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Firefox 148 introduces the promised AI kill switch for people who aren't into LLMs
(www.xda-developers.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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I already addressed all of these arguments in another comment in this thread...
Not all these arguments no.
You're defending your position that this AI feature is not really AI so it's ok, but the others are all bad because of the two letters of the devil.
Still AI is a marketing term, always has been. AI in the form of machine learning has been around for more than a decade, and lots of things already use that.
The knee jerk reaction of tech circles saying mozilla will sell their soul because there is no "kill switch" is so fucking dumb. Even more dumb is thinking no other users may want any of these features. Unless you work at Mozilla, and/or do product research for browsers, chances are you most likely have no idea how people will want to use these features in their day to day.
Even working on one's own product in a company, few really understand the users needs and wants, especially tech persons.
I can guarantee you, the weird gimmick you don't understand is crucial to some.
I literally say "The translation is technically AI," so no. I give reasons how the other features are different, which you seem to acknowledge a little, at least.
Can you describe how to access the gimmick and which people find it crucial? I'm pretty confident in my understanding of it and how hilariously unhelpful it is.
Being technically something implies it's not really or to be considered apart from the group.
The "gimmick" is proposing alt text based on the image when editing PDFs. I don't see how it's unhelpful. I'm not into editing PDFs in firefox, but I do use it to read them.
Inciting editors to include an alt text for accessibility seems like the ideal use case for this tech. The human still has to review and approve the generated text.
Unless I missed something as I cannot try the feature now, it seems to me a great application of ai, to augment humans in their work, and to a useful cause.
Image classification and description is "old" tech now, and I already use it in my work to auto tag images for editors to find more easily later. Nothing crazy.
There enlies my point. Mozilla added a feature that is buried so deep in Firefox that you don't even know if it's actually there.
It is there, believe it or not. I criticize these things, but I also tested it the day it arrived.
But despite the way Mozilla buried it, the code is still there. It still makes Firefox more complex to maintain, and Mozilla still spent time and money putting it in. Imagine if Mozilla spent those resources actually trying to help people, instead of treating AI like companies used to treat blockchain: as a solution looking for a problem.
A gambling toolbar that links to Polymarket could be helpful. But I think we both said "crucial".
If you know someone who uses Firefox to add images to PDFs so often that the alt text generation would be crucial to them, or even more than a gimmick, please introduce me to them. I have so many burning questions. Several things related to "why not a dedicated PDF editor?!"
Please never develop any software for other humans without first developing any kind of compassion or empathy for others.
You are the stereotypical nerd that doesn't understand people may have different needs than you, so I have to justify how a feature relating to accessibility can be useful...
I don't know which angle is more interesting, the fact your "compassion and empathy" started with implying people who disagree with you are stupid, or the fact that we both know that a hidden feature tangentially "relating to" accessibility isn't remotely the same as something that's crucial...