While everyone is seemingly racing to integrate AI into their browsers, Tor Browser is ripping it out. The project has decided to cut Mozilla AI features and branding in the name of privacy.
Tor Browser 15.0a4 – the latest alpha release – is already available, and it’s still based on Firefox. But it has cut out all of the AI features and integrations that Mozilla has been adding lately.
The Tor team has explained that these machine learning systems are inherently un-auditable from a security and privacy standpoint.
“We also do not want to imply recommendation or promotion of such systems by including them in Tor Browser. Therefore, we have done what we can to remove such features from the browser,” explained the Tor Project.
One contributor to the Tor Project – @henry – noted that the team has not audited the code and cannot realistically audit the trained “black box” behavior of the machine learning models.
Essentially, it seems that the Tor Browser people acknowledged that some users might “want to accept the risk of a local black box from Mozilla” for certain features, but opted for exclusion first.
Moreover, the Tor Browser team is removing and replacing all new Firefox and Mozilla-specific branding and features.
“This includes things like those cute little fox graphics, Firefox Home, and the new History Sidebar. As of this release, there should not be any more Firefox or Mozilla-specific branding, features, or service integrations accessible in Tor Browser,” said the blog post.
The Tor Browser team is also removing and replacing all new Firefox and Mozilla-specific branding and features.
The Tor Browser team, however, doesn’t actually explain which features are being removed. Redditors speculate that it’s all about the AI chatbot integration sidebar, which allows you to log in to ChatGPT, Mistral, Gemini, and other tools.
“Removing it would make sense since it communicates with the cloud and therefore is a potential privacy issue – even though it’s only a privacy issue if the user chooses to log in to one of those services and share something with them,” one user wrote.
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