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Something that hasn't been made clear: Firefox will have an option to completely disable all AI features. We've been calling it the AI kill switch internally. I'm sure it'll ship with a less murderous name, but that's how seriously and absolutely we're taking this. …

All AI features will also be opt-in. I think there are some grey areas in what 'opt-in' means to different people (e.g. is a new toolbar button opt-in?), but the kill switch will absolutely remove all that stuff, and never show it in future. That's unambiguous. …

I'm not asking for faith in our direction - the thing I love about the Firefox community is how open, honest, and technical it is. But I do ask that you don't have the opposite of faith. Like, try not to be determined that we're going to do the wrong thing here. …

Thanks Jake! I trust you as a person and your intentions a lot, so I hope you have enough power to steer that ship in the right directions! For me Firefox feels like a two-sided coin rn: glad Theo are here, glad they have an engine to not make Google and Apple the duopoly

But on the other side doing some things in recent years that simply don't look good :/ I guess, the issue in the end is funding. Building a fully fleshed out browser engine is expensive as hell and when your main product is a free thing for the world, it's really hard to finance that :/

You are the first Firefox person that talks in the same language with its user base. I bet the blowback would not have been this extreme had it been someone like you and not your CEO who was in charge of that public statement.

Which is also kinda worrying/sad that you aren't the one personally working on this stuff? Just the shift in communication principle between "opt-in" and "opt-out" is already a massively different approach.

I personally do not want Firefox to be working on AI at all and prefer that Firefox continue spending its resources on optimization, user-friendly features, and performance. But, if Firefox continues with AI development, the only path that could fly is developing its own model.

so far I can tell the dev team, that I will not return to Firefox proper. The ML was already implemented into FF without the Users knowledge and it was quite painful to disable. I did after 19 years switch over to Waterfox and don't think the new CEO can be trusted.

Just be glad this thread wasn't a long-ass video. It almost was.

FWIW, I’m switching my desktop usage to Waterfox until I see some forward-looking demonstration of consistency in this approach. I don’t doubt that those working the technical side understand peoples’ frustrations but I’m tired of having to swap services because management found a new shiny toy.