I'm glad to add Firefox to the list of apps I have to constantly check to make sure they haven't turned back on all the anti-features I disabled.
#firefox #mozilla #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #SmartIsSurveillance #tech #dev #web
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I'm glad to add Firefox to the list of apps I have to constantly check to make sure they haven't turned back on all the anti-features I disabled.
#firefox #mozilla #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #SmartIsSurveillance #tech #dev #web
Anthony
in reply to Anthony • • •Based on the answers to this StackOverflow question and this blog post, here are the 16 (!!!) AI-related settings in new versions of Firefox that you'll want to disable/set to false, and that might be turned back on with each update:
-
browser.aiwindow.enabled-
browser.ml.chat.enabled-
browser.ml.chat.menu-
browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge-
browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge-
browser.ml.chat.page-
browser.ml.chat.shortcuts-
browser.ml.chat.sidebar-
browser.ml.enable-
browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled-
browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled-
browser.ml.smartAssist.enabled-
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled-
browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled-
extensions.ml.enabled-
sidebar.notification.badge.aichatEnter "about:config" in the browser bar and then search for each of these and disable them, turn them off, or set them to false as appropriate.
Depending on which version of Firefox you have you may not have all these configuration options.
Check your smartphone browsers too!
#firefox #mozilla #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #SmartIsSurveillance #tech #dev #web #NoAI #AICruft #antifeatures
Disable AI In Firefox
fLaMEdpaulrickards reshared this.
Gilberto Ruiz
in reply to Anthony • • •GitHub - yokoffing/Betterfox: Firefox user.js for speed, privacy, and security. Turn off AI. Your favorite browser, but better.
GitHubAnthony
in reply to Gilberto Ruiz • • •Amy
in reply to Anthony • • •browser.ml.enable! This gives the impression you need to disable all of these and be on the lookout for more, which is misleading.Amy
in reply to Amy • • •Anthony
in reply to Amy • • •Amy
in reply to Anthony • • •Anthony
in reply to Amy • • •Amy
in reply to Anthony • • •Anthony
in reply to Amy • • •Default opt-in is a dark pattern, and signals an untrustworthy organization in my personal opinion. Something's gone off the rails when software starts including known-controversial features as default opt-in. That's my starting point for all this.
Incorporating Perplexity AI search, as Firefox is also doing, is not on-device. Granted that's different from the features affected by these config options. But who's to say whether future ML and AI features they add will continue to be on device. I for one will be watching them very closely, and I see now downside to doing so.
Anthony
in reply to Amy • • •Anthony
in reply to Amy • • •Please don't refer to my post as misleading without first asking where I'm coming from. That's needlessly accusatory, and helps no one.
browser.ml.enablepresumably does not clobber all the LLM/AI features. There are "smartAssist", "aiWindow" and "aichat" features that may or may not be affected by that setting, since they are in different namespaces. Furthermore, if you'd read the StackOverflow page and the comments, you'd have seen that some of these features are newly-added in the latest release of Firefox. Hence the admonition to be on the lookout for new ones.Amy
in reply to Anthony • • •I should have perhaps qualified with "to the best of my knowledge", sorry. I didn't mean it was misleading intentionally at all. I'm just worried this will give people needless anxiety, scouring about:config every Firefox update.
I believe it does though - although yes, technically we cannot be 100% sure.
Anthony
in reply to Amy • • •Amy
in reply to Anthony • • •it suggests that you need to turn them all off, that's all.
The blog post says you can turn them all off with
browser.ml.enable.Anthony
in reply to Amy • • •Amy
in reply to Amy • • •Anthony
in reply to Amy • • •Amy
in reply to Anthony • • •Anthony
in reply to Amy • • •What would be the motivation for an employee of a large organization to enthusiastically support the mission of the organization they've chosen to work for, and that provides them their livelihood, to the point that they might overlook certain facts that are of importance to people less enthusiastic about their organization's recent behavior? I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Your vigorous assertions that a single flag should turn off all the ML/AI features--including the ones in different namespaces--are unconvincing. Since it is a negligible amount of additional work for me to toggle all of them off/false/what have you, I will continue to do so.
Julien W.
in reply to Anthony • • •Anthony
in reply to Julien W. • • •Julien W.
in reply to Anthony • • •Anthony
in reply to Julien W. • • •Julien W.
in reply to Anthony • • •Anthony
in reply to Julien W. • • •Does setting
browser.ml.enableto false overridebrowser.ml.linkPreview.enabled,browser.ml.pageAssist.enabledandbrowser.ml.smartAssist.enabled? Does it set them to false? If so this behavior is not obvious, and the naming of these options in this way is ripe for confusion and misinterpretation. If these settings are left alone, then they have be checked separately.Does setting
browser.ml.enableto false also setextensions.ml.enabledto false or override? If so, why? That is unexpected and confusing behavior. If not, then these settings have to be checked and changed separately.Does setting
browser.ml.enableto false also setbrowser.tabs.groups.smart.enabledandbrowser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabledto false, or overide them? If so, why the heck? This is unexpected and confusing behavior. If not, then these have to be checked and changed separately.Does setting
browser.ml.enableto false setbrowser.ml.chat.sidebarto false, or override it? If so, why? If not, this is another setting that has to be checked and changed separately.What about
browser.ml.chat.shortcutsandbrowser.ml.chat.shortcuts.custom?Does setting
browser.ml.enableto false also setbrowser.aiwindow.enabledto false, or override it? If so, what the hell? If not, this is another setting that has to be checked and changed separately.I don't have the numbers in front of me but Firefox used to have maybe 5 settings like this. Now it has 16. How many more are going to be added? 32 more? 100 more? Will they all be controlled, ultimately, by
browser.ml.enable, regardless of how they're named? If not, how am I to know when I need to scour through these settings again to see if any new ones have popped up? This feels user hostile if you're a user who does not want AI cruft in your web browser.How many bug reports do you reckon I should file about the above?
Paul
in reply to Anthony • • •Anthony
in reply to Paul • • •I'm not going to poke through a settings panel and hope. I want all these settings permanently off. I don't want the settings to be reverted after upgrade, which some reports suggest is happening. I don't want new configuration options that I'm opted into by default to pop up without my knowing.
Right now watching
about:configis the only viable way to satisfy those requirements."Much safer"? AI/LLMs are not safe. I'll make safety judgments for myself, thanks. "Much easier"? I'll be the judge of that, thanks.
A strange reply, I have to say--it's unclear what your motivations are for posting this.
Paul
in reply to Anthony • • •Saving you and others from having to poke around in about:config and risking data loss and damaging your own Fx setup was the aim.
The settings screen is much easier to navigate and safer to use for most people and with good reason it does not have the same warning screen as about:config.
Anthony
in reply to Paul • • •And you believe I don't know this because.........?
Check that savior complex talk please.
firebreathingduck
in reply to Anthony • • •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?
Anthony
in reply to firebreathingduck • • •I am curious as well.
Mozilla's new CEO is all-in on AI, though, regardless of what its users want: lwn.net/Articles/1050826/
He says the word "trust" a whole bunch of times yet intends to turn an otherwise nice web browser into a slop-slinging platform. I don't expect this will work out very well for anyone.
Mozilla gets a new CEO: Anthony Enzor-DeMeo
LWN.netAnthony
in reply to Anthony • • •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
Firefox for Web Developers
2025-12-18 12:11:21
P.J. Meisch
in reply to Anthony • • •Sensitive content
Anthony
in reply to P.J. Meisch • • •It's a good question, and I have to confess that I did not check as thoroughly as I should have before posting. Here's what I just found:
That account is run by Jake Archibald, who joined Mozilla in August working on Firefox. The kill switch coming in an upcoming release is confirmed here: 9to5linux.com/firefox-will-shi…
as well as by the new Mozilla CEO on reddit here: reddit.com/user/anthony-firefo…
If this is being faked then whoever's doing it sure is going to a lot of trouble.
Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux
Marcus Nestor (9to5Linux)Chris Siebenmann
in reply to Anthony • • •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
Anthony
in reply to Chris Siebenmann • • •user.jsto harden the browser. Arkenfox has auser-override.jsfile where you put the settings you want to stick between updates; I imagine Betterfox has something similar but I haven't looked that much into it yet. You could put these AI settings in there. I hesitate to publicly suggest such things till I've had a chance to check them out so I haven't. It's good to see there are options, though.Ellie 🏴🏳️⚧️
in reply to Anthony • • •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.
Anthony
in reply to Ellie 🏴🏳️⚧️ • • •