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PayPalSomething that might help calm the masses against generative AI, Mozilla announced that AI controls are coming to Firefox. For the people who don't want any AI extras in their browser, they'll get easy access to turn off all existing and future additions to Firefox.
As announced in a blog post the controls will arrive with the Firefox 148, which is due to arrive February 24th. The settings won't be spread out either, they'll be in a single central place making it quick and easy to do. No one size fits all approach though, you'll be able to individually toggle various AI features or just turn them all on / off.
The features that will get the toggles at launch will be:
- Translations, which help you browse the web in your preferred language.
- Alt text in PDFs, which add accessibility descriptions to images in PDF pages.
- AI-enhanced tab grouping, which suggests related tabs and group names.
- Link previews, which show key points before you open a link.
- AI chatbot in the sidebar, which lets you use your chosen chatbot as you browse, including options like Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Le Chat Mistral.
Mozilla put out a video to showcase it:
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A needed step - good to see them deliver on their promise of options.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
About the author - Liam Dawe
I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly.
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27 comments
Quoting: scaine@Eike summed it up perfectly.Quoting: _wojteksadly tiny but super vocal butt-hurt minority[Duckduckgo did a survey](https://voteyesornoai.com/) asking their userbase if they wanted AI features. They closed the poll after a week or so, 175K votes counted, and 90% said no, they don't want AI.
Yes, it's very skewed - DDG's userbase is privacy-focused. But "tiny but super vocal butt-hurt minority" is a shitty and antagonistic way to describes people's perfectly valid dislike of this planet-burning technology.
Also, you yourself point only to DDG survey where most likely only those hell-bent on anti-AI crusade participated (because it was shared in certain places) :D
Probably the most reliable thing would be to force the survey to all Fx users to get the correct trends but the… they kinda already have that and it's called tellemetry and they can see if the current AI features are used or not and they probably make the decission based on that.
Of course the same vocal minority was butt-hurt about telemetry back in the day and gladly turned it off just to voice their disconent later on.
All in all, Mozilla DID address the issue in a quite nice and elegant way.
The setting will be permanent and apply to all feature AI features.
It will probably be featured in "what's new" after the update so everyone affected will be able to turn it off. Why the heck still complain about what they did???
1 Likes
All this so called "backlash" has been for nothing LMAO... From the very beginning Mozilla said they would do this even BEFORE the "backlash" started.. but NO ONE took the time to ACTUALLY read their initial announcement. We live in the age of rage bait and people reading a headline and NOTHING else. Now granted Mozilla should be disabling them by default but it is what it is
Last edited by tohur on 3 Feb 2026 at 5:46 pm UTC
Last edited by tohur on 3 Feb 2026 at 5:46 pm UTC
3 Likes
GustyGhost 3 hours ago
Quoting: scaine[Duckduckgo did a survey](https://voteyesornoai.com/) asking their userbase if they wanted AI features. They closed the poll after a week or so, 175K votes counted, and 90% said no, they don't want AI.Asking in good faith: If non-local AI features were able to operate in an ecologically viable way, would you then not dislike AI? Are there other aspects about ML/AI that keep you from engaging with it?
Yes, it's very skewed - DDG's userbase is privacy-focused. But "tiny but super vocal butt-hurt minority" is a shitty and antagonistic way to describes people's perfectly valid dislike of this planet-burning technology.
Last edited by GustyGhost on 3 Feb 2026 at 7:49 pm UTC
2 Likes
Quoting: Nic264Translations and OCR are not the things that have caused the hatred.Quoting: hardpenguinHow about you disable them by default, Mozilla, and have people unleash AI at their own peril -_-What's dumb about translations and OCR?
This is dumb. So dumb.
Blind hatred for anything labeled with “AI” is as pointless as hatred for anything that uses linked lists.
And you know. Stop playing dumb.
1 Likes
I'll never use vanilla ff again because of mozilla's disastrous management decisions, but this at least I like because I *think* it'll make it easier for the various forks like zen / libre / etc to just disable remove all this bullshit?
0 Likes
how about having a separate build of firefox without telemetry and ai slop
0 Likes
This won't block Google AI to intrude into your searches.
0 Likes
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