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

[itskaren]

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:

1. In Firefox, type about:settings#experimental into the address bar
   
   
2. Check the box next to Link Previews to turn it on
   
   
3. 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!

[00FF00]

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 😃

[wellington1993]

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! 

[PaulFirefoxUX]

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.

[system5]

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.

[probablywrong]

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.

[Arkadiusz]

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. 

[PaulFirefoxUX]

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

[Arkadiusz]

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

[Denise_D]

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?

[BlueLightAlarm]

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! 

[pigg_klippa]

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

[PaulFirefoxUX]

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!

[vp2177]

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?)

[PaulFirefoxUX]

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!

[vp2177]

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)

[rudihartinger]

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?

[PaulFirefoxUX]

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.

[jacopofar]

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

[RichardL]

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.

[masoudd]

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

[LB]

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

 - I run Firefox on Linux ?

 - I live in France ?

 - another reason ?

[Agentvirtuel]

Bonjour

Je réside en France.

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

[Windows_Vista]

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

[Anonymous]

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!

[probablywrong]

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.

[Agentvirtuel]

Hello

---

Take a look at https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1lv4jx0/link_preview_hotkey

https://www.youtube.com/embed/4WgThc2_3WY

[TheJoseph]

I like the idea, but I have many questions. Is the current placemente final? Also, does the IA have access to more user mavigation information?

Apart from this, nothing else, thanks for reading.

[PaulFirefoxUX]

Thanks for the questions TheJoseph.

The answer to both is no.

This is still an experimental feature that we're testing to see if there's sufficient interest / use to continue its development.

And the AI doesn't have access to anything except the opening few paragraphs of content on the page beyond the link. It has no access to any other data, and doesn't even remember previous links it has generated key points for (the browser may cache previously generated key points for your convenience, but the AI doesn't know about them). And the AI runs on your device without sending anything to Mozilla or anywhere else.

My colleague Jolie has recently published a blog post about our approach to privacy-preserving AI: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-ai/ai-browser-features/

[TheJoseph]

Thanks you Paul.

[Shahariar]

This AI is oddly very very slow. I took like 3 minutes to generate 2 key points for the jsPDF libraly 😑. WTAI😆

[mwatson506]

My feedback: I did not want this feature. I did not want this feature to be enabled. I did not choose to have this feature enabled. The feature was automatically enabled without me deciding such. The feature is now disabled - though, given how I was not given notice of such, who knows when that will change.

Please don't force this on us.

[Name1]

I am trying to turn this feature off but it still is on even after unchecking it - Anyone else have this issue?

[Agentvirtuel]

Hello

You can try browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled

1 - Go to Configuration Editor for Firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-config-editor-firefox
2 - Enter a search term browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled and try value false

For information purposes to try

user_pref("browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled", false);

Copy/paste the code into Notepad
Save
Type: All files
user.js

Go to your profile folder https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data#w_how-do-i-find-my-prof...

Move user.js to your profile folder

Restart Firefox

Another subject
Firefox policies https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates
Preferences https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/#preferences, for information purposes, https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1518067, the Enterprise Policy Generator https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/enterprise-policy-generator helps to create the configuration file.

---

Specify user-defined preferences (about:config)

{
  "policies": {
    "Preferences": {
      "browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled": {
        "Status": "locked",
        "Type": "boolean",
        "Value": false
      }
    }
  }
}

[Name1]

That worked ty!! Just set it to false in about:config

[NicholasMKE]

This just started unintentionally activating for me while I was unaware of the feature. I do a fair amount of writing in the browser (Jira tickets, comments like this page, etc) and somehow I must be triggering the shift + alt shortcut while pasting links. The first few popups were pretty alarming and unexpected, especially when I couldn't figure out where it was coming and when it disappeared when I tried to take a screenshot. 



I don't think I use the alt much if at all (alt+tab, I guess, but that wouldn't be with shift...), so I'm not sure how I triggered the preview. It took a few guesses in searching online to figure out where it was coming from so I think it'd be nice if the popup emphasized on the first activation that it was from Firefox and why it was activating.

It's an interesting feature, and reminds me of the wikipedia link hovers that I've grown to appreciate, but the unexpected nature was a mixed bag this week.

[PaulFirefoxUX]

Thanks for the feedback Nicholas.

This is exactly why we ran the experiment with a small group of users, to find out what works and what doesn't.

You'll be pleased to hear we're turning off the shift-hover shortcut as it causes too many issues.

Before first activation it should have shown a popup that introduced you to the feature. But it's possible to click off that popup and dismiss it without realising.

[PaulFirefoxUX]

Thanks for the feedback Nicholas.

This is exactly why we ran the experiment with a small group of users, to find out what works and what doesn't.

You'll be pleased to hear we're turning off the shift-hover shortcut as it causes too many issues.

Before first activation it should have shown a popup that introduced you to the feature. But it's possible to click off that popup and dismiss it without realising.

[NicholasMKE]

Thanks for the update Paul. I noticed this week now that if I hold down just shift and hover over a link, I often get a preview popup in FF v140.0.4 on Windows, even though the labs "Link Preview" setting is unchecked.

[PaulFirefoxUX]

The first release was a Labs release (ALT+SHIFT) only to those who opted in, announced in this post.

The second release was an auto-enrolled small experiment. Users see an onboarding card and a consent flow, and the shortcuts are SHIFT+HOVER and LONG-PRESS (different groups of users have different shortcuts on by default so we can assess which works better). Users can withold consent, turn off the feature, or remove the AI model completely.

So it sounds like you're in that second group of users but stumbled upon this post about the Labs release. Does that sound right?

[NicholasMKE]

That could certainly explain it, presumably I missed that onboarding card somehow...likely user error in ignoring unknown popups 🙂  Thanks for the info

[LexVorona]

I was curious and left the feature open. However, I found that it did not work most of the time. For most links it failed to fetch any content, as they were either localhost or links requiring authentication.

When it generated a preview, it was mostly wrong. For example, for this very post I am replying it generated a first key point as "I am Karen". Which is hardly a key point of your post.

Most disturbing was its interaction with multiple workspaces. I use Ctrl+Shift+Left/Right to switch between desktop workspaces and if the last window open was Firefox, then it would get stuck in the "Shift key pressed" mode and would start to show the AI preview on all the link on hover, even though I was no longer holding down the Shift key. This was disruptive enough for me to disable the feature completely.