Saved you a click: Firefox 142 offers AI summaries of links

CRLite, link previews, and a llama-shaped surprise for devs

Good news, everyone! The new version of Mozilla's browser now makes even more extensive use of AI, providing summaries of linked content and offering developers the ability to add LLM support to extensions.

Firefox 142 brings some visible shininess, but due to the combination of regional restrictions and Mozilla's progressive rollout system, not everybody can see all the features just yet. There's also a new option for extension developers that we predict will not meet with universal acclaim.

Not geofenced but subject to phased rollout are link previews, for various native-English-speaking regions. Hover over, long-press, or right-click a link and pick Preview Link, and a summary should appear. Mozilla's summary says:

Previews can optionally include AI-generated key points, which are processed on your device to protect your privacy.

Earlier this month, we reported that some people were finding Firefox's inference engine gobbling CPU cycles. We're sure some people like the integrated LLM bot features, but they're very quiet about it if so. We predict that some people will be unhappy with this new role for them, too.

We also anticipate some misleading results. According to research both in 2024 and earlier this year, LLMs often fail to summarize accurately.

Overall, this new release looks relatively modest to us, but that is in part because we're in the wrong geographical region for several of the features affected, and we don't yet have access to another due to phased rollouts. As a result, the new stuff might be considerably more visible to some readers elsewhere in the world. Also, this vulture has a habit of turning off a lot of the new features in apps we've been happily using for years, so we confess that we had not really explored the Firefox new tab page and its customization options.

Two features on the new tab are geofenced. Users in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, France, Spain, and India can all get news headlines there. Despite being in the British Isles, we're not in the UK or Ireland, so this vulture can't see them. However, if you can, in this release they're now categorized by topic. Also, users in North America, Brazil, Australia, India, and Japan can get a weather forecast embedded in the new tab page, but we're in the land of "none of the above" so we don't.

Two welcome changes are simpler interactions with the sidebar and tab bar. You can now manage pinned tabs with a simple drag-and-drop operation, and just right-click to remove extensions that run in the sidebar. We foresee ourselves using both. There's also a new system for selectively managing exceptions to Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection, in case this breaks some sites.

Much less visible for everyone is that this version has Mozilla's new CRLite feature, which it described in more detail in a technical blog post whose title is the executive summary – CRLite: Fast, private, and comprehensive certificate revocation checking in Firefox. CRLite has been around for a while but may now become more common.

Summarizing links is not the only bit of increased LLM integration to be found. Although oddly it's not mentioned in the Firefox 142 for developers notes about new technical changes, the announcement also says:

Firefox now supports the wllama API for extensions, enabling developers to integrate local language model (LLM) capabilities directly into their add-ons.

In case you are as unfamiliar with it as we were, wllama is a Wasm binding for llama.cpp. This does not integrate spitting camelids into your browser; instead, it interfaces with llama.cpp, which lets you run Meta's Llama LLM and other models, locally or in the cloud. Personally, we'd rather have a face full of ruminant saliva, but your mileage may vary. ®