Mozilla is working on introducing link previews in its Firefox web browser. The feature is in testing in the latest Nightly version currently and includes support for local AI summaries.
The main idea behind the feature is to give users a tool at hand to check information about linked resources without visiting them directly.
Here is how it works: You hold down the Shift and Alt-keys on the keyboard and move the mouse cursor over links in the browser’s interface. Firefox displays a popup then that shows a preview image, the page title, and some basic information.
It uses AI, processed locally entirely according to Mozilla, to create key points that are displayed in the popup. This works for English webpages only at the time. Sören Hentzschel notes that you may add additional language support in the advanced configuration, but that the summaries are often in English.
The speed of processing depends entirely on the local system and its capabilities. I tested this on a fairly old computer and the processing took too long to be of use. Still, even without it, link previews worked quickly and reliably already.
How to enable the feature
You need the most recent version of Firefox Nightly, as this is only baked into Nightly at the moment. Note that the feature is in active development and that some features may be missing and that you may experience bugs while using it.
To enable Firefox’s new link preview feature:
- Load about:config in the Firefox address bar.
- Confirm that you will be careful.
- Search for browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled.
- Set the experimental preference to True.
- Restart Firefox.
Tip: you can add new supported languages to the preference browser.ml.linkPreview.allowedLanguages. Just append them. The default value is en. To add Spanish and Japanese, expand the string so that its value is en,es,jp in the end.
Again, languages other than English may not work overly well at this stage in development.
Closing Words
Firefox supports link previews on mobile already. You can long-press a link to get a preview. On desktop, users need to install extensions for that purpose, unless I’m mistaken (correct me please on this if that is the case).
The shortcut Shift-Alt is not overly elegant, but it works. The preview opens quickly and you get some information that you would not get otherwise, including the page title and a short description.
The AI summary feature did not work well on an older test system, but it may work better on modern hardware.
Now You: do you make use of link previews regularly or click on links right away all the time? Would you use Firefox’s new feature? Feel free to leave a comment down below.
Forgive me, but Firefox previews links already I think, or at least it does to the URL if users hover over a link. It doesn’t show what the page looks like, but the URL is perfectly readable in the bottom left hand corner of the browser when hovering over a link.
My main concern though is with QR Codes. When I point the phone’s camera at a QR code it opens the webpage immediately without any indication of where the URL hidden in the code will go to That’s inherently dangerous since it could be malicious.
So Moz’s idea of providing previews of sites on Firefox For Android would be most welcome if it’s going to include scanning QR Codes. Failing that, I suppose I’ll have to install a third party app to do the job.
After posting the above, I looked around and found a third party QR scanner on the F-Droid store which has the option to preview the URL the QR code will go to. So problem solved in that respect.
If anybody is interested in previewing QR codes, this app – with no ads – is called “QR & Barcode Scanner”. It’s the 5th one down on the F-Droid site when you perform a search using “QR”.