1996202 - Provide global LLM disabling option

Status: NEW

(Core :: Machine Learning: General, enhancement)

Description

[Simon Friedberger [:simonf]]

People keep asking for ways to disable AI. Just yesterday in this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1o1mnrf/comment/nihqshp/

People end up posting lists of preferences to flip like this:

user_pref("browser.ml.enable", false); // machine learning features in Firefox
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.enabled", false); // AI Chatbot (https://docs.openwebui.com/tutorials/integrations/firefox-sidebar/#additional-about-settings)
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.menu", false); // "Ask a chatbot" in tab context menu
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.shortcuts", false); // "Enable custom shortcuts for the AI chatbot sidebar"
user_pref("browser.ml.chat.shortcuts.custom", false);
user_pref("extensions.ml.enabled", false); // might only be relevant for app developers
user_pref("browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled", false);
user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled", false); // "Use AI to suggest tabs and a name for tab groups" in settings
user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled", false)

We should make sure to give them an option to do this. Otherwise people will accidentally break things in weird ways and it will look like a bug on our part.

We should probably focus on remote services because for some definition of AI we use AI even for detecting forms on pages but that has nothing to do with LLMs and it does not send any user data anywhere.

Comment 1

[Simon Friedberger [:simonf]]

Another explanation on how to turn it off: https://equk.co.uk/2025/10/28/firefox-forcing-llm-features/

Comment 2

[Frederik Braun [:freddy]]

We have an Enterprise Policy that tries to do that without disabling our offline machine translations that is more focused on GenAI https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/#generativeai

Someone want to create a quick table of the prefs that we have and what they do and then we clean it up such that there's a global "Gen AI" pref that Firefox (and enterprise policies) can use before the individual features are checked?

Comment 3

[Brian Gomes Bascoy]

It would be great if this was not just a flag in about:config but a proper user-friendly option in about:settings.

There is quite a lot of negativity around Firefox's AI integrations lately (e.g. the "I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla" article was top #1 on Hacker News for a day) so I believe it would be good if at this point all of these new features could be very easily switched off or maybe preferably opted-in.

Comment 4

[Jared Hirsch [:jhirsch] (he/him) (Needinfo please)]

Note there is a bug on file (bug 2005800) to add this control to about:preferences