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.
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.
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
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.
if chrome added a toggle to turn off ai features?
… and it was turned on by default and had misleading language as to what the button actually does, yes.
Most features in most software are either opt-out or unremovable, though. It’s clearly not about that to you, it’s about the association with AI
I’m also largely against opt-out in other uses, too. The fact that this is AI only makes it that much worse.
No one’s against a feature being opt-out unless they actively dislike that feature. You’re not going to make a post about the context menu items you don’t use unless you have some political opposition against them.
Nobody complains about the ¤ key on their phone’s English QWERTY keyboard, or the “generate QR code from tab” feature in Firefox that I’m sure you’ve never used. Neither of these features is opt-in, and yet you’re content with them. It’s because you don’t have any political opinions about the features themselves. You don’t actually care about opt-out when the feature doesn’t bother you.