Firefox starts testing "Link Previews"

Sounds bad.

- "Firefox uses AI that runs locally on your device to read the linked page and create the key points." --> Last time I played with local LLMs they were gigabyte sized models. So this has to mean Firefox is shipping with a very small model, not gigabyte-size?

- And so does this mean Firefox visits these links beforehand, or when you hover link or what? How many unnecessary requests are made? Since this is "local", I assume you reveal your IP/browser fingerprints to unnecessary sites?

- If the content behind the link is already LLM generated, it gets double LLM generated.

- And what about webservices (shopping carts, management dashboards, banking..), if it is hover based, it might easily and accidentally request url that cause some action, right?

I love Safari's link preview feature (on iPad, at least). Tap and hold a link, and see the target page preload in a widget. I prefer that, previewing the actual page, rather than seeing a header image and a generated summary.

So I would have to hover over a link, press a key combo that might conflict with my OS, wait for a full page load in the background, then see what a small-scale LLM decides the link is about along with a thumbnail? Who asked for this, and how does it keep me "organized" and "focused" vs just clicking on the link?

"the AI that generates the key points may miss context from the webpage and make mistakes" You don't say...

> and AI-generated key points. Firefox uses AI that runs locally on your device to read the linked page and create the key points

Hey, if it works it works but was there something wrong with the "what every other piece of software does" and just use the meta tags? Website operators happily provide this info for you in a machine digestible format.

I tried the link preview feature on a link to the English Wikipedia article about Touhou Project, and the LLM's key points are just hilariously bad. For some reason it's focusing too much on the PS4 and Nintendo Switch (which the LLM "thinks" were both released on August 15, 1997). I have a screenshot 6 days ago when it wasn't a Firefox Labs feature yet in my Misskey: https://makai.chaotic.ninja/notes/a6d86p8n26

Tried it today in an updated Nightly and the key points are still the same lol.

Given that Firefox now sells your data [0], this move should be seen as nothing less than actively adversarial.

The ship has been sinking for a while; now the crew is trying to light the remaining decks on fire.

All the best,

-HG

[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms...