> Why not make them disabled by default, with the option to turn them on?

"All AI features will also be opt-in"

He said there would be both an "AI kill switch" but that it's also "opt-in". Taken together, his two statements seem a little...odd.

People are already getting worked up about being prompted to opt into a new feature on update (even if that prompt is hidden behind an icon that doesn't do anything until the user clicks it), so it's not inconceivable that the kill switch just disables those opt-in prompts for AI-related features.

I guess that just means that there will be a number of AI related features you can choose to select but if at some point you want it all gone you just hit the checkmark Disable all AI.

They could even make the AI features available as extensions, downloadable from addons.mozilla.org

That way, the users who want them can download them, and the users who don't, don't.

to pump adoption number. it is well known that adoption rate is much higher when people are forced to opt-in be default.

because no one in right mind, would opt-in AI seriously. and definitely never on corporate machine

Mozilla shouldn't need to worry about adoption numbers though.

I think Facebook did a study that making options opt-in means only a tiny tiny percentage of users will ever activate them. People never look around in settings.

I suppose if - after you click away the popup that says "Thank you for loving Firefox"(1) - a popup shows that says "Hey, hey, look at me, look we have this new feature, it'll blow you away. Do you want to enable it?" would be obnoxious but satisfies the idea of "opt-in".

(1) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1791524 - I still remember how icked I was seeing this popup.

Don't need to run studies to understand that.

If it's off be default it will stay off unless the user is somehow made to try it. Default opt-in is one option to do that, the simplest one, but it's not the only one. The rest require explaining clearly what the user will get out of enabling it ... and that often is difficult to do succinctly, or convincingly. So shovelling it down everyone's throat it is.

> making options opt-in means only a tiny tiny percentage of users will ever activate them

Why exactly should I, a user, care about this? I don't want useless crap shoved in my face, period. I don't care that people might not turn on someone's pet feature if they don't enable it by default.

Because if this browser will have zero appeal to wider public it will die and you will have to pick between Chrome forks.

Yes, that’s the intent of the argument. If it’s so valuable , people will find it, talk about it, amd it’ll spread on its merits.

Because money! Seriously that's the answer to most of these questions.

Is there a business model behind actually making profit off this stuff yet? Last I looked, Mozilla is still making almost all their money from Google.

The new CEO said he views it as a monetization source. I'm not really sure how, but he apparently has something in mind I can't think of.

The chatbot can provide sponsored responses. Not sure how evident those will be, but I think it will happen. Surely is in Google's mind.

If the responses are sponsored, it seems the value drops dramatically.

I want the AI agent to act more like a fiduciary, an independent 3rd party acting in my best interest. I don't need an AI salesman interjecting itself into my life with compromised incentives.

Us “AI hostile users” are this way partially because we know that our desires do not align with those funding these tools.

OpenAI was already taking steps to integrate ads, amd Grok shows how much we should be trusting AI as some impartial 3rd party. The goal was always about control and profiting off of said control. Pretty much the antithesis of hacker mindsets.

Is there a reason such a thing couldn't present a bunch of neutral options, but with affiliate links that provide revenue back to Mozilla?

(I mean, that could still steer it toward places that have affiliate programs, but if you're running a local AI tool to help you search for these things that seems like something you should reasonably be able to toggle on and off/configure in a system prompt/something.)

What we’ve seen from other companies is exactly what you mention. Unfair ranking and promotion of items with affiliate links or the highest payouts for them. Changing incentives compromise the integrity of the results.

Huh. Somehow I'd thought those programs were platform level and not item level. Which, yeah, does explain the problem a lot more clearly.

There are other ways to monetize. For instance small local AI models by default with option to pay to use faster/more efficient AI models remotely.