Hate having to read an article and use your brain to understand what it’s about? Would you rather read what an AI says it (hopefully) says instead? If so, Mozilla has your back.

Saltiness aside, current nightly builds of Firefox include an experimental link preview feature that shows an AI-generated summary of what the linked page is (purportedly) about, so you can check before you visit it, saving you time, a click, or the need to use critical thinking.

Firefox generates its AI summaries locally, on device – great for privacy but not for speed

No data about you or the link preview (or its summary) is sent to remote servers or third parties, so no-one (sentient or data centre) can glean info on whatever it is you were thinking about having a look at.

The upside: Firefox’s link preview AI summaries are generated locally, on your device.

The downside: Firefox’s link preview AI summaries are generated locally, on your device.

Snark as there is a big speed hit to running “AI” inference locally: it’s slow. I tested it on my laptop and, similar to Firefox’s AI-powered on-device text translation, it took ages to do its things. The first summary bullet point didn’t appear for a good 10 seconds.

Arguably, it’d be faster to visit the link myself evaluate the content using human intelligence.

I know; I’m a luddite.

Sure, this might be handy for the occasional link (especially one you’re a bit “eh” about visiting) but as-is it’s simply too slow to “elevate” productivity and “empower” users with a “seamless” experience – it’s an AI-generated speed bump.

It’s also not accurate.

“Key points are AI-generated and may have mistakes”, the link preview warns. It ought to add “…but will be devoid of nuance, humour or originality” given the banal, boilerplate and routinely wrong “key points” it derived from processing my own content.

How to Test Firefox AI Link Previews

Support for link previews showing an AI summary is on the way…

If you want to try link previews with AI summaries yourself, you can — only in a nightly build of Firefox 139 right now (though depending on when you read this article, it may be available in the beta release channel too, or it might not – life can be like that).

Update: Link Previews are now available in Firefox 138, albeit as an experimental feature and only in select locales. To see if it’s available for you, go to about:settings#experimental and if you see the Link Previews setting, turn it on.

To enable Firefox link preview with AI summaries:

  • Go to about:config in a new tab
  • Agree to proceed
  • Search browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled
  • Toggle the value to true

Once activated you then hold shift + alt and hover your cursor over a web page link you wish to see a preview of (it also works for story cards on the Firefox New Tab Page).

After a pause, a link preview box should appear. Emphasis on should, as this feature’s reliability proved inconsistent in my hands on. Hovering over a link and pressing the keys often did nothing… Your milage may vary.

A “first-time setup” runs on the initial preview showing a loading bar to indicate that an on-device AI model1 is downloading in the background (which is roughly ~350MB).

Thereafter, each time you press the keyboard combo and hover over a link you’ll see an image preview, web page description (pulled from metadata, if available) and a 3-point AI summary for content.

For now, only in English languages.

It is possible to get Firefox to generate an AI summary for a link in languages other than English (requires a separate flag) but you might not wish to.

Firefox feature hawk Soeren Hentzschel notes the error rate increased substantially when he tried it on German articles.

C’est la vie.

—Err, that’s French.

Worth using? Too early to say

Firefox adding AI-powered page summaries is inevitable now that Mozilla’s all-in on AI in an effort to it “diversify” away from its “legacy products”.

Compared to the Orbit by Mozilla AI Add-On for Firefox, this is a more subtle. It only summarises pages you’ve not yet visited, and then only on-demand. As it’s on-device (Orbit uses a Mozilla AI data server) there’s a greater privacy assurance too.

Right now this feature is experimental, unfinished and not ready for wider use. Parsing, speed, unreliability and (I hope) preview modal size will no doubt improve over the coming months. When it rolls out to stable builds it will be better than it is now.

In conclusion, don’t expect perfection from Firefox’s AI summary feature just yet — but it’s a’coming!

  1. The model is SmolLM2-360M from HuggingFace, for those interested. ↩︎