Remove/Disable Firefox 136's "AI Chatbot" Feature (On by default)

[Lu9-ST]

It seems starting with FF 136 they finally decided to make their "experimental feature" that nobody asked for no longer experimental, and turned on by default. It was even in Zen already (probably because of it being in FF) under the "Experimental /Firefox Labs" settings.
Select any text and a sparkly button will pop up - it's distracting and adds visual clutter - not very "zen" at all I'd say. You can choose to hide that (which I'm not sure if that turns it off, probably not) but the feature is also present in the context menu when right-clicking text, and I'm not sure you can remove that one.

Currently it seems there's no way to completely disable this in Zen (without messing around in about:config I'd imagine)

In my honest opinion, it's one of the most useless things Mozilla has ever done. Literally just so that they can say "it has AI!" to
Because all it is is a sidebar thing, that opens an LLM website of your choosing, where you even have to login first for most of them to even work. For something like this it's something that you could've always done before if you have a sidebar in Firefox... it's pointless. clearly added solely to surf the AI hype/trend/bandwagon. I wouldn't even be complaining as much if at least it offered something different like giving you the LLM responses instantly if you provide an API key or something, but this isn't that. And Zen already has a (much superior, in my opinion) sidebar option (web panels) where you can add any LLM you could ever want.

Mozilla clearly won't do anything about that in the current (awful) state of their business, so I'm hoping at least that the Zen team can.

[NTICompass]

I agree, I think Zen should remove (or disable the AI) feature. Also, since Zen has its own "web panels," I think Zen should hide/disable the Firefox sidebar.

Also, speaking of about:config, you can disable AI by searching for browser.ml. See: https://www.askvg.com/how-to-disable-and-remove-all-ai-features-in-mozilla-firefox/

[noaione]

If you didn't know. I've already made a PR that disabled this by default on Twilight: #6244

[matezoltanfarkas]

I agree that this feature introduces some clutter to the UI which should be mitigated "for a calmer internet".
However, I strongly disagree with the way it is done now and I would argue against this feature being "one of the most useless things Mozilla has ever done". I personally use it extensively to sumarize webpages or sections, generate quick drafts for emails, translate things, looking up for synonyms (must-have features for multilinguals like me!), looking up information (e.g. while reading an article), looking for advice on how to start doing stuff etc.
I love in firefox that I can toggle it via Ctrl+Alt+X and I think it should be kept in Zen by default.

Nuking it from Zen would be a dealbreaker for me as well and I think AI-Assistance tools cannot be avoided in the future if the devs want Zen to be a future-proof browser.

[kelvinchin12070811]

Well I agree with this too, it should be a settings in the preference page which allow us to turn it on, and is off by default. Hiding it in about:conifg would be confuse for us who think this is a not bad feature

[Ivan-Kim]

for future readers: now that web panels are dead since 1.11b, I had to set some flags in about:config to enable AI chat sidebars

pref("browser.ml.chat.enabled", true);
pref("browser.ml.chat.shortcuts", true);
pref("browser.ml.chat.shortcuts.custom", true);
pref("browser.ml.chat.sidebar", true);
pref("browser.ml.enable", true);

I first looked for Firefox labs section in settings UI to revert the removal, but it is invisible now which seems to be another different issue (#7377) from this

[Akiyamka]

@Ivan-Kim that very sad news, I'm very often use this web panels.
So, after set this settings you able to open sidebar?

[kelvinchin12070811]

@Ivan-Kim that very sad news, I'm very often use this web panels.

So, after set this settings you able to open sidebar?

You should be able to open the sidebar once you toggled all those settings, but sometimes the default shortcut did collide with other features so you might need to change it under Keyboard Shortcuts in settings

[Akiyamka]

but sometimes the default shortcut did collide with other features so you might need to change it under Keyboard Shortcuts in settings

Oh. this is my case, thank you!