TL;DROnly 1% of Firefox users used the AI kill switch. Mozilla launched Smart Window (BYO AI models), a built-in VPN with 1.5M signups, and a fall redesign.
Mozilla built an AI kill switch into Firefox after its users demanded one. Only 1% have used it. Another 3% turned off some AI features selectively. The rest left everything on. CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo says the point is not the percentage but the choice.
“Our community was pretty vocal, especially during the CEO announcement, that not everyone wanted AI,” Enzor-DeMeo told CNET. “At its core, we want to listen to our users. It was honestly on the roadmap, but I expedited it, given the community feedback.”
The low usage rate suggests that most people who said they wanted an AI kill switch either did not follow through or found specific features, like AI-powered translation, useful enough to keep. Enzor-DeMeo pointed to this as validation that Firefox’s approach works. The differentiator is not removing AI but offering control, something he contrasted with Microsoft defaulting to Copilot on Windows desktops and Google silently downloading a 4 GB AI model onto users’ machines.
Firefox’s newest feature is Smart Window, now available in beta. It lets users choose which AI model to run inside the browser, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or privately hosted open-source models. “They all excel at different things. Why do I need to be forced into one of them?” Enzor-DeMeo said. Mozilla says it does not use chat data to train models and automatically filters out sensitive information.
