Try Link Previews in Firefox 142 - See What’s Behind a Link Before You Click

[laustin]

Ever wish you could peek at a page before you click? Now you can with Firefox Link Previews, rolling out in Firefox 142 on desktop for English for users in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. This new feature lets you long-press a link (or right-click and choose “Preview Link”) to open a small card showing details like the page title, description, and even estimated reading time if available.

Want more context? If you have at least 3gb of RAM you can also choose to add AI-generated key points, all processed privately on your device, to quickly get the gist of what’s ahead. Thanks to feedback from Labs testers, and based on data from a release experiment, Link Previews helps people browse more confidently and save time while keeping healthy engagement with the publishers who create the content.

How to try it:

• Long press a link on desktop, or right-click and select Preview Link.
• In the preview card, click the settings gear to enable or disable AI-generated key points.
• You can manage Link Previews anytime in Settings > General > Browsing.
  
  

How to turn Link Previews off:
If you prefer not to use Link Previews, go to Settings > General > Browsing and uncheck Enable link previews. The option to preview links will be removed from right-click menus, and the long-press shortcut will be turned off.

How to remove the local AI model:
If you’ve turned on AI key points, Firefox downloads a small on-device language model to make those summaries possible. To review or remove it:

1. Type about:addons in the address bar.
2. Select On-Device AI from the menu.
3. You’ll see which models are installed, what they’re used for, and can remove any you no longer need.

This feature is available in English for users in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia, and is being introduced gradually to ensure great performance and quality.

We’d love your feedback!
Have you tried Link Previews yet? Share what you think: is it helping you decide what to click, or do you have ideas to make it even better?

[igorlogius]

Can i have it totally disabled in general (no model running in the background or whatever) and activate it only on explicit user action/intend for one or a selection of links? - If the answer to this is not a definitv yes this feature is staying completely disabled on all of my systems. ... And is there a chance this will be converted into an addon that users can add or remove if they want? (not just disabled?) 

[laustin]

If I understand your question correctly, the answer is yes. When AI key point generation is enabled (via explicit opt-in), the local model will be downloaded, and will only run when you long-press a link, or right click and select "Preview Link". The model is not intended to be active if users do not explicitly call for it.

[igorlogius]

Thanks for the reply. It only running "on-demand" does make it  sound a better. i'd still worry that the model+api+functions it adds ... might be an additional security and flaw/bug vector, which i and other users might rather want to risk adding. Like for sensitive enviorments. It would be nice for such usecases to be able to completely remove such components. 

So what are the chances that the whole AI stuff will get moved into an addon or a special version of firefox?  

[TechHorse]

laustin, preview sounds interesting, but I was wondering the following.

1. Am I correct in thinking that absolutely nothing will happen unless if the user long presses a link or selects the context menu preview option? There won't even be any pre-fetching of data just in case the user was to decide to preview the link that they are currently hovering over, or that has keyboard focus?

2. Am I correct in thinking that the language model does not get automatically installed just from using preview? It will only get installed if the user first explicitly opens preview, and then in a separate action explicitly decides to also add the model?

3. Finally, will preview actually visit the site, or does it use some sort of caching service such as Google cache? I am guessing it probably just directly visits the site, but in either case, is there any history or cache saved anywhere resulting from previous previews?

Thanks.

[laustin]

Thanks for the questions:
1. Yes, that's correct.
2. You can use Link Previews without AI. That is the default state, and relies on public metadata from the page. The model is only downloaded if you click "See more with AI" during onboarding, or enable "Allow AI to read the beginning of the page and generate key points" in settings.
3. Link Previews uses credentialless HTTPS requests to retrieve a page’s HTML and parses it without actually loading the page or or executing scripts. Firefox doesn't store a history of previewed pages.

[bilboo]

Link preview does not work for search results from Google or Yahoo. It does work with DuckDuckGo. This is probably not a bug, technically speaking, but seems to be a limitation in the current implementation.

[laustin]

Right on. Link Previews will not work for all links, so it's great to get feedback like this on where to improve.

[KaSutt]

"Now you can [peek at a page before you click] with Firefox Link Previews, rolling out in Firefox 142 on desktop for English for users in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia."

What about New Zealand?  😞

[laustin]

We're working on a global rollout next. Stay tuned 🇳🇿

[KaSutt]

Cheers!  🙂

[alexmrtr_]

🇧🇷would appreciate that !!

[AngelG_66]

I can't find the link preview you're talking about, what can be happens?

[laustin]

The feature is fully rolled out in the desktop version of Firefox 142 for English speaking users in US, CA, GB, and AU. Try checking your version or restarting your browser if you meet those criteria and still don't see the feature.

[Ian66]

I am a GB user, running 142.0, and I have restarted FF. I see no context menu, and no new Setting.

[MyZilla]

Same here. I am in Canada, running FF 142 on Windows 11 Home Edition. Like @Ian66, I restarted FF, to no avail. I've tried on various pages, in various tabs, etc.

[gfy]

Same here, in the US.
142.0.1 (aarch64)

[Tiky]

I decided to create an account to give some feedback on this one!  After trying Link preview, here are the issues I found out:

• The text in the popup looks huuuge and there's so much wasted space that there's not enough space for a useful summary of the page. There's a cog so I was hopeful but no options at all for the appearance.
• The page that I tried on had enough text for at least one keypoint for sure but the AI seems to not be willing to generate key points pages if isn't a blog or an article with a lot of text.
• As you can see under my mouse, at least on Linux, if the mouse is holding the link and the popup appear, I'm stuck with the link ghosted on my cursor until I press ESC.

[laustin]

Appreciate your effort in providing feedback!

Improving the appearance of the preview card, and our ability to generate key points for more types of articles are items we plan to address in subsequent versions.

The "ghosted" behavior of the preview card you note is new information, so I've filed a bug for us to track and consider addressing as well.

[jinwoosung]

"Now you can with Firefox Link Previews, rolling out in Firefox 142 on desktop for English for users in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia."

When will it roll out for India?

[laustin]

We're working on a global rollout next 🇮🇳

[jinwoosung]

👍

[twaks99]

This seems like a great feature, and I cannot wait to try it out. However, I am not seeing this at all in Firefox 142 on Windows. It is not even available in the settings. What do I have to do to enable this feature, or do I have to wait for a future version of Firefox?

[laustin]

The feature is fully rolled out in the desktop version of Firefox 142 for English speaking users in US, CA, GB, and AU. Try restarting your browser if you meet those criteria and still don't see the feature.

[LoneyRamik]

In one case I long-pressed a link and got "We can't preview this link" with "Visit link" below it. The problem is that it immediately went to the link when I released the mouse button without allowing me the choice of visiting or not visiting.

[Kvin]

Hi, it would be beneficial if the website page was displayed during editing.
It would also be helpful to be able to select the preview delay and assign a custom key combination for displaying the preview
Thank you

[twaks99]

It actually works now after restarting the browser. Thanks for your help.

[martinbckr]

What happens if the link is malicious? e.g. a payload-on-click link. Would the payload or malicious code still be downloaded to my device if I use link preview?

[laustin]

Great question. Link Previews uses HTTPS requests to retrieve a page’s HTML and parses it without executing scripts. These requests go through regular safe browsing url checks.

[c67f]

Please don't add these AI features to Firefox. I understand it doesn't do anything or put anything on my computer if it's disabled, but this is a bad direction to be going in, and any time I see a piece of software has added some new AI feature my heart sinks a little and I want to use it less.

[AmbientImpact]

Agreed. It's genuinely making me want to jump to LibreWolf.

[MartynW]

I have just updated to Firefox 142.0 on Windows/10 but when I go to Settings > General > Browsing I do not see the option to check Enable link previews. What must I do to see this option?

[DietTonic]

To get it working I had to go to about:config and toggle browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled to True. 

After restarting the browser, it worked as described.  I also now see the options in Settings to change the AI options.  It's working great for me, and this seems like a very useful feature (with or without local AI).  Kudos to laustin for the feature and description!

[MartynW]

Thanks @DietTonic - that worked for me - although I'm still curious why it does not work via Settings.

[MyZilla]

Thanks so much, @DietTonic ! That worked perfectly!

I figure it's just a workaround, though, and hopefully Mozilla will debug that...

[DietTonic]

You're most welcome - I'm glad it worked, and I added the comment to the original post (apologies for the duplicate).  Just a guess is that there might be some kind of roll-out hold based on Firefox extensions.  I know that roll-outs are often staged so certain users get features first (for safety, reliability, testing, risk management, etc.). 

I'm running about a dozen or so from the official Firefox site (all signed), but none that should effect this functionality in any way I'm aware.

[laustin]

Thanks for chiming in here. We are indeed rolling this out in a staged fashion during the initial release and will be updating the defaults shortly.

Appreciate you going the extra mile to not only enable it for yourself, but to also share your workflow in this forum to help others ❤️

[NebularNovice]

I tried link preview on this page.  Nothing happens when I long press, and it does not show as an option on right-click.  The link I tried was Community Disapproval ...

I just installed 142 and have made no changes concerning this in settings.  

??

[DietTonic]

To get it working I had to go to about:config and toggle browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled to True. 

[DietTonic]

To get it working I had to go to about:config and toggle browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled to True.