Firefox is finally getting the AI kill switch
If you’re annoyed by the generative AI features creeping into Firefox, here’s some good news. Mozilla is currently publicly testing an “AI Controls” page for Firefox, with the ability to disable individual features or everything.
Firefox has slowly added AI-based features over the past couple of years. Firefox 130 added an optional chatbot sidebar with quick access to ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini and other services. Firefox 141 added suggestions for combining tabs into groups, powered by a local AI model running on your computer. There is also the Local Page Translation feature, although it uses a Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model and not an Extended Language Model (LLM).
Not everyone liked these features, as they are usually enabled by default and must be disabled individually as they are rolled out. A feature that used AI models to improve history search also briefly caused battery drain issues. Mozilla said in December 2025 that an “AI kill switch” was in the works to address these complaints, and now it has finally entered testing on the Firefox Nightly channel.
Firefox has a new settings page called “AI Controls” with a list of AI-based features in the browser. You can enable or disable each feature or use the “Block AI enhancements” option to disable all current features. and the future AI functionality. The current list includes page translations, alt text generation in PDFs, AI-enhanced tab grouping, link previews, and sidebar AI chatbots.
Mozilla said in a blog post: “Once you set your AI preferences in Firefox, they stay in place across updates. […] We believe choice is more important than ever as AI becomes part of users’ browsing experiences. What we care about is putting people in control, regardless of what they think about AI. »
I like the new settings page, but I’m not sure I agree that it “puts people in control.” These features are still disabled, instead of enabled, and the settings page arrives months after many of these features were implemented. It seems like an afterthought.
It’s also worth noting that Firefox already allows IT departments to disable all generative AI features on managed PCs, using the browser’s group policies. This option arrived in Firefox 144, released in October 2025, so it will still take several months to get a user-accessible version of the same setting.
The AI settings page is currently being tested in Firefox Nightly. It should be deployed to the stable version of Firefox soon, once the bugs are resolved.
Source: Mozilla Blog
