A follow-up on Firefox pushing a "labs" feature that gives you a sidebar to talk to an AI chatbot.
mastodon.social/@mcc/113098293

On Saturday I filed a bug on Firefox requesting that Firefox either offer a compiler flag / build channel for removing the AI chatbot feature, or move the AI chatbot to a plugin which users could choose to uninstall. Because I wish to avoid brigading, I am not going to link this bug.

I got an *illuminating* (and discouraging) reaction from a Mozilla dev I'd like to share.

@mcc Sorry, I'm very interested in this but I'm having trouble following this conversation (possibly due to weirdness with my instance): Is this post of yours the response to your bug report?

mastodon.social/@mcc/113110278

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@mcc Anyway, it would seem like, at the very least, these are features that would entail a bunch of extra code (mostly the local model more than the interface to the cloud services) and therefore open a larger attack surface. If for no other reason that that, it does seem like people who have no interest should be able disable it in the interest of security.

And, to come at it from a slightly different perspective, it seems like for most new Firefox functionality the burden of proof should be on the side arguing why this couldn't/shouldn't be an extension. Perhaps there's some technical reason why not, but this *seems* like something that could be an extension.

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