I’m sorry, I’m not often someone to whine about Firefox UI. Usually their changes have been for good actually. BUT! But but but. Proper UI design would require AI features to be disabled if the toggle is disabled. This is both highly silly and very confusing.
Some dynamic text under the toggle that reads “AI Anti-Feature ‘X’ is on/off” could ensure absolute double-certain clarity.
There is in fact a “what these options mean” at the bottom of the page that does that.
i think you just blocked things you already blocked. that button is for blocking all at once, as per their statement
As they say, no AI is a feature.
Luckily, due to the nature of Firefox, this feature is free
its a kill switch to disable everything otherwise you can enable or disable the things you don’t want
It’s functionally a killswitch, yes, but it’s presented as a confusing mess. Enabling a disabling is still silly no matter what.
the ai stuff is disabled by default, you toggle it to enable it, this isn’t rocket surgery.
You and your post makes no sense. You have to enable ad blocking, so why wouldn’t you enable ai blocking? It’s even well explained in the screenshot and blocked by default.
I hate inverted booleans with an agenda
Using Librewolf solves the issues.
I’m using Zen and I haven’t seen any of this nonsense yet 🤷
I moved to librewolf a few days ago. Got sick of Mozilla fucking with shit. Yes, I’m aware librewolf is Firefox underneath.
Anything is better than using yet another Chromium wrapper and pretending to use a real alternative to Chrome 😀
I don’t see the problem. The paragraph of text explains exactly what it’s doing. Do you also have a problem with the “enabling” of your ad blocker “disabling” the ads? There’s nothing “dark pattern” about this at all.
Hehe. 47 people here think “enabling the disable-ation of ads” is clear language?! I’d like browsers / distributions include uBlock per default so there’s less spying. And if you want to enable all the ads and trackers, you’d go to the top right and press uBlock’s power button (to turn uBlock off - and ads on). I think that’s a clear and straightforward UX. At least that’s how I set up Linux computers and nobody ever complained 😄.
I mean it surely is a dark pattern to trick people into giving away their personal data to all those companies? Most of the users aren’t even aware. And their consent is fabricated by making this backwards?!
I could see that, but I think the key difference.
Adblocker is an active block of something from outside.
AI block is telling firefox not to use any of it’s own.
Kind of a do this, versus don’t.
“Do protect me from attackers.”
“Don’t attack me”
It should not be turn on to disable
Yes but I would argue that its function is properly described. I mean, it says what it does and if you want you can enable what it actually says.
It’s intentional.
This is just my opinion, but I think it’s reasonable to require your user to go to the settings if they want to remove a context menu item.
In fact, I think they’re going above and beyond here. Most people never use “Inspect Accessibility Properties”, yet they added it here with no option to remove it, and yet no one’s complaining.
I think the cause of this outrage is people reading too much into Firefox’s AI features. Firefox doesn’t bundle an LLM or make requests without your permission. It doesn’t put AI overviews on your pages. It didn’t remove existing functionality to make room for the new buttons. And it doesn’t shove any of the features into your face. It’s just a context menu item that opens a website in the sidebar if you choose to click on it.
If it’s not an opt-IN feature, then it’s malicious, anti-consumer design. Full stop.
The lengths people will go to defend Mozilla are astounding. If Chrome did this, you’d be throwing a fit.
Most features in most software are either opt-out or unremovable, though. It’s clearly not about that to you, it’s about the association with AI
I’m also largely against opt-out in other uses, too. The fact that this is AI only makes it that much worse.
No one’s against a feature being opt-out unless they actively dislike that feature. You’re not going to make a post about the context menu items you don’t use unless you have some political opposition against them.
Nobody complains about the ¤ key on their phone’s English QWERTY keyboard, or the “generate QR code from tab” feature in Firefox that I’m sure you’ve never used. Neither of these features is opt-in, and yet you’re content with them. It’s because you don’t have any political opinions about the features themselves. You don’t actually care about opt-out when the feature doesn’t bother you.
Thanks for telling me what I believe in spite of me laying it out in plain English for you. I was confused for a minute there.
if chrome added a toggle to turn off ai features?
I think thats not what OP is mildly infuriated about though. If I understood correctly its that you have to enable the setting “disable AI” instead of having a setting “use AI” (possibly enabled by default), which you would disable. Its just counterintuitive semantics
I agree. This is a double negative. Language usually goes with positive statements instead of double negative. You don’t say “I didn’t fail”. You say “I succeeded”. With that logic, the UI should say “Enable AI features” instead of “Disable AI blocker”.
You do the same thing with ad blockers. They are on when you are blocking ads. This is on for blocking AI.
Ask yourself what’s the main purpose. For an ad blocker, the purpose is to block ads. The dev spent hours developing the blocking mechanism, so it’s normal that it’s called an ad-BLOCKER. For the Firefox AI features, they spent hours implementing the AI tools. Look at the pop-up blocker in Firefox. It says “block pop-ups” because that’s the feature the dev worked on.
On device translation is amazing and exactly what this software should be approved for, I think it’s good that they let you pick this separately. I don’t care for surrendering my cognitive functions to an advertising panopticon machine, but translating pages without letting Google know what sites I’m looking at? Yes please
Especially since Google translate is just a front for Gemini these days (and not in an “LLMs were made for translating” way, you can literally prompt inject it)
Agreed. It’s the only one I leave turned on and use rarely. I do appreciate that it runs locally.
For the record, I know it was marketed as “AI killswitch”. I know it functions as one.
But it’s still hella confusing as presented in the configuration! Don’t do double negatives! If your design goal is “disable everything”, maybe give the users the option to, I don’t know, “disable everything”.
Isn’t that what it does? Except in your mind it would say “enable ai” and you’d have to enable it to access the options below.
That makes sense to me
It’s a dark pattern to confuse those who don’t read word by word. In daily life, if i have to turn on the switch to switch off the light, it just wouldn’t make sense, unless when it’s intentionally want to confuse and make you switch on the light.
An On/Off switch for AI Enhancement reads significantly better than On/Off switch to block AI Enhancement, the first one is just basic intuition.
Totally, they really should change those ad blocker buttons. Off to indicate ads are off right? Definitely not ‘on’ to indicate that ads have been disabled. Because that would be too confusing for people.
Is this AI Blocker 3rd party plugin or first party setting? In the same sense if those ad blocker are first party stuff that’s build into, say, youtube or news site, then yes, that would totally be a better option, off to turn off ads, on to turn on ads. If it’s third party tools made literally to turn off ads, then it make sense to turn on to block ads and turn off to allow ads. Common sense, yeah?
As someone who has gone through Windows group policy, the amount of weird policies and regedits we have to do to disable AI, recall, anayltics, etc. it’s insane and the process flip flops with tricky wording. Enabling something here and disabling stuff somewhere else, it gets annoying
You are comparing it to the worst of the worst
firefox is a spring garden filled with wildflowers and honeybees going about their business compared to the hellscape that is windows group policies.
Someone has been studying up on the Microsoft Group Policy way of wording things.
