Firefox will give users the option to disable AI features

22 December 2025

From a post on the Firefox for Web Developers Mastodon account:

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.

There’s no escaping AI, and that may not always be a bad thing, but it seems inevitable that web browsers of the future will eventually be like Altas, the ChatGPT/OpenAI browser. I don’t however like the idea of taking an existing browser, and fitting it out with AI functionality, as Mozilla intends to do.

As I wrote about two months ago, if Mozilla wants to release an AI browser, it should be separate from the existing Firefox browser. If people want to use an AI-powered version of Firefox, fine, they can do so. But if people don’t want that, it shouldn’t be foisted upon them. That’s probably thinking that’s a tad too simplistic however. The AI “kill switch” it will have to be.

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