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.

[PushoverMC]

The new CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo doesn't care about Firefox, he's a talking head business exec who doesn't know the first thing about what Firefox stands for and what its users want. He doesn't know or care about internet browsers, he only knows "business", and "business" tells him that AI is hot right now, so clearly that's what Firefox needs. He has no commitment to Firefox or its values, he's just doing "business" for a paycheck, Firefox would be better off without him.

[Buddhist-Zoolog]

Saying you offer choice doesn’t change the fact that many of us simply don’t want AI integrated at all. This move is the wrong direction for Firefox.

[bookdragon]

No, just no. Generative AI is categorically terrible, I have been disabling AI assistants since tech bros started trying to shove them down our throats. It's insulting to your userbase, we don't need a page summarized, we can read it for ourselves thanks.

Besides being insulting and unwanted, AI is bad for the environment, by their server farms guzzling water that's needed by humans in the community. 

Don't give us AI, we hate it, we don't want it, and forcing it on us would destroy so much of the respect people have for the Mozilla brand.

I switched my browser to Firefox for the privacy and security, don't spit in my face by trying to force-feed me AI slop.

[toavezon22]

Given that "the firefox way" seems to be stabbing users in the back to sell user data to fad companies built on plagarism and revenge porn, I wish you the best in finding a new, less discerning userbase.

[doctordipper]

How about no, and **bleep** you for asking.

[ch6]

How about no?

[kiwielo]

I am absolutely disgusted by the way firefox is acting about AI. If it continues this way I'll have to keep researching to find yet *another* browser. I chose firefox to get away from the **bleep**hole and data scraping security problem that is chromium. Now firefox is integrating it??

If AI simply must be included, it should be automatic opt out with absolutely zero AI features, and you have to opt in if you want it. This is absolutely frankly shameful. All the times i've recommended people switch to firefox, and now it's becoming worse. I'm so embarrassed on behalf of the browser, and behalf of myself for trusting it and recommending it to others when I apparently should not have, the way this is going.

[MillenniumTree]

I want a browser that DISABLES ALL AI CONTENT, FOREVER.  Block all domains related to AI, never allow AI garbage to run or show in the browser, from any vendor, ever.
Not an opt-out, with world-burning bloat trash still built in.
I will use firefox exclusively, everywhere, forever if you can do this.
Remove. All. AI.
It's hallucinationware, it's hideously unethical, it's a Lazy Lie Machine.  D E S T R O Y   I T.  Don't add fuel to the apocalypse.

Whoever decided to add AI here should be FIRED.

[Bonemannes]

Please get a grip on what's your actual userbase and stop trying to compete in a market of slop browsers: not only you're never gonna win against the likes of Chrome, but you'll also lose your current customers that use your product for privacy and an hassle-free experience on the net.

Revert the ToS changes on the GitHub and announce that you're never putting AI again in your browser, you've already done the damage and a killswitch won't repair anything, but at least you could CONTAIN said thing before **bleep** really hits the fan is all I'm saying

[scootmelton]

My feedback?

NO AI IN FIREFOX. Period.

Even with a kill switch, it'll add unnecessary bloat and complexity.

Have you polled your uses to see if this is what they want? It doesn't sound like it. You just got a new CEO who has decided to make their mark.  

Why don't you generate ideas from the bottom-up, and not the top-down?

[AlexiaSophia]

Honestly, this is how you're going to lose a LOT of users, myself included. You either insure that *all* AI is opt-out AND EASY TO OPT-OUT (no hidden links, commands, going to hidden settings, having to go through MULTIPLE toggles, random toggles that go back on, etc.) or... we're out! And honestly I'm half-way leaning towards leaving just by seeing that post and your attitude in this conversation.

[Megamoya]

Or even better, that *all* AI is opt-IN and not naggy. You get prompted a maximum of once, if at all, and it never reminds you again.

Or even better, that *all* AI code is in a plug-in that needs to be installed separately, and by default Firefox does not contain any of it.

Or even better, do not waste any of your money and man-hours of your workers in any of this AI dungturd in the first bloody place!

[Xx_Orfevre_xX]

I don't want to be able to 'opt-out' of AI, I don't want it on the browser period. I've gone into the settings repeatedly to disable AI functionality that I don't want and have never wanted. I have never logged into the community site for Mozilla before and it took me time to find this post; that should tell you enough as a long-time user of Mozilla Firefox how important this problem is to me. I would support Firefox entirely if it started making moves to rid of any AI on a page--but if the CEO is just as out of touch as any other CEO and moves forward with this I will switch to a browser that doesn't support AI tools at all. Waterfox is built off of Mozilla's open-source code and doesn't plan on implementing AI tools ever. 

[tmich3a]

I was absolutely disgusted today when I right clicked a tab and saw an AI option, despite previously turning off all AI.

Stop this immediately. Nobody wants this, nobody is asking for it. I WILL stop using Firefox if this continues. I've been championing it to my friends and family, and I feel disgusted to see Mozilla chasing this awful trend while also making it impossible for everyday users to completely disable it.

I dropped Windows in favor of Linux for their AI push, and I will do the same for any company that is trying to force me to use technology that is built on plagiarism and is speeding up the destruction of our world.

[squarepeg]

I guess this is goodbye then. I've been a Firefox user since it was Netscape Navigator/Mozilla Browser but I can no longer stand the ridiculous moves Mozilla keeps making, the removal of the 'we will never sell your data' TOS fiasco was bad enough and I was already considering moving, crow-barring AI into the browser is the last straw.
Goodbye Firefox, you have destroyed yourself.

[Devilpants]

Over 900 replies and only 25 kudos as of this post -- not gonna lie, I don't think this AI stuff is all that popular with the userbase. Maybe it's a mistake.

[TranquiLogan]

I want to climb a mountain and scream to the heavens "I DON'T CARE ABOUT AI" I could not care less about Gemini, Grok, ChatGPT, or whatever else. I don't care to be told what to think by a program, the sole purpose of which is to regurgitate text patterns written by actual people. Waiting for the bubble to pop

[KL1]

I think this approach is excellent. One of the things that attracted me to Firefox Android mobile was the ability to have different search engines at your fingertips. You can pick your default but you can switch to alternatives easily if they happen to be more suitable. If you achieve the same sort of thing with dealing with AI chatbots that would certainly be welcomed by someone like me, who finds AI on the whole to be genuinely helpful. 

[glaive1976]

I really wish the people steering this had had the foresight to start with these new features attached to a single checkbox in settings, and then honored previous settings on update. I probably could handle the mess y'all have made of this if it didn't force me to go digging after every update to disable features I am rather obviously rejecting.

Maybe poll your users, then listen to what they want a little.

The place for y'all to force machine learning is not on the user base but on the Firefox code itself, looking for answers regarding long standing bugs and new unknown ones.

[RBlue118]

Well, the only non-anti-ai posts in here are from you and the reply bot. I hope that's enough of a backlash for you to be able to go to your superiors and convince them to scrap this "feature"

[CHaSeD]

It won't, because the new CEO has no intention to NOT drink the Kool-Aid, but I'd love it if they did listen. Tech bros are ruining everything for literally no progress whatsoever.

[Megamoya]

Please Firefox, fire this CEO and replace him by one that is not an AIdiot. Then drop all your AI development immediately, and instead dedicate all that effort into a set of features to have Firefox disable AI features in displayed webpages.

[aaronchantrill]

A few months ago, I was able to easily load my own local LLM. Now I have to go into about:config, set (bizarrely) "browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost" to False, then edit "browser.ml.chat.provider" to the url of my actual local LLM running on my home server. This is not a good sign.

I really have only found one use for the whole "Ask AI Chatbot" menu, which is to scan EULAs looking for arbitration clauses and other problematic or dangerous language, but it's easy enough to simply open http://server:8080 and paste the EULA into it.

I did recently have a situation where I needed to update an expired certificate, but the only way to update the certificate was to log into the server itself, and since my server administrator has enabled HSTS on all the servers, my only option was to disregard the server warnings and load the page anyway. On Firefox, I had to "forget" the site to disable the preloaded HSTS policy, then immediately load the page, but after the first page loads the HSTS policy is re-implemented meaning that I was unable to upload the new certificate. In Chrome, I was able to type "thisisunsafe" and then set a temporary override for the old certificate while installing the new one. I was unable to find any way to accomplish this using Firefox, which is disturbing on a number of levels.

I'm a veteran of the browser wars from the early aughts and respect Firefox for holding the line on W3C recommendations and not allowing Microsoft to embrace, extend, extinguish the world wide web. This is the role I want Firefox and Mozilla to embrace and continue. It's been disturbing to watch them implement block-chain with no apparent implementation in the browser, embrace WebSpeech and create (and later abandon) their own STT engine instead of partnering with Kaldi, then hide the API and require users to download and install multiple docker containers only supporting their own abandoned DeepSpeech engine for local processing.

I do not understand why the Mozilla administration seems so dead-set on pissing off the user base.

[Saulin]

No one asked for this. 

[November]

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

Says the browser that abandoned desktop PWA support.

[samyotix]

I will uninstall Firefox if you add AI spam 

[samyotix]

"Let's build a useless, energy-wasting piece of garbage that users do not want the Firefox way! Yay!"

[Frede957]

I can not support this direction, and have decided to switch my use of browser to Vivaldi who are against AI integration, as well as stop my monthly donations to the mozilla foundation.

It truly hurts me to have to do this, but i see no other choice.

If you ever decide to remove the AI features, i might still come back.

[squarepeg]

This might be a good time to mention the good people at Librewolf - they remove all the 💩 that Mozilla have crammed into the once-brilliant Firefox browser. 

[TechHorse]

I don't know if anyone at Mozilla will read this, as they may have written this thread off by now. But just in case:

Please ensure that the forthcoming AI toggle off setting will not only disable and remove any pre-existing AI modules, but will also clean away any pre-existing working data that may have been created by them.

For example, if the user had had that module for AI searching their history, and the module had created some working database of information relating to that user's history, then disabling the module should not only remove the module, but clean away any such working data.

(To avoid a situation where, for example, the user later wants to clear all history but doesn't realise that a list of history still exists in a stray AI database file that wasn't cleaned away when the module was removed.)

Thanks.

[TechHorse]

Further to my previous post, please ensure that any AI module that records information about a person's usage is subject to the same kinds of history cleanups as regular usage is.

For example, if a person chooses to clear all history then any AI module that has been noting visited sites should have that history cleared also.

Or at least give the people who are using such features a straightforward method to clear AI-history as an independent process, if this is not included as part of the regular history clearing methods.

And if in a private window session, then any AI records of the names or contents of sites visited in the session should be kept entirely in memory, and disappear as soon as the private windows are closed.

It would also be good if people had the option to disable any usage-noting AI components for private windows. Similar as to how add-ons can be set to only run in normal windows.

[kkdavs09]

I am begging you to scrap the move to AI. It's disheartening and genuinely infuriating to have one of the last reliable browsers decide to go all in on technology built off of stolen ideas and half-baked nonsense (not to mention the biases of AI when it comes to race and sex). Please do not make AI inevitable for Mozilla users. I will try to quit the Internet entirely before handing my trust over to the AI overlords.