I Prefer Firefox, But

The senior management of the Mozilla Corporation are trying very hard to kill the web browser.

I would argue that they are among the most overpaid executives in Silly-Con Valley.  (Musk is, of course in a class of his own in this category.

Case in point, in their relentless pursuit of the latest shiny object, the brand new CEO announced that he would be baking AI features into the program.

After the inevitable outcry from Firefox users, the CEO has announced that there will be a kill switch to disable AI features.

The backlash against AI invading almost every aspect of the computing experience is growing by the day.

Particularly as an onslaught of lazy AI slop subsuming news feeds, the tech is starting to feel like a massive distraction — and huge parts of the internet are disillusioned or even fuming in anger.

For instance, a vast number of Windows users refused to upgrade after Microsoft announced it would turn the operating system into a so-called “agentic OS.”

Even household names in the open-source industry aren’t safe. After being appointed as the new CEO of open-source software company Mozilla, whose Firefox browser has long been lauded as a compelling alternative to Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo announced that it would be tripling down on AI.

In a December 16 blog post, Enzor-DeMeo announced that Firefox would become a “modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.”

But a ringing backlash quickly forced the company into damage control mode. 

………

The outcry was formidable enough for Mozilla to clarify the company’s new CEO’s comments.

“Something that hasn’t been made clear: Firefox will have an option to completely disable all AI features,” the company wrote in an update on Mastodon. “We’ve been calling it the AI kill switch internally. I’m sure it’ll ship with a less murderous name, but that’s how seriously and absolutely we’re taking this.”

I would note that Mozilla has released new and widely loathed features with some sort of kill switch, and 3 or 4 releases later, they remove the kill switch.

I had to engage in some fairly deep hacking to roll back their Mozilla add-on library requirement, for example.