Firefox uses on-device downloaded-on-demand ML models for privacy-preserving translation.
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The Firefox AI "kill switch" is not "complicated" except insofar as it's incoherent. it's not "undisclosed nuance" except insofar as it's incoherent.
the "kill switch" doesn't exist.
this is important to keep in mind. once you remember that NONE OF THIS EXISTS, you will realise that every one of the dilemmas you posit is an imaginary problem that follows from incoherent postulates.
e.g. "AI kill switch purists" is not a coherent postulation because the "kill switch" does not exist.
the "kill switch" is a hypothetical proposed in this post:
https://mastodon.social/@firefoxwebdevs/115740500373677782
the "kill switch" is a proposal to satisfy the demand for an opt-in by providing an opt-out. you might think that's a failure to respect the question, and you might even begin to suspect the proposal was in bad faith.
note that Jake, in presenting the kill switch and calling it a kill switch and getting it into all the papers as a kill switch, says he's uncomfortable with the name he's publicised it as. you might think that's oddly incompetent for literally a PR (devrel) person.
the concept as presented imposes multiple false dilemmas.
the LLM stuff should *incredibly obviously* be an extension. this is the purest possible opt-in, despite jake's past attempts to muddy the meaning of "opt-in".
making it an extension is also eminently feasible. There is literally no technical reason it needs to be a browser built-in.
this suggests the reasons are not in any way technical. some person with a name, who has yet to be named, dictated that it would be a built-in. so that's what Mozilla is going with.
why Mozilla went hard AI is entirely unclear. this would have been late 2024? we have no idea who was inspired with this bad idea nor why they were so incredibly keen to force it into the browser.
nor is it clear what Mozilla will do for external LLM services when the AI bubble runs out of venture capital and pops in a year or so, most of the chatbot APIs shut down and whatever remains is 10x the cost at least. but that's a problem for 2027's bonus, not 2026's.
note how the poll provides no option for "no LLM functions built-in to Firefox", in a pathetically transparent attempt to synthesize consent. jake wants to use this poll as evidence of what the user base wants, deliberately leaving out the option he knows directly a lot of them want.
and in conclusion:
1. solve the "kill switch" naming problem by branding it the "brutal and bloody robot murder switch with an option on the executives responsible".
2. make all this shit an extension like they should have a year ago.
3. and your little translator too.by the way, here's the Twitter version of the poll, posted the same time as the masto version. the screenshot is the *entire* responses to the poll, because Twitter is a plague graveyard.
https://xcancel.com/FirefoxWebDevs/status/2008586590998983153
note also the claim about "open data", which turns out to mean "we took the data cos someone found it lying around fell off the back of a truck honest" and not "open" in any other sense.
but the weird thing is, it has one less option for no good reason (Twitter allows four options too).
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@mdavis folks want to disable 'AI' for more reasons than privacy. Privacy is important of course, but folks are also concerned about the training data, and energy used for the training.
@firefoxwebdevs I'm nitpicking here: it's not just energy, it's greenhouse geases emissions during training, and training data but also water used for cooling and DC space and water used for making GPUs and mining and destruction of life in the process. It's a lot broader than just energy. it's all about Life Cycle Assesment (LCA) and multiple impacts: GHG, water, pollution, etc. cc @mdavis
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@mdavis I believe it's a moral stance due to how the models were produced.
@firefoxwebdevs indeed. cc @mdavis
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Firefox uses on-device downloaded-on-demand ML models for privacy-preserving translation.
They're not LLMs. They're trained on open data.
Should translation be disabled if the AI 'kill switch' is active?
@firefoxwebdevs I would be fine for a deep learning model akin deepl but privacy first on device.
AI is a bullshit marketing terms.
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@firefoxwebdevs But wait… what if the developers used AI to help develop the code in the browser itself? Does that mean AI kill switch purists should then rather not even use the product at all?
@mdavis @firefoxwebdevs As an example, firefox nuked all the community contributed documentation on their japanese pages in favour of machine translated AI-Slop, those are reasons we are very much against this, instead of well done human translations done with care it's now pure garbage.
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Let's ask the real question:
Firefox users,
do you want any AI directly built into Firefox, or separated out into extensions?
@duke_of_germany @firefoxwebdevs @davidgerard @tante
4th option: i was a Firefox user until they fed it up with AI -
Firefox uses on-device downloaded-on-demand ML models for privacy-preserving translation.
They're not LLMs. They're trained on open data.
Should translation be disabled if the AI 'kill switch' is active?
@firefoxwebdevs Why are so many people clicking "yes" here? I don't get why you wouldn't want to have a local offline translator that gives you privacy preserving translations by default. For me the AI kill switch should only kill services that actually send and request data from other companies, here it's just a local translator.
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Let's ask the real question:
Firefox users,
do you want any AI directly built into Firefox, or separated out into extensions?
@duke_of_germany @firefoxwebdevs @davidgerard @tante As long as Firefox has *anything* to do with the slop-generating plagiarism machine, it will not be used by me.
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Let's ask the real question:
Firefox users,
do you want any AI directly built into Firefox, or separated out into extensions?
@duke_of_germany @firefoxwebdevs @davidgerard @tante
hoping @zenbrowser, based on FF, will stay away from this
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@firefoxwebdevs Why are so many people clicking "yes" here? I don't get why you wouldn't want to have a local offline translator that gives you privacy preserving translations by default. For me the AI kill switch should only kill services that actually send and request data from other companies, here it's just a local translator.
@noah a lot of folks have (reasonable imo) concerns around how these models are trained. I'm not sure how much of that applies to the translation models, but feelings count here.
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@firefoxwebdevs Where's the option for "I do not want this bullshit toy anywhere near my browser"? Is someone forcing you at gunpoint to be pro-slop? Why are all the executives so into this crap? Can't we just let them have their cocaine daydreams without subject the rest of us to it?
@StarkRG @firefoxwebdevs @davidgerard Firefox only exists because Google subsidize them so they can point to FF as "proof" that Chrome isn't a monopoly. With the new regime in power, that's a dead issue. So Google want FF to push AI adoption now because they've figured out how to monetize it and they don't want precious eyeballs evading their slopware. If Google cut off their "search" payment to FF, Mozilla goes bust and the C-suite lose their jobs. QED.
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Firefox uses on-device downloaded-on-demand ML models for privacy-preserving translation.
They're not LLMs. They're trained on open data.
Should translation be disabled if the AI 'kill switch' is active?
@firefoxwebdevs i use Firefox on-device translation fairly regularly! i think it should still be part of some sort of kill switch due to the size of the models that need to be downloaded (iirc?) but definitely allow a way to enable it, and maybe other similar non-LLM ML features. i could see there being a separate LLM killswitch that's a subitem of an ML killswitch
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Why is Firefox even running this survey?
Because the people in charge genuinely believe that AI slop is The Future
and believe that, in order to stay relevant, Firefox must become an AI Browser.But somehow users inexplicably dislike AI slop?! How can this be?!
Embedding AI slop in Firefox as deeply and pervasively as possible is thus a critical goal. But this risks reputational damage with its actual users! To mitigate the risk, bundle features that were not controversial into the discussion of the controversial features; this serves to average the controversy across the (previously uncontroversial, existing) translation feature and highly controversial new slop features, hopefully reducing it below an ignorable threshold.
So Mozilla recently announced their new CEO, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo. Just before the Holiday break. They launched this on the back of their Summary Portfolio Strategy back in November.
There's a key line in the document:
MoCo (and Mozilla) still depend on search for ~85% of revenue.
We know that business line is dying, so they clearly need something new here. And they're trying to do something to keep the ship moving here. This decision isn't just Anthony's decision, there is clear board involvement here, there are lots of people in agreement on how to change direction on this ship.
So let's pick different people. Let's say you get to be in charge. You RA0F are the new board and CEO.
What do you do instead?
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@firefoxwebdevs Here's a concrete example of what I mean, that should be pretty consistent with the Firefox UI design:
@joepie91 @firefoxwebdevs turns out the translator includes mass-collected data too, it's not "open data" at all but whatever they found lying about
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Firefox uses on-device downloaded-on-demand ML models for privacy-preserving translation.
They're not LLMs. They're trained on open data.
Should translation be disabled if the AI 'kill switch' is active?
@firefoxwebdevs As said before. Remove ALL AI from firefox and ship it in extensions (or plugins).
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Firefox uses on-device downloaded-on-demand ML models for privacy-preserving translation.
They're not LLMs. They're trained on open data.
Should translation be disabled if the AI 'kill switch' is active?
@firefoxwebdevs What about you opt in to the AI stuff you want by installing an extension, it's easy, problem is solved, then you are stopping cramming in stuff people don't want, 99% of people don't need, this has been suggested so many times, and you keep on ignoring it, I guess the answer is pressure from the leardership..
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@firefoxwebdevs The frame of this question is risible.
I am begging you to just make a web browser.
Make it the best browser for the open web. Make it a browser that empowers individuals. Make it a browser that defends users against threats.
Do not make a search engine. Do not make a translation engine. Do not make a webpage summariser. Do not make a front-end for an LLM. Do not make a client-side LLM.
Just. Make. A. Web. Browser.
Please.
@m0rpk @firefoxwebdevs 100% this. I've been using Firefox since before it was called that. I was, way back in the day, an NCSA XMosaic user. I just want the inheritors of that legacy not to ruin it but instead to build he best damn *browser* on the web. Please stop forcing us to use forks designed to fix all the things you break.
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@firefoxwebdevs Where's the option for "I do not want this bullshit toy anywhere near my browser"? Is someone forcing you at gunpoint to be pro-slop? Why are all the executives so into this crap? Can't we just let them have their cocaine daydreams without subject the rest of us to it?
@StarkRG @firefoxwebdevs because most executives were always human slop machines trained on Gartner and linkedin
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@joepie91 @firefoxwebdevs Mozilla's tortured definition of opt-in seems to predict that Mozilla will invent features to nag you into enabling AI, as they have already done with Link Previews: https://www.quippd.com/writing/2026/01/06/architecting-consent-for-ai-deceptive-patterns-in-firefox-link-previews.html
@yoasif @joepie91 @firefoxwebdevs if only there were some way to let users tell you what they actually want https://social.treehouse.systems/@dysfun/115746064081228352
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@StarkRG @firefoxwebdevs @davidgerard Firefox only exists because Google subsidize them so they can point to FF as "proof" that Chrome isn't a monopoly. With the new regime in power, that's a dead issue. So Google want FF to push AI adoption now because they've figured out how to monetize it and they don't want precious eyeballs evading their slopware. If Google cut off their "search" payment to FF, Mozilla goes bust and the C-suite lose their jobs. QED.
@cstross @firefoxwebdevs @davidgerard
Sure, I just wish they'd stop lying about it and pretending like it's anything anyone actually wants.
