The Firefox 148 update sees its stable release today, bringing with it a much-request ‘AI kill switch’ to easily disable all AI-powered features within the browser.
Mozilla has said future updates to the browser will not re-enable AI features once disabled. Given that Mozilla now measures its success by how much revenue it makes from AI features in its products, Firefox included, that’s a reassuring stance.
To disable AI features in Firefox go to Settings > AI Controls. Slide the ‘Block AI Enhancements’ toggle to turn off ChatGPT and other chatbots in the sidebar, AI link previews, the (supposedly) smart tab group suggestions and others.
More AI-enabled features are heading to Firefox, including an ‘AI mode’ offering a prompt-based browsing experience. Mozilla has previously said users will be able to opt-out of Firefox AI mode and continue browsing for themselves in a ‘classic’ experience.
If you do decided to turn off AI enhancements Firefox will no longer nag you to ‘try’ said features through in-app call outs and context menu entries. Any local models that were downloaded previously are also deleted from your system.
You can also choose to selectively block AI features, letting you choose to keep those you find helpful and turn off those you don’t. This granular approach means, for example, you can use on-device AI translations but get rid of ‘big tech’ chatbots.
Remote improvements without data collection
An AI kill switch isn’t only new “choice” Firefox 148 brings. You can now opt out of Firefox’s telemetry and data collection policies but continue to receive ‘remote improvements’ between releases.
Go to Settings > Privacy & Settings > Firefox Data Collection and check the appropriate boxes to configure things to suit you.
Tab page changes
When I tested Firefox 148 (here in the UK; some changes are locale specific), stories on the new tab page are now separated into topics (e.g., business, politics, etc), with a ‘Popular today’ at the top. Each section has a follow button.
In the 147.x build, all recommend stories exist in a single feed under a ‘thought-provoking stories’ heading.
The card layout is improved to show more content. Instead of 3 same-sized cards in every row (in a regular sized window width), some rows show 2 normal cards and a pair of stacked half-sized cards.
While uniformity is nice, it can cause scroll blindness. Visual variance breaks things up which can catch more attention. As some of the recommend stories are sponsored one (i.e., companies pay Mozilla for placement), more cards means more opportunities.
However, as this change isn’t mentioned in the release notes. It may or may not be available in your build, but I figured Id mention it since it is new in the stable release I downloaded from the Mozilla FTP to write this article.
Other changes in Firefox 148
The Settings > General page in Firefox 148 now includes a handy link to access and manage data in configured Profiles.
Firefox 148 also delivers updates core web platform updates including support for the Trusted Types API and the Sanitizer API to mitigate cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities, and CSS support for shape() function and the position-try-order property for anchor positioning.
Other changes in Firefox 148:
- Better screen reader support for mathematical formulas in PDFs
- Firefox Backup is now available on Windows 10
- Translate into Vietnamese and into/from Traditional Chinese
- New Tab wallpapers will now appear in new container tabs
- Service worker support for WebGPU has been added
For more details see the official release notes for this update.
Download Firefox 148
Firefox 148 is available to download for Windows, macOS and Linux from the official Firefox website beginning Tuesday, February 24.
Linux users can install Firefox in variety of ways: the Firefox Snap or Firefox Flatpak on Flathub, adding the Mozilla APT repo, or the distro-agnostic Linux binary you can grab from the Firefox website or Mozilla FTP.
On Ubuntu, Firefox is provided as a Snap package. New updates are downloaded silently in the background and applied on application restart – keep an eye out for a prompt to relaunch the browser, if open.
Linux Mint users can update to the latest Firefox release via the Mint Update tool because the distro packages the browser as a traditional .deb package.