Building AI the Firefox way: Shaping what’s next together

[Jolie]

Hi everyone,

We recently shared how we’re approaching AI in Firefox with user choice and openness at the center of everything we build. We’ve heard from many of you who’d prefer not to have AI in your browser at all, and we get it: We will soon provide additional settings for you to control how AI is used (or not) in Firefox.

Nonetheless, standing still while technology moves forward doesn’t benefit the web or the people who use it. That’s why we see it as our responsibility to shape how AI integrates into the web, in ways that promote openness, transparency, and choice. That way, users and developers can use it freely, help shape it, and truly benefit from it.

You’ve already seen this approach in some of our latest features:
💬 AI Chatbot in the sidebar – Access your preferred chat assistant without switching tabs.
📱 Shake to Summarize on iOS – Quickly summarize pages and stay focused on what matters.

Now we’re working on something new, and we’d love your input.

What is AI Window?

AI Window is an intelligent space we’re building that lets you chat with an AI assistant and get help while you browse, all on your terms.

✅ Completely opt-in: You decide if and when to use it.
🔄 Model flexibility: Pick the AI model that best fits your needs.
⚙️ Full control: Easily toggle it on or off anytime.

Help us shape the future

We’re still early in development and want your feedback. Starting today, you can sign up to receive updates.

[amoroso]

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Nonetheless, standing still while technology moves forward doesn’t benefit the web or the people who use it.

In the early days after the discovery of radioactivity such substances were crammed everywhere, including in beverages and items for kids. Other technologies also showed great effectiveness and promise at first but turned out to be deadly or terribly harmful. Think of thalidomide, asbestos, and CFCs.

There's ample historical evidence that "progress" (or "technology moving forward") can and has been stopped or highly restricted. Sometimes standing still is the most sensible thing to do and delivers the greatest benefit.

[ShrikeBishop]

For the love of God Mozilla, please just don’t. Nobody wants this. We can leave for a sane fork anytime. Be the only non AI en**bleep**ified browser, there’s a niche for that. You’re already super niche anyway, this won’t bring you any new user.

[po3mah]

No AI in browser, please. Please focus on the browser that is: fast, small, stable, secure, compatible with variety of OSes, extensible, doesn't use dark UI patterns, respects users.

This is more than enough of things to focus on.

[Zergy]

I use Mozilla Firefox since version 0.8 and it's light to say I'm disappointed by the direction it take.

Instead of following the latest shinny tech bubble and mimic Google you should be very different from it and fight for the open web.

Your user are just now a niche composed of FOSS nerds and we hate AI with a burning passion.

Some advices?

Remove any AI thing, support JPEG XL and XSLT 3, give us back the Delicious Delicacies and the cute red pandas plushies.

Oh, and get ride of your C Suite, they are good at nothing. Remember that back in the day when some of your devs were creating Firefox and Thunderbird they wanted to cling on the Mozilla Suite.

[antiphasis]

As all others had said before: Stop the AI-Crap. Noone needs it, almost noone wants it. Those who want it can use whatever other browser, whatever other plugin / extension to use it. 

Think about what AI is - for real. It's a stochastic parrot - nothing less, nothing more. There is no intelligence at all. It's a idiocratic waste of time and resources. 

[Anonymous]

Parrots are actually intelligent. I have never met any living being as unintelligent as a LLMs. 

[valpackett]

No one asked for this.

*Not* having *any* "AI" integration would be a real differentiating feature. Look at the new Steam hardware announcement from Valve.. ZERO mention of "AI" ANYWHERE!

[kensanata]

The things I liked about AI and Firefox:

Local translation.

The things I hate about AI and Firefox:

How to turn it off. The fear of it leaking information to surveillance capitalism. The fear of suspecting there is yet another option that I might habe missed. The sadness of knowing all the resources spent on features I don’t want.

[pittance]

The main thing I want to know for any AI integration is how to turn it off. Integrating AI is already close to being a deaIbreaker but it's not an exaggeration to say that any AI integration that can't be turned off is a complete red line

You need to stop. You're not going to "beat" Chrome by being Chrome, your only option is to be different; why are you copying the worst, most toxic user-hostile parts of everyone else's business model?

[CelianGdfrd]

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@Jolie wrote:

We get it: We will soon provide additional settings for you to control how AI is used (or not) in Firefox.

---

you did, in fact, not get it.

[ndw]

"No."

[bpenris]

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@Jolie wrote:

What is AI Window?

---

Something nobody asked for and nobody wants and it would be nice if Mozilla would get off the train of pushing AI-stuff down our throats.

Focus on making the current product better, do not add stuff nobody wants.

[CSStrowbridge]

I am already looking for alternatives and I will drop Mozilla if Mozilla continues to pursue AI. 

[Rodentata]

Please stop, nobody wants this.

[dtw_]

Based on the MS announcements yesterday, an absence of AI is what is really going to put Linux/OSS on the desktop. Apparently Mozilla doesn't want to be part of that.

[SnyperWolf]

It would be really great to have a firefox installer that never would install any AI features in the first place.  Disabling AI is good, but I would prefer to never have it installed to begin with

[palace261]

You can install LibreWolf and get a completely AI-free Firefox experience. I totally recommend it.

[jamestomasino]

> We’ve heard from many of you who’d prefer not to have AI in your browser at all, and we get it: We will soon provide additional settings for you to control how AI is used (or not) in Firefox.

It's not just that we don't want AI in our browser, it's that we see you spending the energy and focus of Mozilla in a direction that's antithetical to your community's view of web technology. We don't want you focusing on AI at all. I'm not sure how much louder or more clear we need to be on that front for you to hear it.

> Nonetheless, standing still while technology moves forward doesn’t benefit the web or the people who use it.

This is true and why we need groups like yours pushing the latest developments of the web: accessibility, standards, CSS improvements. Not AI.

> That’s why we see it as our responsibility to shape how AI integrates into the web, in ways that promote openness, transparency, and choice.

You do this by building a better web, with structured data, with tooling that extends beyond the screen layout, with care and humanity that keeps content focused on people.

Just stop. Pivot back before you lose your audience completely and we're all stuck with Google deciding the future.

[ArtistSynth]

Nope, stop it with the AI

[modulux]

I think it's important that AI features remain possible to disable for people who don't want them, but I also wish people didn't speak for others in discussions like this. I want AI features, and I use Firefox. If you're not going to use them and they can be removed, they shouldn't bother you. There's a ton of Firefox features I don't use (full screen for example) but I don't get in a tizzy about devs not having the exact same priorities I do.

[nimu]

IF you are a real user, you could simply download an extension??? no one is forcing you not to use ai, we just want not to be forced to use it, it's the other way around.

[Rachel_norfolk]

What I and, it seems, the vast majority of people want is a good quality, lean, browser that respects privacy. Nothing more. 
How difficult is it to “read the room”? Just build what people are asking for. If you really believe that the GenAI features you are planning are wanted, then make them as an extension people can add. If they really want it, they will add it. 

[Szkodnix]

I already switched to some other forks of Firefox. I'm not going to deal with your ridiculous ideas.

Did LLM also decide on this direction of Firefox development? Why not to fire your CEO and hire LLM instead, if you are so into implementing AI?

[limako]

I would much prefer Firefox spent its limited resources building something useful. 

[bramble1]

Please take a break and reflect on the bizarre marketing speak in the original post. Someone is ticking the corporate checkboxes but forgot how to be a real, empathetic human.

One thing Mozilla can do in their position as technical experts (besides avoiding all of this LLM nonsense) is to stop calling it "AI" and help the general public understand that there is no "intelligence" involved. Call it LLM or whatever and provide resources that explain to the layperson that no, you can't trust it to be factually correct, no, you can't actually have a relationship with it, no, it's not capable of looking out for your best interests. Maybe provide some studies that explore the enormous energy consumption and environmental impacts, and some research into the cognitive effects and long-term societal effects of a population that cedes their ability to think and research to a corporation's stochastic parrot machine. 

The open web is almost dead and hanging on by a thread: adtech controls everything, major search engines return LLM slop as a "feature" AND the actual results are all LLM slop, hostile platforms like Meta and Google are doing their best to squeeze the life out of it. Would be ironic if Mozilla holds the hammer that puts the final nail in the coffin. Please wake up before it's too late, Mozilla. Does anyone working there remember what we had in the 90s and 2000s?

Who am I kidding, they'll probably just delete this thread. 

[trash_robot]

Why?

Why en**bleep**tify?

Why choose evil?

Everyone hates you now! Stop!

[Dupont2010]

Hello, (very) long time Mozilla user here. What a relief it was to quit IE6 for Firefox. What a shame it is to see what all this has become. Last thing I wanted to witness is my favourite browser following the stupidest and deadliest tech trend of the last 10 years. Please. I beg you. Stop this nonsense.

[MxAmber]

Yeah nah. I've been using Firefox since 2009, give or take, and stuck with y'all through several terrible decisions (like axing the old extensions – still haven't forgiven you for that, by the way!) but this is a bridge too effing far.

Do you have any idea how "AI" actually works? Have you spent any time at all learning what's under the hood?

These models are neither intelligent nor remotely useful. They act on statistics, nothing else; they generate output that resembles sentences that are probable. That's all. They can't think, they can't understand, they can't reason. Their summaries are wrong, their explanations are wrong, when you prompt one to explain its decision, it is literally impossible for it to do so, all it can do is generate an explanation that looks like a real sentence.

And all that at absurd environmental cost, ethical cost, and involving industrial-scale copyright violations.

It's nuts, and you're nuts for wanting to bloat Firefox with this.

Remember every hype train you've jumped onto? The next best biggest newest hottest thing? Where's Pocket? Where's Positron? Persona? Firefox OS? Ubiquity? Firefox Hello? Let's face it, you have a loooong history of trying to make Firefox "more than a browser", and every time, you've failed. Focus on what you do best, other than screwing users over, and just make. a. good. browser.

Do yourselves, and us, a favour and actually try to understand how GPTs/LLMs work. Because right now, it sounds like you're just eating up OpenAI and Facebook marketing materials (and to be blunt, your post itself reeks of ChatGPT).

And then scrap the whole "AI" nonsense and apologise.

(P.S: I hate having to make accounts for anything, and yet I made an account to tell you off – I didn't do that when you killed good extensions or launched awful redesigns, so this should tell you how much I don't want any genAI **bleep**e in my FF!)

(P.P.S: Holy mackarel you auto-censor expletives in your forums? What is this sanitised garbage, Facebook? LMFAO)

[CodeNamePancake]

I just want a simple browser which renders the HTML/CSS/JS returned from the server address I requested it from. Grafting all kinds of garbage on to the basic core of the tool is what killed the original Mozilla browser (yes, I'm old enough to remember that) and required Firefox to be built in the first place. As an organization you have learned nothing. Stick to where you provide value (i.e. making a browser) and allow your users to make their own decisions about "AI". (From the contents of this thread, they seem well capable of doing so.) 

[fearnothing]

I stopped using Firefox altogether over the insistence on ramming AI in to it. I might consider coming back if you took it out, though it would take a while to trust you again. 

[forestine]

People like(d) Firefox because it was the alternative to these other corporate browsers shoving stuff down our throats that we didn't ask for. Instead of listening to feedback, you're adding more and more unwanted features to the browser which require advanced knowledge to disable. And it's like playing whack-a-mole with every update when there is YET ANOTHER AI "feature". Please stop wasting resources on a race to the bottom and add an easy way for anyone to turn off every AI feature in perpetuity. People don't want this.

[eheil]

You could improve AI in Firefox by shoving it where the sun don't shine.  We do not want it.  We do not trust it.  We do not like it.  I hate the fact that every time I install Firefox I have to dig through about:config to root out a dozen settings to truly banish this garbage from my browser.  I've been using Firefox for literal decades and adding ML to the browser is the only thing that has made me consider ditching it permanently.  It is the biggest breach of trust in a long series of breaches of trust.

[mudo]

"We can't stand still" said the lemmings heading to the cliff. You're not being asked to "stand still", but to stop running in the wrong direction and head somewhere more productive.

[jepyang]

no. none of this.

don’t want ai, at all. don’t want it toggleable, don’t want it opt-in, don’t want it sandboxed. i want it completely absent. period.

be a tech leader by leading the way to an AI-free future.

[shgw]

This sounds as thrillingly exciting as the time that Firefox joined the blockchain and, though I've no clear idea what an "intelligent space" is, I've heard them mentioned often before, usually in 8am marketing meetings, since around 1998, so it would be nice if one ever existed.

All the same, I've lived long enough to recognise urgent pointlessness when I have to read about it, and this smells of something similar. Especially when, as you admit, you're pouring time and resources into your "intelligent space" (what was wrong with "smart hole"?) before you've put in proper controls for the regurgitatory tools you've shoe-horned in already.  Much as I enjoy playing whack-a-mole in config, I regretfully doubt that everyone else will be as bored or indulgent as I am.

The pointlessness is, I hope, obvious. There are plenty of AI portals already discoverable through the browser, which is largely the point of a browser, and if we wanted to "stay focused on what matters" we wouldn't be using one anyhow. The urgency is less clear. If you were a profit-making corporation, devoted to enriching your shareholders, then you'd have to keep up with the competition, and if they added another button to their remote-control, or put another lamp in their fridge, you'd be well advised to add two. But you're not, and a web-browser isn't a fridge, it's a gateway to a universe of nonsense. And that, in itself, is the point I'm trying to make. You make the gateway, not the nonsense and, though you're not wholly inexperienced in the latter as your post nicely shows, it's not really your strong point. Some of you, even now, are still doing some good and useful work, and it would be charming, if admittedly quaint, if you simply continued to do it.

[TheVHSWizard]

Quick unrelated story... I used to love getting food from Subway (the sandwich place).  Their subs were great, exactly what I wanted.  But then Quiznos came around with their *toasted* subs, which introduced a choice into the market... I could choose toasted (but kind of terrible) subs and go to Quiznos, or I could choose non-toasted (but overall much better) subs and go to Subway.

And that's where it should have ended, right?  I am making my choice, I am going to Subway, Subway has the sandwich type and quality I want, so that's my choice.  But no, it was not enough for Subway that a majority of people were still choosing them, they couldn't stand the thought that there was a new market space that they were not also a part of, and rather than just existing parallel to the "toasted" sub market, Subway tried to turn into a *toasted* sub place too?  And in order to do this, they started cutting a lot more corners on all the rest of their stuff... toppings disappeared, choices were limited, bread types were discontinued - in order to streamline making their subs toasted.  And then, they started aggressively pushing the TOASTED subs on everybody.  On multiple occasions, I had to shout at the subway employees asking them to please NOT put my sub in the toaster, I did not ask for it to be toasted, they just sort of assumed everybody wanted toasted subs and you had to scream at full volume to snap them out of their toasted sub trance.

Well, this entire process alienated me to Subway.  I didn't like Toasted subs, I felt like I had already VERY CLEARLY MADE MY CHOICE when I went to Subway instead of Quiznos, and their insistence on aping all the worst parts of their competitors in order to "complete" with them felt like a betrayal of my trust, and I got to a point where I stopped going to Subway entirely.  And I'm not saying it's wrong to like Toasted Subs, though I personally think they're kind of vile, I'm just saying if I have already chosen the not-toasted-subs guys, them trying to force me to like toasted subs is a very quick way to completely piss me, the sub buyer, off.

No reason to tell this story, definitely nothing applicable to the article here, just... and old man yelling at clouds, really.

[Owlbear]

Another "no AI, please" opinion from me.
This is not something people need in a browser.
And the potential for environmental harm inherent in the casual use of data centre resident models is startling.

[loiclac]

While I use LLM on a daily basis, I use it voluntarily. I like that I can choose any LLM, AI service, by just going on their website. I do not want a pre-selection of badly integrated tools in Firefox. Using a web browser to actually browse the web and access AI tools is fine. Keep on doing a good browser and cut away the AI crap.
Sorry mates, but other than being deeply annoying, I do not see any point in adding AI tooling integration into Firefox.

[arxphire]

Then you know how powerful LLM's can be... so why not make it possible to have local LLM's? Or ability to use non-VC-funded LLM's? I do not think regular browsing will stick around much longer as we all move towards agentic use. I am more scared we will have no open source options because we can only see the big trees infront of the forrest. If we didn't have Linus all those years ago we would not have an alternate way of using a PC. 

[MikeTaylor]

(BSD would like a word.)