’s about the association with AI
I’m also largely against opt-out in other uses, too. The fact that this is AI only makes it that much worse.
No one’s against a feature being opt-out unless they actively dislike that feature. You’re not going to make a post about the context menu items you don’t use unless you have some political opposition against them.
Nobody complains about the ¤ key on their phone’s English QWERTY keyboard, or the “generate QR code from tab” feature in Firefox that I’m sure you’ve never used. Neither of these features is opt-in, and yet you’re content with them. It’s because you don’t have any political opinions about the features themselves. You don’t actually care about opt-out when the feature doesn’t bother you.
I hate inverted booleans with an agenda
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
Agreed. It’s the only one I leave turned on and use rarely. I do appreciate that it runs locally.
Especially since Google translate is just a front for Gemini these days (and not in an “LLMs were made for translating” way, you can literally prompt inject it)
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.
I could see that, but I think the key difference.
Adblocker is an active block of something from outside.
AI block is telling firefox not to use any of it’s own.
Kind of a do this, versus don’t.
“Do protect me from attackers.”
“Don’t attack me”
It should not be turn on to disable
Hehe. 47 people here think “enabling the disable-ation of ads” is clear language?! I’d like browsers / distributions include uBlock per default so there’s less spying. And if you want to enable all the ads and trackers, you’d go to the top right and press uBlock’s power button (to turn uBlock off - and ads on). I think that’s a clear and straightforward UX. At least that’s how I set up Linux computers and nobody ever complained 😄.
I mean it surely is a dark pattern to trick people into giving away their personal data to all those companies? Most of the users aren’t even aware. And their consent is fabricated by making this backwards?!
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If you refer to a traffic light as a “stop” light then you can interpret red as “do not stop”.
i grew up calling them semaphores and i’ll die calling them semaphores.
Never stop never stopping
Don’t keep on not keeping on
ah, reminds me of a famous song.
Don’t stop not believing
Also, why does it say “blocked” instead of “disabled”? This kinda leads me to imply that their AI features are spyware
When they first announced this they called it the “AI kill switch”, so they already toned it down.
“AI kill switch”… bro you put the AI in there…
The fact that they announced that instead of an “AI ON switch” tells you where Mozilla’s interests lie these days.
most people want/are indifferent to local translation
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.
Blocks the news too, because they know its all ads so they built in the adblocker
Only the built in tools
