Firefox will get AI controls to turn it all off

Quoting: scaine

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.

@Eike summed it up perfectly.

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???

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

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.

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.

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?

Last edited by GustyGhost on 3 Feb 2026 at 7:49 pm UTC

Quoting: Nic264

Quoting: hardpenguinHow about you disable them by default, Mozilla, and have people unleash AI at their own peril -_-

This is dumb. So dumb.

What's dumb about translations and OCR?

Blind hatred for anything labeled with “AI” is as pointless as hatred for anything that uses linked lists.

Translations and OCR are not the things that have caused the hatred.

And you know. Stop playing dumb.

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?

how about having a separate build of firefox without telemetry and ai slop

I guess.. it's better the function exist then not at all. but for me personally I'll keep using mozilla forks.

This won't block Google AI to intrude into your searches.

Quoting: hardpenguinHow about you disable them by default, Mozilla, and have people unleash AI at their own peril -_-

This is dumb. So dumb.

I would like to think the majority of users would want it all turned off. But honestly, I'd not be willing to stake anything significant on that being true.

Quoting: hardpenguinHow about you disable them by default, Mozilla, and have people unleash AI at their own peril -_-

This is dumb. So dumb.

AI is selling like hotcakes, so Mozilla have decided that they need to provide these cool new trendy AI features out of the box in order to try and attract more users (who of course wouldn't know how to manually turn them on if they were turned off by default). But they do recognize that there are people like you who don't like anything AI, so contrary to everyone else in the competition they're actually giving you a switch that you can use to completely disable everything.

And yet you still complain, and instead want Mozilla to shoot themselves in the foot by disabling all their cool new trendy features and thus lose potential new users who will instead run even faster off to Chrome, which will mean even less revenue for Mozilla in the long term and will force them to sell out even more of their core values in order to attract funding and stay in the green, all for the sake of your personal crusade.

This is dumb. So dumb.

Quoting: grigiI would love to turn off "AI" features by default and then only turn the ones I need on manually. Instead it's either "all OFF", or "ON by default".

It's not like that though. It's either "all OFF", or "ON by default", or "some OFF and some ON, pick and choose exactly what you want to use". As far as I can tell by the pictures, you'll be able to do exactly what you want to do.

Quoting: syylk...Until you are the one shopping for a pair of DIMMs.

That's a side-effect of out-of-control capitalism though, not of AI itself. Yesterday it was bitcoin mining and GPUs, today it's "AI" and RAM, tomorrow it will be something else. It's an unfortunate that we live in a society of gullible fools, but what can you do.

Quoting: doragasuTranslations and OCR are not the things that have caused the hatred.

(I'll ignore your second sentence, if you're able to discuss without personal attacks that is?)

Caused it: no, but they do get included in the hatred.
Because Mozilla's marketing grouped those features together under the “AI” buzzword, and because some people freak out at “AI” → large image/text generation models → sloppy work, license infringement, high resource usage and whatnot (and I agree with most of these claims).

The comment I was originally quoting called for all those features to be disabled by default, so does the latest comment as I'm typing this:

Quoting: EhvisI would like to think the majority of users would want it all turned off.

And I sincerely disagree: I'm pretty happy when my browser politely asks me if I want websites written in German to be translated into French for me.

Last edited by Nic264 on 4 Feb 2026 at 9:56 am UTC

waterfox is new firefox now

With Firefox's shrinking market share, they better start listening to the users they have left. This could have been an extension so those who want AI can add it, it also would keep the browser from getting bloated with frivolous features.

Quoting: GustyGhost

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.

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.

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?

I've already answered the bulk of this here, so no point repeating it: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/01/valve-tweak-steam-ai-disclosure-form-for-developers-to-clarify-its-for-content-consumed-by-players/?comment_id=288587.

To answer you more specifically, a few of those issues I outlined could definitely be addressed, yes. Will they? Probably not. I suspect the ship has sailed on most of them, such as plagiarism / non-attribution. We'll see.

Quoting: NociferAI is selling like hotcakes, so Mozilla have decided that they need to provide these cool new trendy AI features out of the box

I don't actually think that's the case. Which is why they're adding adverts to ChatGPT, for instance, and also see Satya Nadella's plea that more people need to use it. Perhaps it's selling better in the Enterprise/Corporate world, and maybe that will fuel the AI growth that Nadella is desperate for - but you should be going into any AI tool with eyes wide open here - this technology is front-loaded. It is NOT paying for itself, and so it will either become heavily subsided by adverts, or sustained by a significant monthly subscription.

And the advertising element gives me serious concerns. It's bad enough that I'm profiled by Google via email, calendar appointments or searches... imagine what insight ChatGPT would get if it had all my "private" conversations with a chatbot over years of use. Does ChatGPT have an incognito mode? Yes, it does. Do you trust it? I don't.

Quoting: LeprottoThis won't block Google AI to intrude into your searches.

I don't use Google for searches, I stopped doing that many years ago, or anything actually, except watching some videos from Youtube with third-party clients.