- Firefox 139 added a preview function to link fueled by AI
- This sums up the web pages without you having to click on a link
- Like any generation of AI, he needs time to think – which can be pain
With artificial intelligence (AI) in fashion these days, it is not uncommon to find that your favorite web browser has added a lot of AI features designed to change the way you surf on the internet. Firefox is no exception: as explained in the publication notes of its latest update in version 139, the browser has brought glimpses of links fueled by AI to its users.
Once the experimental function is activated, you can activate it by flying over your mouse pointer on a link and pressing Alt + Shift. This triggers a preview box that summarizes key information on the web page so that you can see what it is without needing to visit.
At first glance, I love this idea. Imagine you land on a web page and you don’t know if you can trust its integrated links. Or you are super busy and I just want to know if it is worth clicking on a linked page. With an AI link, you can get artificial intelligence to do the work for you.
The Firefox AI comes into play by showing a set of key points that summarize the main ideas on the linked page, helping you understand it before clicking. But although it initially sounds well, I am not yet completely convinced.
A good idea with a boring defect
I have been a faithful user of Firefox for 20 years now, and I saw him change a lot at that time. And with the rise of the AI, I should not be surprised that the developer Mozilla is looking at the characteristics of automatic learning in recent years.
Although the seizures of links are a good idea on the surface – one thing, they allow you to check if a link is actually what it claims to be without having to click and discover it – they suffer from a common AI problem: you must wait for them to be generated. It’s the same with tools like Chatgpt, where you have to wait for AI to envisage an answer. The glimpses of the Firefox link are not instantaneous, and when I tried them, I found that they ended up slowing down my navigation experience.
However, they must be activated with a specific keyboard shortcut, which means that they will not appear when you simply pass on a link, minimizing the risk of accidental activations. It’s good, because a slow generation box that obscures the text you are trying to read would quickly become boring. As it stands, you can activate the overviews if you wish, or ignore them completely if you don’t.
It is far from being the only IA tool that Firefox has added in the past year. You can now add an AI chatbot to your sidebar, use AI to revise your groups of tabs, and more. And although the skills of links help him follow the current technological zeitgeist, I am not sure that it is a feature that I will use a lot at the moment.
