You will be able able to disable all AI features in Firefox starting in v148, Mozilla has announced.
The next major update of the web browser, which is scheduled for release on 24th of February, includes a AI Controls panel which does what many have been ask for: provide choice over whether AI features are surfaced in the UI or not.
You can turn off Firefox’s AI features wholesale or at a granular level.
If you want to use certain features, like on-device page translations and alt text generation, without being nagged to ‘try’ chatbots or use Google Lens, you can pick and choose:
New AI Controls in Firefox 148
If you don’t want any AI features in Firefox at all, the ‘Block AI enhancements’ toggle acts as a kill-switch.
But notice the framing here: you’re not ‘disabling AI’, you’re ‘blocking enhancements’. This reads a little like ‘confirm shaming‘, a form of deceptive pattern used to emotionally cue users to view their choice as self-sabotage.
If you choose deactivate all AI functions – sorry; block enhancements – globally, all AI functions that are available now are disabled but more importantly any that Mozilla adds in the future.
Firefox’s AI Kill-Switch
“We’ve heard from many who want nothing to do with AI. We’ve also heard from others who want AI tools that are genuinely useful. Listening to our community, alongside our ongoing commitment to offer choice, led us to build AI controls,” Mozilla say.
It may seem like a surprising volte-face given that Mozilla is “rewiring” itself as an AI-first company, whereby the amount of monetised AI features it shoves in its products is the yardstick by which success is now judged.
But AI features in Firefox have not proved universally popular – a sentiment the entire “AI” hype industry is immune to acknowledging, even when the market speaks. Mozilla’s own statement tacitly acknowledges part of the reason for the backlash: a lack of purpose.
For instance, Firefox made a big deal about its AI-powered tab grouping feature. But maxing out people’s CPUs to run a local AI model to run tab content analysis in the background solely to suggest tab group names is clearly a solution in search of a problem.
—Does anyone really need “AI” to suggest names for a group of, say, shopping tabs?
Mozilla continues to pay lip-service in filler-word heavy blog posts and expensive-looking mini-sites about how it’s building a ‘rebel alliance’ of open source AI companies to serve the public good rather than line the pockets of multi-billionaires.
But its actions tend to say otherwise.
It bought and subsequently killed FakeSpot, a prime example of ‘public service’ AI since it detected fake reviews on shopping sites, and it continues to aggressively push its own users to try OpenAI, Anthropic and CoPilot chatbots.
Even so, it is reassuring to see Mozilla relent – especially after its staff variously tried to redefine ‘opt-in’ as a ‘grey area’, and dismissed those asking for a kill-switch as ‘standing in the way of progress’ (all whilst championing ‘agency’ and ‘choice’, of course).
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