topic Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us! in Firefox Labs

Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

itskaren — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 17:24:48 GMT

Hi all!

I'm Karen, the product manager in charge of Firefox Labs. Today, Joy (@mozpm) from the Firefox product team is joining me to share some awesome news!

We’ve just introduced a new experimental feature in Firefox Labs on Beta and Nightly called Link Previews, and we’d love for you to give it a try and let us know what you think.

What it does

We created Link Previews to help you browse more efficiently by showing a quick snapshot of what’s behind a link before you open it. It’s designed to help you get to the most relevant info faster, reduce tab clutter, and stay focused and organized as you browse the web.

Most links you preview will include an image, the webpage title, and AI-generated key points.

Firefox uses AI that runs locally on your device to read the linked page and create the key points. Because the AI runs locally, it works in a way that prioritizes your privacy since your browsing data is not shared or stored.

And, as with all of our AI-enabled features, Link Previews is entirely optional: it only appears in Firefox if you enable the feature and consent to local AI processing.

How to try it

This feature is currently available through Firefox Labs 138 in limited regions:

In Firefox, type about:settings#experimental into the address bar
Check the box next to Link Previews to turn it on
Hover over a link and press Shift + Alt/Option to see a preview

Edit as of June 3, 2025: Please note that the shortcuts for Link Previews now also include "Press Shift key while you hover over a link" and "Click and hold the link for 1 second (long press)." These shortcuts can be configured in Settings.

What to expect

This is an early version: it’s functional, but you may run into some rough edges. Your feedback will help us shape this feature as we continue to improve it!

Known limitations

Keyboard shortcuts: The current shortcut (Hover + Shift + Alt/Option) may overlap with system shortcuts on some devices. We’re working on ways to make this more accessible.
Language support: Right now, Link Previews work best on English-language pages. The feature also may not be available in all regions while testing in Firefox Labs.
Accuracy of Key points: In some cases, the AI that generates the key points may miss context from the webpage and make mistakes. Your feedback on these mistakes helps us improve the feature.

We’d love your feedback

Once you’ve had a chance to try it, please share your thoughts in the comments below. Whether it’s UX polish, content quality, or ideas for how this feature could better support your workflow – we’re all ears.

Thanks for helping us build a better Firefox!

------

**UPDATE on April 29**

We’ve just incorporated a bug fix to optimize the Link Previews experience. This is a rare occurrence when you may need to “restart” this now fixed feature in Labs--if you’ve been using Link Previews in Firefox Labs on Nightly, Beta, or Developer Edition, please visit Labs (about:preferences#experimental in the URL bar) and re-check the “Link previews” checkbox to get the feature back.

Sorry for the inconvenience, and thank you for your support!

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

Erwan — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 10:13:43 GMT

My personal point of view:

Not interested at all, I turned off all previews, including tab previews, it annoys me all these things that open all the time. If I click on a link, I know where I'm going, no need for previews.

And where does AI come from?? I thought there was no AI in Firefox, only an isolated chat that could be disabled?? You mean to tell us that in fact the AI is mixed into the Firefox core and that it has access to all our activity??

---FR---

Mon point vu personnel :

Pas du tout intéressé, j'ai désactivé tous les aperçus, y compris ceux des onglets, ça m'énerve toutes ces choses qui s'ouvrent tout le temps. Si je clique sur un lien, je sais où je vais, pas besoin d'aperçus.

Et l'IA, elle vient d'où ?? je croyais qu'il n'y avait pas d'IA dans Firefox seulement un tchat isolé qu'on pouvait désactiver ?? Vous voulez nous dire qu'en fait l'IA est mélangé dans le noyau Firefox et qu'elle a accès à toute notre activité ??

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

Anonymous — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 13:17:36 GMT

Every time a new default shortcut is added to Firefox, support communities get flooded with posts from people saying that these new shortcuts conflict with something else they had been using for ages, and that they want to know how to change or disable them in Firefox.

Some of those people react in a very violent way when we try to explain that Firefox offers no way to customize keyboard shortcuts.

Please work on this before adding even more shortcuts:

* https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/customizable-hotkeys/idi-p/4979
* https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/hotkeys-yes-please/td-p/57804

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

mozpm — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 21:57:17 GMT

Hi @Erwan, that’s a completely fair perspective – appreciate you raising the question. It’s clear you know what kind of browsing experience you want, and so the option to turn the Link Previews feature on or off is there for that reason.

Regarding the AI piece, just to clarify: the Link Previews AI model only downloads to your Firefox when you choose to turn on the feature.

The model runs locally and on-device – so you can rest assured your browsing data stays with you. It’s not part of Firefox’s core code, it doesn’t have access to anything else you do in Firefox, and it’s only used to generate key points when you request them.

Our goal is to give people choice: some people will want a fast, minimal browser with no extras, while others want smarter tools to help them get things done. We hope Firefox can support both – thanks again for raising these points!

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

kxra — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 23:54:01 GMT

It's nice, but I'm assuming that the hotkeys are mostly to prevent it from being too obnoxious during testing, but will probably be enabled without hotkeys if it works out. For me, the previews are for some using a much larger text size than anything else on the page (would expect smaller, since it's a tiny preview) so they appear very cramped.

Also, one of my pet peeves is when stuff slowly loads and then the view for the content grows as it loads. For example infinite-loading web pages that have a navigation footer you can never reach, or searching for a user in Instagram messenger and tapping on the result only to have the results finish loading and then you tap on the horrible AI assistant that just took the actual results spot in the list.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

okay_okay — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 18:22:34 GMT

I like the idea, but the hover plus keyboard shortcut experience is a bit clunky. I'd prefer to just enable the feature and then hover over links to see preview (without having to also enter a shortcut). Thanks!

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

00FF00 — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 20:04:15 GMT

Looking forward to this being added to the regular release version, I had to fire up the dev version and poke around just to see it in action - very nice!

Now if only we could remove that pesky empty flexible space from the toolbar as long as we have either the title bar or menu bar enabled 😁

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

Denir — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 03:00:03 GMT

Looks good and useful feature. I would also like to suggest a similar feature edge has, when you hover over an image and press ctrl, it opens a small window where you can zoom into the image, would love to see this on Firefox. Also off topic but please please implement split tabs functionality, it's really important to a lot of us.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

whoami730 — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 10:41:03 GMT

Is it possible to integrate all ML related settings in one place? We have atleast two firefox features using ML now - smart tab groups & link previews. Also more information/settings on which model is being used, from where etc will be much more useful. This information is not available anywhere except technical documents .

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

2mustange — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 16:20:23 GMT

Its kind of clunky if i were to add my 2 cents.

Seems to take forever for it to generate the "preview". I would almost prefer the ability to do something of an inline modal of the webpage and have the ability to preview the whole webpage and just exit out of it without loading a new tab.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

Anonymous — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 18:28:11 GMT

If the link points to a URL pattern that is known to be used by articles (e.g. Wikipedia, news websites, blog hosting services, etc.), this modal could actually show its Reader View and load it almost instantly, allowing the user to skim over it with his/her own eyes and brain.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

Windows_Vista — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 02:51:32 GMT

What a useless feature its just AI bulls*** why couldn't you guys ever come up with something original or even remotely useful!

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

jollysea — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 08:46:16 GMT

I'm very sorry, but I don't get the hype about so-called "AI"* at all. I feel like I have to switch search engines every two weeks because the one I use chooses to "summarize" the websites instead of using the meta-tags or the first few lines of text to give me a preview. And now my browser wants to do the same?

AI summaries are never good, and often wrong and/or biased.

One example: I've searched for a female singer, and one of the results I've seen was an "AI" summaries of her wikipedia page (in Duckduckgo search results!) highlighting a relationship she had. One that lasted 2 weeks. If somebody gave you (in school, in uni, at work) the task to summarize a biography of a singer in 200 characters and you choose to highlight a relationship of 2 weeks, you'd fail that test.
It's also clearly biased because somehow male singers have their careers summarized, while somehow with female artists it's their interpersonal relationships that the "AI" "thinks"** is important.

More often than not, "AI" products are next to useless when you're not only interested in English. This might come as a shock to USians, but not everybody in the world speaks just English. Some people actually enjoy learning languages and reading websites in these languages. What they, however, mostly don't enjoy is reading "AI"-generated summaries that sound unnatural and often childish.

I'd love Mozilla to build a good, privacy protecting browser that's also fast. And not only fast on new computers, but also fast old machines. I don't want an "AI" running in the background, browsing the web for me, I want to do it for myself. In the time the "AI" is calculating a bullsh*t "key points", I can look at the website for myself. I'm also sure this will consume less energy and be better for the planet. Speaking of that, I think Mozilla should ditch the AI-team and focus all that energy and money and ingenious, creative people into creating a faster, more energy-efficient browser.

(*most often not very intelligent, more often than not a lot of humans involved in the process, so neither articifcial nor intelligent
**machines don't think)

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

tnjh — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 09:38:01 GMT

I made an account specifically to reply to this topic so let me be clear, and I really cannot stress this enough: I do not want want this or any other AI in my browser. There's so many other things I'd like instead, like text-wrap: pretty or the ability to more easily switch profiles.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

CallCateIn58 — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 10:09:15 GMT

Since Link Previews has the option to be turned on or off, can Link Previews AI be turned on or off?

I love Link Previews without AI.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

Boudah — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 10:22:07 GMT

TL;DR: not interested by AI features.

You stress out that the choice is ours, but it's not entirely true, the time given to that isn't given to other things.

you say data is local, but where and from whom the LLM is born? How you plan the LLM to stay up to date?

You talk about smart tools, isn't us humans who has the chance to get some intelligence via sharing, not consuming, informations?

Who take this trajectory for Mozilla? How much money was involved?

The only fact that devs are working on it instead of the education, security

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

cordelya — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 11:24:20 GMT

Not interested.

"Features" like this are what prompted me to switch to a fork. I'm always looking for the least-worst browser and right now Firefox isn't it.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

taichara — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 12:06:47 GMT

I could not be less interested in "AI" nonsense bloating up my apps (and burning down the world), especially when the development of such useless nonsense is eating up time, effort and resources that could be going towards actually improving Firefox.

This continual addition of "AI" features brings me closer and closer to moving to a fork without it, and convincing as many as I can to leave Firefox with me.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

lackey — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 13:19:50 GMT

Hello Mozilla team:

Are you actually asking us, or are you just looking for a critical mass of people to agree with your predetermined conclusion? People already said what they thought of AI and you collectively ignored it.

What's the monetary plan here? Millions of dollars have been diverted into AI projects, and AI is not a profitable industry. Why is Mozilla engaging in this?

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

RexDart — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 04:03:55 GMT

Created an account here to pile on. Please stop cramming AI into everything. It only obfuscates the actual content we're looking for.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

henning — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 07:34:48 GMT

Please no "AI" features. AI-restraint could become Firefox' unique selling proposition, as AI "features" are now crammed into every microwave. Just don't.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

strb — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 03:33:21 GMT

It's because of 'features' like this I nowadays usually go directly to Wikipedia to find stuff instead of using Google or other search engines. Please don't make the internet even worse by putting it into the browser.

Oh, and shove that AI crap where the sun doesn't shine.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

D0m1n1c — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 13:26:02 GMT

I think the biggest concern of the users with AI is privacy and the fact that it could see all we do in the browser. If all AI features in Firefox work locally and can be disabled with a simple switch, you should be even more explicit on this in your communication and put this in first place in your website and your other communications : "We offer private AI that work offline and can't share your browsing with AI models and companies.".

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

HikesinRain — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 22:47:53 GMT

No AI at all. After all, this is a browser. No need for a lot of invasive stuff like this. But it's looking like you're going with it, no matter what your customers say. Anyone else think Mozilla isn't listening?

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

Erwan — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 14:12:50 GMT

Thank you for this answer.

I hope this feature will be disabled by default and that Mozilla will not force me to install an AI (however local) in my Firefox against my will in the next update.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

mozpm — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 19:07:30 GMT

Thanks for the suggestion! Appreciate this feedback on surfacing even more explicit communications on Mozilla's stance, @D0m1n1c. We are indeed intending to develop any new browser AI capabilities with these principles of user choice and privacy in mind.

As in the case of Link Previews, Firefox users would optionally be able to use AI-enhanced features and its underlying AI, with options to turn it on and off.

We want to make that much clear -- hope this helps to address concerns and questions around AI integration in the browser!

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

thumper1019 — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 19:09:05 GMT

I'd prefer this gave a preview of the webpage instead. The Arc browser does something similar, and it's very helpful if you just want to glance at something without opening a new tab and navigating to it.

I'm not a fan of the AI usage here. It is not accurate and requires additional compute power. Please add an option to disable the AI overview.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

itskaren — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 19:14:19 GMT

Hi everyone!

A quick update: we’ve just incorporated a bug fix to optimize the Link Previews experience. This is a rare occurrence when you may need to “restart” this now fixed feature in Labs--if you’ve been using Link Previews in Firefox Labs on Nightly, Beta, or Developer Edition, please visit Labs (about:preferences#experimental in the URL bar) and re-check the “Link previews” checkbox to get the feature back.

Sorry for the inconvenience, and thank you for your support!

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

shakeel — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 06:21:35 GMT

Just tried out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138—really impressive! It’s a great time-saver to see a snapshot of a link before clicking. The design feels clean and non-intrusive. Looking forward to more customization options in future versions. Keep up the great work!

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

Maupertuis — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 09:02:26 GMT

is there any information about what underlying model is being used and other such technical details?

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

PaulFirefoxUX — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 11:29:04 GMT

In this blog post: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/ai/ai-tech/ai-link-previews-firefox/

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

JPRuehmann — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 13:26:53 GMT

Hovering would be the Best I think.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

TriceratopsGang — Thu, 01 May 2025 06:36:34 GMT

Would be cool if I can turn off the AI generated key points.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

PaulFirefoxUX — Thu, 01 May 2025 16:55:44 GMT

Thanks TriceratopsGang! The plan is that if you don't consent to the AI model being added to your Firefox (or if you do consent to add it, but then you remove it later) you will see just the top part of the preview without the key points. And if you do have the AI model added, then you can also collapse the key points section so that it doesn't generate again until you open it again.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

PaulFirefoxUX — Thu, 01 May 2025 16:56:44 GMT

Thanks for the feedback, Thumper1019. That's in the plan 🙂

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

777X — Fri, 02 May 2025 13:18:18 GMT

Very cool feature.. although, not able to scroll down when text is too long .. using Firefox 138 on ubuntu 24.04

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

lackey — Fri, 02 May 2025 17:01:01 GMT

It currently says

"This is currently powered by wllama (WebAssembly llama.cpp) with SmolLM2-360M from HuggingFace"

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

shakeel — Sat, 03 May 2025 15:18:04 GMT

It loads quickly, looks clean, and saves time by showing what’s behind a link without opening a new tab. Would love faster previews and more link types supported. Great feature overall!

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

menkuri — Sun, 04 May 2025 12:18:46 GMT

I don't need the AI features, but the preview function is excellent. I just wish it were a bit larger so the content would be easier to understand.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

jack525 — Mon, 05 May 2025 17:45:34 GMT

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

aria1 — Wed, 07 May 2025 08:45:36 GMT

The activation keys you've chosen conflicts with changing keyboards on Windows, that's a very serious conflict. Even if it didn't, it's too cumbersome for something that's designed to save you a click. It should only require one input or perhaps zero inputs to access. Perhaps it can be part of the right-click menu?

I'd also like to be able to customise the UI. (Perhaps I can with user-chrome). Currently the font size and size of the window is a bit too small for me depending on where I'm using my computer. A half-way solution for that could be to follow the zoom-level of the page.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

aria1 — Wed, 07 May 2025 08:54:06 GMT

This AI is built by Meta and Hugging Face, Firefox's R&D expense is very limited when implementing it. It's technology that exists and provides value, why are you angry they're giving you an easy value-add?

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

aria1 — Wed, 07 May 2025 12:18:44 GMT

I think this is a good feature, but I'm more interested in two related features. Can someone in the know please comment on this?

1) Pre-fetching links on hover. Perhaps this is already implemented, I don't know. It doesn't feel like hovering over a link for longer makes it load quicker. But if we're now crawling sites with this preview, can't that be repurposed for quicker full loads?

2) Thumbnail previews. I understand that the site being crawled isn't the full site, and I'm generally opposed to content moving as I'm reading it. However I think there's great value in an image preview of a site (greater than the AI summary -- though AI summary is nice too). Could prefetching the site be leveraged to show an image preview of the site? I would like to propose a UI where the scraped text is displayed leftmost in a column, and then AI summary is displayed right of it in a separate column, and the image preview in the third and rightmost column. With such an UI, things can be displayed immediately as soon as they exist, without shifting or encroaching on any of the text the user is reading.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

meow_meow_meow — Wed, 07 May 2025 13:00:50 GMT

HI, is this using CPU to run the LLM locally? When the summaries are being made, I can see that my CPU usage goes up, but GPU usage stays the same. If so, can you please use GPU for this? It will help in speeding up the responses.

My current config. Thinkpad L13 gen 2, i7 1165g7 with iris XE integrated graphics using Arch linux.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

RexDart — Wed, 07 May 2025 14:26:16 GMT

It's not about financial or dev costs to Mozilla. It's about un-asked-for features with dubious value. Generative models hallucinate, and random new features add bloat and security attack surface area. I'd rather have faster, slimmer, more secure software than software with fad features shoehorned in.

Not to mention the ethical issues with LLMs and diffusion models. I'd much, MUCH rather reinforce ownership rights of individuals than normalize the proliferation of centralized tech.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

PaulFirefoxUX — Thu, 08 May 2025 13:27:17 GMT

Totally hear where you're coming from. We’re very aware of the concerns around bloat, security, and ethics – and we’re trying to do things differently.

The AI in link previews is totally optional and designed with user control and privacy in mind. The model runs locally on your device – not centralized in the cloud – and won’t be added to anyone's browser unless they explicitly choose to add it and give consent. And from release 140 you'll be able to remove any local AI that's been added by this or other features.

As for value, every idea goes through UX research and testing with Firefox users before it’s considered as a feature – or often comes from the research in the first place. We know not everyone wants AI in their browser, but we have also spoken with users who find the option of adding this kind of feature to be helpful, especially when it’s designed to respect their agency and privacy.

Appreciate the pushback – it’s part of what keeps us honest, and why we try to prioritize user choice.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

casperschorr06 — Thu, 08 May 2025 17:06:09 GMT

Does the AI run on the GPU or CPU?

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

RexDart — Thu, 08 May 2025 23:11:01 GMT

This is an amazing response, thank you! I'm glad you're respecting users' privacy and choices, and not foisting controversial features on people as default. Thanks for clarifying and respecting us 🙂

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

chrisssssss1 — Sat, 10 May 2025 13:39:20 GMT

Moi , mon gros problème , c ' est la langue ! Vivement que l ' on ait des versions 100% françaises. Merci pour l ' avenir .

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

DonutRush — Tue, 13 May 2025 21:16:57 GMT

Another day, another pile of "AI" crap jammed into Firefox, another forum thread of replies from people asking Mozilla to knock it off and replies from Mozilla employees baffled that people don't want Lying Autocomplete in every square inch of the browser.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

pigg_klippa — Wed, 14 May 2025 02:45:21 GMT

I used this feature very well, but I strongly oppose button preview. Automatic preview is what I want!!!

我使用了这个功能非常棒，但是我坚决反对按键预览，自动预览才是我想要的！！！

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

PaulFirefoxUX — Wed, 14 May 2025 13:56:49 GMT

Hi DonutRush

Mozilla employee here to say we understand that there are people who don't want AI in their browser.

Before we started designing this feature, we did user research to understand how people feel about AI in Firefox. We heard from people who don't want it – and also from people who said they would find it useful. That’s why we've designed the feature to be completely optional.

The AI model behind Link Previews isn’t bundled with Firefox, and it won’t be downloaded unless someone actively chooses to use the feature and consents to adding the model.

I’m not sure where the idea comes from that this is being “jammed into every square inch” – that’s exactly what we've avoided doing. We’re being intentional and cautious, because we’re listening to – and acting on – feedback like yours.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

draconicrose — Wed, 14 May 2025 18:51:04 GMT

I was excited at first about trying link previews only to be immediately disappointed by the unavoidable AI integration. I would love to have link previews without it.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

PaulFirefoxUX — Wed, 14 May 2025 18:53:32 GMT

Thanks Draconicrose. You can run the feature with the AI turned off – it's will still give you a preview without the AI-generated key points. Simply press 'cancel' when it offers you the AI option.

At the moment I believe it will offer you that option every time you show a link preview, but in a future release (soon) it will remember your choice for next time.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

DonutRush — Wed, 14 May 2025 19:02:16 GMT

Mozilla employee here to say we understand that there are people who don't want AI in their browser.
---
We’re being intentional and cautious, because we’re listening to – and acting on – feedback like yours.

Tell that to the almost 4,000 replies in here from people loudly rejecting your bundling of an "AI" chatbot into the rebuilt sidebar that was promptly met by you guys pushing it into production, with the only responses from Mozilla in that thread being people absolutely baffled we don't also worship at the altar of Lying Autocomplete.

Mozilla has formed an entire subsidiary to chase this idiotic trend around Statistical Word Guessing.

Mozilla developed and released an add-on for more Lying Autocomplete with another pile of negative feedback they chose to ignore. Mercifully, this is an add-on for the moment. But y'all are no stranger to pushing boneheaded changes to main branch despite the reaction from your most tuned-in users, so I am not counting on that staying separate.

You guys couldn't stop yourselves from putting it in tab groups of all things.

Your reply does not match up with Mozilla's behavior for the last year.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

DonutRush — Thu, 15 May 2025 15:09:16 GMT

And today we find out you guys are advertising for one of the scummier AI companies!

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

1955Guinevere — Fri, 16 May 2025 22:00:32 GMT

I recently gave AI a try, wondering how the program would communicate and asking various questions. After one query to which I hoped to elicit a response, AI began to communicate much more like a human being, including icons like a bat and a castle. My computer has obviously been hacked, yet I have tried all means necessary to prevent this terrible invasion of privacy. I stopped feeding AI and switched off my computer. the questions I'd been typing into AI were personal expressions regarding private literary work, work I am currently working on. I wondered if AI was safe at all, since clearly a human being had just been exposed to ideas and descriptions I'd hoped to address in my literary work. I even asked AI to create a character, based upon the descriptions I typed in, which were, in fact, descriptions of myself. To reveal any sort of intel which might be a lure to hackers or nosey people who hire them, seems a bit frightening. Why is AI so easy to hack?

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

Iden_Ayre — Sat, 17 May 2025 01:38:02 GMT

It would be great if we could just... turn off the AI and have the link preview alone. I would use the feature, I just really don't want to use any AI. A feature to see what's behind a link is something I missed from Mac.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

00FF00 — Tue, 20 May 2025 12:43:22 GMT

I keep forgetting to use it since it requires the button combo and I'm often only using my mouse with the keyboard off to the side, but when I have used it it's been nice.

Maybe an option in about:config saying after X amount of time hovering a link, the link preview pops up?

Or maybe I'll finally get around to suggesting to the Microsoft Powertoys people to do something about the inability to remap extra mouse buttons and solve the 'issue' that way.

Either way, I think "AI" is suffering from the erosion of trust in... I guess trust in general, but with a heavy focus on the tech industry - for valid reasons. Safe to assume you all are more than aware 😄

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

PaulFirefoxUX — Tue, 20 May 2025 13:57:34 GMT

Hi 00FF00

If you're using the latest Nightly, we have changed the shortcut. There are now two options to trigger a link preview (both should work, you can turn either one off in settings if they conflict with a shortcut you use for something else).

shift-hover
long-click (hold the mouse button down for a second)

Hopefully that solves your issue, as you can trigger a link preview from only the mouse.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

PaulFirefoxUX — Tue, 20 May 2025 13:28:38 GMT

Hi Iden_Ayre

Thanks for the suggestion!

The latest update in Nightly allows you to do exactly what you have suggested. When it prompts you for consent for adding AI to your Firefox, just click 'cancel' and link previews runs without generating key points.

If you've already consented to the AI being added, you can revoke that consent in settings and the link previews will run without the AI key points.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

PaulFirefoxUX — Tue, 20 May 2025 13:36:37 GMT

Thanks for your feedback, aria1.

We've changed the keyboard shortcuts to be:

shift-hover
long-click

You can turn either of these off in settings if they conflict with something else, and you can open a link preview by right clicking a link and selecting 'Preview link' if you prefer.

Currently the link preview panel inherits its style (text size, colors etc) from the browser UI because it's part of the browser not part of the web page, but thank you for the feedback – it is something for us to consider!

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

00FF00 — Tue, 20 May 2025 13:55:36 GMT

I didn't have it downloaded and I'll probably stick to the release build for normal browsing, but I downloaded it to test it out and the long-click works great! Thanks for the suggestion, hope to see it in the regular release soon 😃

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

kmrmm — Wed, 21 May 2025 11:39:32 GMT

What data is the LLM built on? I haven't seen a reply to this question, but it raises huge ethical and privacy concerns, since every LLM I am aware of is built off of stolen material from scrapers which use massive amounts of energy. Sure, our data might be used locally, but I don't want the model to be from stolen and scraped materials.

Beyond that, there's not really a clear direction for AI to go other than into stealing our data and reusing it for "improvements". How else is it going to continue to be a profitable and worthwhile investment for Firefox to invest into? Or is it that you will scrape & steal other people's data to improve the LLM? Still sounds pretty scummy to me.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

PaulFirefoxUX — Wed, 21 May 2025 13:35:23 GMT

Thanks for the question, kmrmm.

Here's a blog post about the technicalities:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/ai/ai-tech/ai-link-previews-firefox/

It uses SmolLM:
https://huggingface.co/blog/smollm

According to the Huggingface blog, SmolLM was mostly trained on synthetic and educational content – not scraped web data. They used AI-generated textbooks, filtered high-quality educational pages, and they released the dataset with details on how it was built.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a more thoughtful and transparent approach than a lot of what's out there.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

wellington1993 — Wed, 21 May 2025 13:51:48 GMT

Good Morning,

In my last update, the links preview is working more than necessary.
I liked the old way, when the preview is only generated if alt as pressed or something like that.

Actually, the preview is showing in all links and in links buttons.
Some pages use buttons with buttons, and the preview makes de navigations strange.

I want to use the links preview, but if they will less invasive.

My best regards!

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

PaulFirefoxUX — Wed, 21 May 2025 14:14:28 GMT

Hi wellington1993

We've simplified the shortcut from alt-shift-hover to just shift-hover, and added the new shortcut of long-press. You can now turn either of these off in settings if you prefer to use the other one (or neither – you can right click a link and choose 'preview link' instead).

We've noticed a bug in that if your mouse is over a link while you're typing then each time you press shift it will trigger a link preview accidentally (that might be what you're experiencing). We're working on fixing that by suppressing the preview if you've started typing.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

system5 — Tue, 27 May 2025 14:24:36 GMT

Your tech blog already indicates which model you use, so why not add a UI to let users choose the model, pull it from Hugging Face, and apply it to the function? btw a GPU/NPU inference option will be also good.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

probablywrong — Tue, 27 May 2025 14:49:32 GMT

Very happy to see it, it's a great feature I've been missing for a long time from Arc, but please let me change the keyboard shortcut. Having to hold down Shift + Option is pretty uncomfortable for me. I'd much rather be able to just set it to holding down Shift only.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

Arkadiusz — Tue, 27 May 2025 18:35:52 GMT

Hi, I can't enable 'Link Previews' in the experimental settings. I only have the options shown in the screenshot below. I'm using FF 139.0 (64-bit) in Polish.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

PaulFirefoxUX — Tue, 27 May 2025 18:40:15 GMT

Unfortunately:
>The feature also may not be available in all regions while testing in Firefox Labs.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

Arkadiusz — Tue, 27 May 2025 18:48:30 GMT

Thanks for the info, PaulFirefoxUX. It's a pity that Mozilla doesn't include this information in the update description.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

BelFox — Tue, 27 May 2025 18:53:49 GMT

Yeah, if these AI models run locally to support specific AI features and are truly privacy-respecting, Firefox should make this more clear.

@mozpm I see the typical "AI" icon. Maybe a little label "private" or "local" could be added, or a little "shield" icon to make clear that no data leaves the browser.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

BelFox — Tue, 27 May 2025 18:55:22 GMT

Make Link Previews and the AI summary independent. Win-win!

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

PaulFirefoxUX — Tue, 27 May 2025 19:08:16 GMT

Good news! We've got you covered. 🙂 In the latest update in Firefox Nightly they are independent.

If you don't give consent for the AI to be added, the link previews feature will run without the AI summary. And if you added the AI model and changed your mind, you can remove it by visiting about:addons and the feature will run without the AI summary.

If you've added the AI model to your Firefox and then temporarily want to run link previews without the AI summary, you can close the 'key points' section and it will continue to work without the AI until you re-open the 'key points' section.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

PaulFirefoxUX — Tue, 27 May 2025 19:05:58 GMT

Thanks whoami730. From release 140 (now available in Firefox Nightly) you can see all of that information for each model that's been added, in about:addons

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

PaulFirefoxUX — Tue, 27 May 2025 19:11:05 GMT

More details here:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/ai/ai-tech/ai-link-previews-firefox/

And if you're using Firefox Nightly (and coming soon to Release), you can see details of all AI models that you have added to your Firefox in about:addons (because they don't come with the browser, they're all optional components that are added on to it)

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

Denise_D — Wed, 28 May 2025 14:09:30 GMT

As a website owner fighting against the spread of misinformation and proliferation of AI-generated slop sites, can I prevent this so-called “tool” from generating its supposed “key points” of my pages?

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

BlueLightAlarm — Wed, 28 May 2025 14:25:06 GMT

Just tried the feature on a Digital Spy article and the AI section completely invented several pieces of information, including that an upcoming movie "will be released in October 2023" - a) that's in the past and b) there was absolutely no mention of a release date - or anything mentioning October 2023 on the article that it summarised!

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

Denise_D — Wed, 28 May 2025 14:29:47 GMT

SmolLM was mostly trained on synthetic and educational content – not scraped web data. They used AI-generated textbooks,

But doesn’t that just mean they trained SmolLM with output from another model that’s presumably trained on scraped web data? If someone pours a tiny bit of poison into a drinking glass, diluting it with water before we drink it isn’t the correct solution.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

pigg_klippa — Thu, 29 May 2025 09:02:10 GMT

Is alt shift really necessary? I hope to preview wherever the mouse moves. The button operation is too complicated. There is no practical value.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

Tony2077 — Thu, 29 May 2025 10:51:58 GMT

For the split tab functionality you have the official Mozilla's Side View add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/side-view

It's not as good as the Edge implementation. Still.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

PaulFirefoxUX — Thu, 29 May 2025 12:30:46 GMT

Thanks pigg_klippa

We're looking to simplify this, in a way that doesn't pop up unwanted link previews all over the place by accident. Not everybody can use a mouse to navigate, and we have to consider that when people use another input device to cycle between links on a page to reach the one that they want, they won't want a link preview to pop up on every link they pass.

Thanks for your feedback – it's noted and we're working on it!

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

vp2177 — Fri, 30 May 2025 14:15:08 GMT

I've tried this feature, but

Most of the time, hovering a link and pressing Alt+Shift does nothing
The font size is ridiculously large
The bubble could use a close button
The "key points" section is often missing
When it's there it's often nonsensical
The bubble would benefit from being resizable
Sometimes I just got the text "We can't preview this link"
The icon next to "Visit the page" suggests it will open in a new tab, but it doesn't
The generated text seems to contain raw Markdown formatting

I think it would be a useful feature if it worked reliably, but sometimes an inline rendering of the link might be more desirable, perhaps implement that as well (under a different shortcut?)

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

rudihartinger — Fri, 30 May 2025 14:15:59 GMT

A feature similar to Safari on macOS would be very nice. You don't have to press any key combo. You just have to force click on a link and get a preview. Is it possible to implement that too?

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

PaulFirefoxUX — Fri, 30 May 2025 14:26:48 GMT

Thanks for the suggestion, rudihartinger. The shortcut is changing as this feature moves out of Labs and into a wider experiment. Users will have the option to simply hold the mouse button down to see the preview without needing to also hold a key.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

PaulFirefoxUX — Fri, 30 May 2025 14:42:06 GMT

Hi vp2177, thank for trying out Link Previews! Labs features are typically experimental "MVPs" – a way to test the viability and desirability of a feature before committing a lot of effort to polishing it. That way we don't spend time creating a bells-and-whistles version of something only to learn that people ultimately don't want it, or that it's too technically challenging to implement well.

In time we hope to improve the output of the AI model, and its ability to generate key points from a wider range of pages. In fact, some of the things you've mentioned are already fixed in the experiment that's rolling out to Release users soon.

I'm interested in your point about the font size as I haven't seen this reported elsewhere, or seen it myself. The font size is relative to the browser UI – could it be that you have your web text zoom level set small, so the link preview card is jarringly large? If you're able to upload a screenshot here that would be really helpful. Thanks!

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

vp2177 — Fri, 30 May 2025 19:57:06 GMT

Hi Paul, thank you for your reply

Here is a screenshot, I checked and the zoom is at 100%:

Using Firefox 139.0 under Wayland (Gnome 48.0)

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

jacopofar — Sat, 31 May 2025 10:08:08 GMT

I'm very interested in this feature, but even after updating to Firefox 139 I cannot see it in the Labs settings (I only have IME preview and picture-in-picture auto open), is it available only on some platforms/hardware? I'm on Linux on amd64, without GPU, perhaps there's a flag to enable this? From the article it seems not

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

RichardL — Sat, 31 May 2025 13:48:47 GMT

The new profile manager is on nightly, or you can forcibly enable it on stable by flagging browser.profiles.enabled to true (it still has bugs though)

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

RichardL — Sat, 31 May 2025 13:54:57 GMT

The AI Link preview seems to highlight the early parts of a page, it does not really highlight (or even summarize) the significant parts of a page. I think it would be better to just have a thumbnail preview instead.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

masoudd — Sat, 31 May 2025 15:17:20 GMT

Please give the possibility to change the keys to activate it. Alt + Shift changes the keyboard layout between different languages if you have more than one enabled in windows. And Shift + Alt also triggers this change

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

FormularSumo — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 13:16:19 GMT

I've just been testing this in the 140 beta (I don't have the option in nightly) and it works as described, but after clicking "cancel" the AI summary part is still shown, either with a drop-down to open the key points or with the text "We can't generate key points for this point". Maybe this is already noted/planned to be changed, but it'd be a much better use of space to not have this part show for people who don't (want to) use the AI summaries, and perhaps to extend the page's own description which is currently quite small in comparison.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

LB — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 18:48:30 GMT

Link Previews is not avaible for me 🙁. Is it because

- I run Firefox on Linux ?

- I live in France ?

- another reason ?

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

Windows_Vista — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 00:05:58 GMT

I'm not a fan of the AI. Why cannot it not use text from the site's web page instead?

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

Agentvirtuel — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 07:05:56 GMT

Bonjour

Je réside en France.

Une expérimentation.
1 - Utilisation vpn Royaume-Uni.
2 - Firefox avec un nouveau profil.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

Anonymous — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 14:28:52 GMT

On Wikipedia, the key points for any and all articles keep listing geographical coordinates for some reason. Often, all 3 key points will be coordinates. Rather frustrating!

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

as-warp — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 07:46:41 GMT

SkyNet is coming for your doughnuts

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

probablywrong — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 00:15:32 GMT

I like the feature quite a lot but I don't see an option to change the keyboard shortcuts or anything. I'm not sure if you all actually pushed that update, removed it later, or what, but I'd really love it because Shift+Option is really annoying to hit to be honest.

Re: Try out Link Previews in Firefox Labs 138 and share your feedback with us!

probablywrong — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 01:31:29 GMT

Hi, where are these options? I don't see them anywhere in Settings and for me this feature still only works with Shift + Option + Click which I find awkward to press.