Old people spent almost all their lives living in a different world, where you could trust and believe in certain things. That world has dissolved just as their brains got too old to adapt to the change. It’s hard for everyone to keep up, but for some people it’s impossible. My father in law is like that, his smartphone is always full of crap because if he sees a popup advert telling him he needs to install something, he’ll do as he’s told. He can’t tell the difference between an advert and a system message. He grew up in a world where most of the time you could basically trust what people were telling you, especially if it looked official. Modern technology and media has no consideration for such vulnerable people, except for finding ways to exploit them.
What seems really off to me is that Firefox has one standout feature that people really love: extensions. You can customize your browser however you want. So it makes sense that if they wanted to integrate AI into their design that it should be done via extensions. They could produce a mozilla-approved pack of extensions which add whatever AI features they want to offer. That way any AI functionality is opt-in, and transparent in the sense that you have a specific feature set for each extension so you kind-of know what you’re buying into, rather than having a built-in set of opt-out features that are ill-defined and constantly changing. Such a radical and unnecessary change of their whole design philosophy seems very suspect to me.