Firefox 148 adds master switch for browser bot bother

It's not the only new feature in Firefox 148 yet one thing is very definitely the big news: the global off switch for its AI features that the company announced earlier this month is now included.

Firefox 148 is out, alongside its counterpart Thunderbird 148 from the Mozilla Foundation's for-profit subsidiary MZLA. Both have improved accessibility support and increased security, however, the big news applies only to Firefox – because happily, Thunderbird still eschews LLM-based "enhancements."

The saga of Mozilla's inclusion of artificial idiocy into its browser has trundled along since Firefox 141 in July 2025. That version introduced an embedded LLM bot to invent names for tab groups, thus demonstrating both the desperation of Silicon Valley tech bros to embed plagiarism bots anywhere they possibly can, and also their complete lack of awareness of the resources the things burn. Within weeks, users started complaining about Firefox scoffing ...