Firefox 139 adds experimental AI-powered link previews
21 points by laktak
21 points by laktak
Would rather use a mozilla link like https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/139.0/releasenotes/
Here points of interest
Could actually be an OK feature
Specifically, visit the above-linked release notes and scroll to “Link Previews” within the “New” section. That summary links to this page: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!. View the release notes first – that’s the only page with a screenshot.
FYI, when it sends a request to generate the AI-powered preview, it does so with the X-Firefox-Ai HTTP header set to 1. Use this information as you see fit. (For example, like this.)
I don’t think I want to use “AI-powered” link previews. But I don’t really understand the point in poisoning them. To a certain extent, don’t you think you’re helping Chrome’s monopoly?
I totally get why one would want to poison AI crawlers. But I would really love to know the motivation behind poisoning locally running LLM-based (does this even use an LLM? I haven’t looked into the details TBH) link previews.
But I don’t really understand the point in poisoning them
The previews generate garbage. I help them, by serving them garbage to begin with. If someone’s not interested in reading what I wrote, then I am not interested in showing it to them, either.
don’t you think you’re helping Chrome’s monopoly?
No, I don’t. I suspect the vast majority of Firefox users would rather see Mozilla do literally anything else but shove AI agents noone ever asked for into Firefox. Seeing as my sites get around 2-3k human visitors a week, most of them returning ones, I have a very strong suspicion that the only people who’ll ever try to use FF’s AI-powered link preview on my stuff are those who already know I’m serving it garbage, and they just want to have a giggle.
So, nope. Me serving garbage has no influence on browser share. Even if I blocked Firefox completely, it still wouldn’t make a difference, because the tiny amount of human visits I serve don’t make a difference to begin with.
But I would really love to know the motivation behind poisoning locally running LLM-based
I don’t want my work, my writings, and in general, my stuff to be consumed by anything LLM-based, whether crawler, or a local model, or whatever. So I do everything in my power to discourage that, which includes serving garbage to not only AI crawlers, but other things too. I don’t care whether it crawls to wash it clean and resell it, or to show a summary to its operator that totally misses the point - they all get the same treatment.
Wouldn’t it serve your purpose more effectively to show the client a message that LLM previews are not supported by your website, rather than showing garbage which will just confuse the user?
No, it wouldn’t, because I already have a garbage generating service, routing AI preview users there took ~2 seconds (+ writing the explanation in the docs). Serving them a specific message would have taken more, and about 10 users would have ever seen it. Not worth the trouble in my case.
If someone has more visitors who are likely to use AI previews, it might be worth it for them.
So, you don’t like AI and thus feel like it’s appropriate to ruin AI summaries for those who want to use them?
I mean I guess that’s why Firefox is sending the header, so servers also have a choice to be creative…
AI does a great job at ruining it to begin with.
If someone wants a thoughtless mechanical parrot to spit out something completely wrong based on what I wrote, I do not wish to show the original to that person to begin with. I can’t (easily) block them when they visit the link, but I can serve garbage for the AI preview, so hopefully they won’t visit, and we’re both be happier.
Silly two letter acronym bandwagon experiments aside,
PNG images with transparency now keep their transparency when pasted into Firefox.
finally. Finally!!! Yes!
Closed elements are now searchable and can be automatically expanded if found via find-in-page.
This is also very good.
Added support for the WebAuthn largeBlob extension.
And that sounds great too.
I know not everyone wants this, so I want to call out that this is currently in Firefox Labs. These experimental features do not work at all and are fully disabled when Telemetry or Studies are disabled. Existing opt-outs continue to work.
Mozilla tying features that don’t involve their servers at all to sharing data with them doesn’t make it better, it makes it worse. Some day the EU regulators are going to catch on to this abuse and bring GDPR enforcement against Mozilla.
This isn’t a feature. That’s my point. As the title of the article we are discussing here says: It’s an experiment.
Experiments come with A/B testing, successful and unsuccessful usage, studies, user reports and all of that.
What is the most direct method by which an “experiment” like this can be prevented from becoming a “feature”?
Shouldn’t this be tagged with ai rather than vibecoding? Since it’s more about the use of AI in a product rather than an article about using an AI tool. I’m not sure I understand that tag fully.
My personal suspicion is that the “vibecoding” tag just means “ai (derogatory)”. The feedback on the tag name when it was proposed was largely negative, and the prior art for editorialized tags is the tag for blockchain and cryptocurrency stuff being merkle-trees.
this kind of low-key AI feature can make browsing feel faster and more useful to technical and non-technical users alike.
I’m not approving this writing style, but, at least, we can have high confidence that this article wasn’t written by AI.
Why, what’s wrong with it? Are you perhaps confusing the phrase “low-key” with it’s more recent slang meaning? It had to read through it a few times to shake off that meaning, which is a little concerning.
Maybe I am. Isn’t this used in its slang meaning?
I don’t think so. This is an example of the older meaning:
The wedding was a low-key affair, with fewer than 30 people attending.
And this is an example of the decade old meaning:
I’m lowkey obsessed with this game.
What’s the difference?
The original sense means “not flashy, quiet, not attracting attention”. Something you would say about a wedding, or someone’s fashion sense. Most commonly attached to a noun.
The new slangy sense is basically just a generic intensifier that doesn’t mean much. It first meant “secretly” or “on the down-low”, as in “I secretly like this thing” (even though they’re telling you about it). It was catchy slang because it implies your opinion is a little held one, or the thing you’re describing is underappreciated. More commonly attached to a verb or adjective.
That doesn’t honestly seem that different. Both are effectively “take the thing you expect given what I’m attaching it to and think smaller, less intense, and somewhat obscure”
The main difference grammatically is that one is an adjective (describing a noun) and the other is an adverb (describing/modifying another adjective). In “this kind of low-key AI feature”, it’s the feature (a noun) that is low-key, so the phrase is being used as an adjective. In something “this feature is low-key lit”, it’s “lit” (an adjective) that’s low-key, so the phrase is being used more like an adverb.
Using words as different parts of speech is a theme of millenial slang. The meaning hasn’t changed though, initially you seemed to say it had.
I mean, they’re being used in different ways in different parts of grammar, they can’t really share precisely the same meaning. They come from the same root, so there’s somewhat of an overlap, but as the other commenter pointed out, low-key as an adverb is more of an intensifier, it can usually be replaced with a word like “very” or “really”, or possibly “surprisingly”. It has connotations of describing an underappreciated or under-recognised aspect. On other hand, low-key as an adjective is more about being subdued or subtle. Something can be well recognised and appreciated, but still be low-key in the traditional sense. Or in the other direction, you can have a party that is low-key busy, but you could never have a busy, low-key party.
low-key as an adverb is more of an intensifier, it can usually be replaced with a word like “very” or “really”, or possibly “surprisingly”.
No? As an adverb it’s a deintensifier, more equivalent to “sort of” often applied to things we feel is underappreciated or would default to more intensity than we want. I’ve never heard it used to add intensity to a statement, it’s more for adding reservation. I’d hear “that party was low key busy” to mean it was less busy than if i’d heard “that party was busy” and yeah, a busy low key party doesn’t make sense.
Huh, that is the opposite of how I’ve heard it used. A party that is low-key busy is a party that is busier than expected, or where the speaker wants to emphasise how busy the party is in some way.
As far as I can see, the settings for these are found in the browser.ml. entries, in case anyone would like to disable the feature.
this is actually really useful! it’s almost enough to switch back to firefox given arc is coming to EOL soon sadly