Orbit by Mozilla, the browser maker’s opt-in AI assistant add-on for Firefox, will shut down on June 26, Mozilla has announced.
The extension, which has been in beta for over 6 months, adds an on-page AI assistant (floating orb, toggle flout, or toolbar button) users can click to do various actions, like ask for a summary of the page (or video) being viewed, ask questions about its contents, etc.
Here’s a GIF of it in action:
But Orbit is no more.
The new sidebar in Firefox provides easy access to AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, making the need to build and maintain a separate add-on with an alternative UX and powered by a different LLM a touch redundant.
Which is why Orbit is being canned.
But the end of Orbit is not the end of AI in Firefox.
On the contrary.
Gravity Bites
Mozilla is all-in on AI, as its leadership keeps telling us each time it kills something off.
Building, adding and surfacing AI features in Firefox itself will reach more eyeballs than creating a separate add-on and relying on users to find it and keep it enabled.
Firefox’s on-device AI link summaries are now available to more users, and many features Orbit offered can now be accessed natively in Firefox, piped through third-party AI companies infrastructure rather than Mozilla’s own AI servers, as Orbit did.
When an AI chatbot provider has been selected right-click context menus on web pages offer pre-populated prompts like ‘Summarize’ (sic; it’s not translated, tsk), ‘Explain this’, and, ‘Quiz me’ –
Furthermore, this AI prompt menu shows when viewing a PDF file in Firefox, which was another ‘feature’ Orbit had.
If there’s a catch in this, its Orbit’s other key feature isn’t replicated: privacy.
“The Mistral 7B LLM used to support Orbit is hosted by Mozilla and the queries are never shared with Mistral or any other services. The tradeoff of not sharing user data with the model is that we cannot influence the model or train it,” it said at the time.
Running its own ‘privacy preserving’ AI server and LLM just for Orbit will have eaten up resources, and Mozilla can spin the demise of Orbit as giving Firefox users ‘more control’ by letting them pick from the market-place of third-party chatbots.
Anyway, figured I’d pass on word.
If you hadn’t heard of Orbit and want to see how it works, you can continue to install the add-on on Firefox and use it until June 26th, after which the doohickey will cease to be — leaving the mortal coil to join the Mozilla Mausoleum of Misfires.
Get Orbit by Mozilla (beta) on Firefox Addons
(via: Soeren Hentzschel)