What’s going on, Internet? To the outrage of the Firefox community across the web, Mozilla has started rolling out AI across our beloved browser and has enabled the features by default.
I’ve found the new Firefox “AI” features, like the pop-ups that appear when highlighting text, to be more distracting than useful. The sidebar chat isn’t something I need either; if I want that experience, I’ll just open ChatGPT in a containerised tab.
If you’d like to turn these features off, open about:config in the Firefox address bar, search for browser.ml.enable, set it to false, and that should disable everything.
If you’d rather try some features while disabling others, keep browser.ml.enable set to true and toggle each feature individually.
I’m giving Smart Tab Groups a try for now, as I’m curious to see how the “AI” handles organising my dozens of open tabs. I’ll let you know how that goes.
Below is a list of the “AI” features you can disable in about:config, along with a short explanation of what I understand each one does. Enjoy.
| Setting | What it controls |
|---|---|
browser.ml.enable |
Master switch for Firefox’s built-in machine-learning platform. Turning this off disables all AI features. |
browser.ml.chat.enabled |
Enables the AI chatbot integration. |
browser.ml.chat.sidebar |
Shows the AI chat panel in the sidebar. |
browser.ml.chat.shortcuts |
Lets you trigger chat from selected text or shortcuts. |
browser.ml.chat.page |
Powers the on-page chat menu when you highlight text. |
browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge |
Displays the floating badge at the bottom of the page. |
browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge |
Shows the “Ask AI” badge in the page menu. |
browser.ml.chat.menu |
Adds “Chat about this” to right-click menus. |
browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled |
Generates AI-based link previews and suggestions. |
extensions.ml.enabled |
Allows browser extensions to use Firefox’s ML API. |
browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled |
Runs the AI “page assist” summariser/assistant. |
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled |
Uses AI to automatically group and label your tabs. |
browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnable |
Lets users manually toggle the smart tab groups feature. |
Later 👋
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