Mozilla is apparently a lot more excited about adding AI features to Firefox than its community. The org has decided that AI deserves its own new environment in the browser, a move its fans met with withering criticism.
On Thursday, Ajit Varma, VP and head of product management at Firefox, announced but did not yet launch AI Window, an opt-in browsing mode that offers a third option alongside the standard browsing window and the Private Window.
“It’s a new, intelligent and user-controlled space we’re building in Firefox that lets you chat with an AI assistant and get help while you browse, all on your terms,” explained Varma. “Completely opt-in, you have full control, and if you try it and find it’s not for you, you can choose to switch it off.”
Varma previously worked as a product manager at Meta and at Google, where product decisions tend to happen without the consent of the masses. But his evident enthusiasm for AI in the browser hasn’t quelled dissent in the Firefox community.
AI Window isn’t even available yet – it’s a placeholder where the project will be developed in the open – but the objections have already begun.
“Once again Mozilla is SPRINTING to chase after the stupidest tech brained trends and not actually focused on improving the product at all,” reads the first comment posted to the Mozilla Connect discussion thread from an individual not affiliated with Mozilla.
The second comment inquires about a browser settings flag to disable AI Window.
The third says, “The only AI related thing I want is a single, prominent, easily accessible switch to turn off absolutely all opt-out AI features. No chasing about:config entries.”
Image of AI Window interface in Firefox – Click to enlarge
Other recent threads on Mozilla Connect, like “Remove AI garbage” and “Please DO NOT Add Agentic AI to Firefox,” offer a snapshot of how Firefox users feel about AI. And the Mozilla Support forums for Firefox contain many posts along the lines of “Getting rid of AI” and “How do I purge AI from my browser.”
Were this the view of only a few, Mozilla would not need to chide its community for rejecting AI, a sentiment also voiced over GitHub’s determination to have everyone use Copilot. The AI Window web page begins, “The web is changing, and sitting it out doesn’t help anyone.”
Jolie Huang, senior staff product manager at Mozilla, echoes that point in the above-mentioned Mozilla Connect post titled, “Building AI the Firefox way: Shaping what’s next together.”
“We recently shared how we’re approaching AI in Firefox with user choice and openness at the center of everything we build,” Huang wrote. “We’ve heard from many of you who’d prefer not to have AI in your browser at all, and we get it: We will soon provide additional settings for you to control how AI is used (or not) in Firefox.
“Nonetheless, standing still while technology moves forward doesn’t benefit the web or the people who use it. That’s why we see it as our responsibility to shape how AI integrates into the web, in ways that promote openness, transparency, and choice. That way, users and developers can use it freely, help shape it, and truly benefit from it.”
Mozilla’s own experience with AI hasn’t been entirely beneficial. In 2023, it added an AI help bot to developer documentation service, only to disable it. There were layoffs in 2024, alongside a plan to refocus on AI. The arrival of Firefox 136 in March 2025 saw the debut of a sidebar for AI bot interaction.
A few months later, reports of performance issues associated with local LLM processing surfaced, which failed to mollify user concerns about adding AI services. And earlier this month, volunteers assisting the Japanese arm of the Mozilla Support (SUMO) community resigned over concerns that the company’s AI SumoBot has been editing and overwriting Japanese support articles without allowing time for human review.
Beyond the cost in community goodwill, Mozilla’s embrace of AI also entails labor costs: AI-related bugs have to be evaluated and fixed.
Nabiha Syed, executive director of The Mozilla Foundation, told The Register in August that the internet isn’t necessarily experienced in the browser and that AI is the next mediating technology.
“The throughline is it’s artificial to define the internet as something in a browser or something in a social web feed or AI,” she explained. “They’re all part of a digital experience.”
The digital experience for almost every browser today includes AI. Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Apple Safari, Opera Neon, and Brave have all incorporated AI services to varying degrees. And AI vendors OpenAI and Perplexity have introduced their respective Atlas and Comet browsers as distribution platforms for their services.
Only Vivaldi continues “sitting it out,” as Mozilla puts it, to “keep browsing human.” ®
