I feel for Mozilla. Legitimately. They haven’t been having an easy go of it for years. None of their attempts to diversify their finances away from Google have panned out. They’ve bought services and shuttered them, rebranded, and replaced their management team multiple times. Actions speak louder than words, and their actions belie a lack of direction and purpose.

This is concerning for the health of the Web, given Mozilla write the only meaningful browser engine that competes with WebKit/Blink. But it also makes me sad on a personal level, because I was such a fan of their work, and a believer in the open Web and principles of choice and empowerment that they stood for. I wore the shirts, I spruiked them at events, I’ve blogged about them for twenty years. Heck, I’m one of the 5% of people on the Web who still uses Firefox as their daily driver, and still remembers the names Phoenix and Firebird.

This is why takes like this one from Anil Dash feel… off, emphasis his:

One of the top stories on Hacker News today was a post arguing that Mozilla shouldn’t accommodate any usage of AI in Firefox because (understandably) people were mad at Big AI companies for all the horrible things they’ve done to users and the internet and society. But I think people are ignoring the reality that *hundreds of millions of users* are using LLMs today, and they need to have tools from platforms that will look out for their interests.

“Hundreds of millions of users” out of… billions of Internet users? Who’s looking out for the interests of the majority who don’t use “AI”, or who actively don’t want to? Or to put it another way, why is Firefox configured to make it easy to opt in, but not to opt out?

As a reminder, this is what you have to do if you want to disable “AI” features in the current version of Firefox:

about:config
user_pref("browser.ml.enable", false); 
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.enabled", false); 
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.sidebar", false);
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.menu", false); 
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page", false); 
user_pref("extensions.ml.enabled", false); 
user_pref("browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled", false); 
user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled", false);
user_pref("pdfjs.enableAltTextModelDownload", false); 
user_pref("pdfjs.enableGuessAltText", false);

To use the word people overseas think Australians say all the time but don’t: strewth! No, wait:

user_pref("browser.ml.chat.strewth", yeahnah);

I’d be willing to entertain Anil’s point if Firefox didn’t obfuscate these settings. But they do. This is hostile design, and it’s why Mozilla’s AI pivot has landed like a lead balloon among their supporters. Again, it’s not a good-faith choice if a person has to beware of the leopard. Someone in the valley will eventually figure out consent, but evidently not today.

∗ ∗ ∗

Mozilla used to be above this sort of behavior. It might be hard to believe for my younger readers, but Mozilla took on Internet Explorer that was just as entrenched as Chrome is now, and they kicked proverbial posterior! They did because they offered a better browser that respected the people who used it, and gave them agency in their browsing experience. This is why their latest moves feel so hostile.

Mozilla team: hand to heart, you can do it again. But it starts with not alienating your remaining evangelists; the people who actively choose and recommend you over alternatives. If you think switching costs for new people are high, wait till you hear about how difficult it is once they’ve churned.