| Previous
Page |
PCLinuxOS Magazine |
PCLinuxOS |
Article List |
Disclaimer |
Next Page |
Tip Top Tips: Disable Firefox's Integrated AI Chatbot |
|
Editor’s Note: Tip Top Tips is a semi-monthly column in The PCLinuxOS Magazine. Periodically, we will feature – and possibly even expand upon – one tip from the PCLinuxOS forum. The magazine will not accept independent tip submissions specifically intended for inclusion in the Tip Top Tips column. Rather, if you have a tip, share it in the PCLinuxOS forum’s “Tips & Tricks” section. Occasionally, we may run a “tip” posted elsewhere in the PCLinuxOS forum. Either way, share your tip in the forum, and it just may be selected for publication in The PCLinuxOS Magazine.
This month’s tip was shared by mutse. Did you know that Firefox now has an integrated AI chatbot? No? Well, me neither. And I’m one of the most devout Firefox users on the planet. So, how do you feel about Firefox having an integrated AI chatbot? I don’t know about you, but I think there’s too much “focus” on AI. It’s still in its infancy, it still gets a LOT of things wrong, and if it doesn’t know the answer, it’s prone to making up its own facts and passing them off as reality. Plus, there are next to no “guardrails” in place for the current iteration of AI. With AI growing so quickly in its abilities, I can’t imagine any legislation addressing the concerns of AI run amok. AI is simply growing at a rate too quickly for legislation to install adequate safeguards. It won’t be able to “keep up” with AI’s advances. And no, Mozilla, I don’t want or need an integrated AI chatbot in Firefox.  In his post, mutse pointed us to a site that has multiple tweaks for Firefox. (Bonus tip within a tip … the other tweaks are worth a look, too!) Of special interest is the tweak to disable Firefox’s integrated AI chatbot. Sign me up! Here’s that tweak: Firefox features an integrated AI chatbot. By default, it's turned on. This might negatively affect both your privacy and the performance (speed) of Firefox. Thankfully, it's rather easy to disable this feature. Like this: 1. Type in the URL bar of Firefox: about:config. Press Enter. 2. Now you're being presented with a warning. Ignore it and click on the blue button “Accept the Risk and Continue”. 3. Copy/paste (or type) the following search term into the configuration search box: browser.ml. 4. Find the following entry: browser.ml.chat.enabled. That's currently set to the boolean value true. Double-click on it, so that it changes into false. Do the same for the entry: browser.ml.enable 5. Close Firefox and re-launch it. Note (1): Leave the other browser.ml settings as they are: usually, the less invasive a hack is, the better. Because this reduces the risk of unexpected unwanted side effects. Note (2): Disabling this is a user preference, so repeat this in each user account. Now, you have successfully disabled Firefox’s new (and unwelcome for some users) integrated AI chatbot. |