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.

i would say it's an intentional dark pattern

It's intentional.

Using Librewolf solves the issues.

its a kill switch to disable everything otherwise you can enable or disable the things you don't want

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".

It's functionally a killswitch, yes, but it's presented as a confusing mess. Enabling a disabling is still silly no matter what.

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.

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.

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

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"

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".

It really depends on the context. e.g. if you just barely pass an exam, that's not really a success - but you truly didn't fail, which was probably your objective instead of being successful (i.e. getting a good score/grade) on the exam.

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.

So, was it blocked by default?

If yes, I wouldn't read too much into it.

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

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.

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

Pushing the opt out responsibility on the user is why I left Windows and never looked back. I recommend Waterfox which I started using a couple months back when Firefox started going in this direction. Waterfox is great on desktop and Android (which I'll hopefully shed soon too when my current phone stops working).

I know it's chromium, but Vivaldi has no AI crap at all. I find it refreshing

You are comparing it to the worst of the worst

It should not be turn on to disable

What exactly is this disabling? Firefox's built-in AI tools? Or is it disabling AI tools on websites you visit? Because "blocking" seems like a very misleading term to be using if it's an internal presence being turned off. We typically only "block" remote things we know to be harmful to our experience, like harassing users on internet platforms or websites known to contain malware.

This is honestly some selfawarewolves shit at this point, Mozilla.

We're talking about Mozilla here. They always do the wrong thing. -edited for brevity

Agreed. It's the only one I leave turned on and use rarely. I do appreciate that it runs locally.

Only the built in tools

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?!

Some dynamic text under the toggle that reads "AI Anti-Feature 'X' is on/off" could ensure absolute double-certain clarity.

If you refer to a traffic light as a "stop" light then you can interpret red as "do not stop".

Never stop never stopping

There is in fact a "what these options mean" at the bottom of the page that does that.

I hate inverted booleans with an agenda

Don't keep on not keeping on

ah, reminds me of a famous song.

Don't stop not believing

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.

You do the same thing with ad blockers. They are on when you are blocking ads. This is on for blocking AI.

the ai stuff is disabled by default, you toggle it to enable it, this isn't rocket surgery.

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?

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.

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.

Vivaldi is really nice, have build in adblocker as well, but then it has the problem all non-mainstream browser have, some site just refuse to work with it. It's annoying as heck when it happen. Luckily it's really just a few site at this point.

Also, why does it say "blocked" instead of "disabled"?
This kinda leads me to imply that their AI features are spyware

When they first announced this they called it the "AI kill switch", so they already toned it down.

Anything is better than using yet another Chromium wrapper and pretending to use a real alternative to Chrome 😀

Blocks the news too, because they know its all ads so they built in the adblocker

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)

The fact that they announced that instead of an "AI ON switch" tells you where Mozilla's interests lie these days.

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.

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