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What's New with Firefox 142

178 points by keepamovin 1y ago

logicprog 1y ago
I really like those local AI features. It's tempting me yo move to vanilla Firefox over LibreWolf...
- gucci-on-fleek 1y ago
  I'm still ambivalent on the rest of the AI features, but the AI translation is absolutely amazing. The translation quality isn't perfect, but being able to seamlessly translate 20+ languages 100% locally is amazing.
  - robertlagrant 1y ago
    Yes - agree. It's a lovely feature.
  - diggan 1y ago
    Agree, for us switching between languages all the time, with some of those languages being less known to us, it's a great tool! My only wish was that I can force it to always allow me to try translating things, even if it doesn't identify it as some specific language. Sometimes what I want to translate is like 30% one language and 70% another language, and I still want to translate it to another language, but since the tool doesn't see it as "foreign enough" or something, I don't even get the choice of having it translated. Besides that, it's a wonderful despite it not being perfect. Hopefully with time it'll only get better as they get more data. On that note, I'd be more than happy to contribute data if they added some way of giving "good translation / bad translation" feedback, but haven't seen that. I guess I had two wishes in the end.
    - jffry 1y ago
      If you select a chunk of text in the page and right click there should be a context-menu option to translate the text. It's a popup with a textarea and not in-situ, but it's the same local model as far as I can tell
      - zveyaeyv3sfye 1y ago
        > in-situ I believe you mean ex situ: > By contrast, ex situ methods involve the removal or displacement of materials, specimens, or processes for study, preservation, or modification in a controlled setting, often at the cost of contextual integrity. Might as well use the correct words if you want to talk above people's heads.
        jffry 1y ago
        First: No need to be rude, "in situ" is a very commonly used phrase among English speakers, as should be evident from the Wikipedia article [1] you yourself cited Second: The normal Firefox translate feature replaces the text in the page with the translated text - retaining its styling, position, context w/ images, etc. The right click menu, does not. I described the right click menu as "not in situ" which is correct. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ
        zveyaeyv3sfye 1y ago
        > "in situ" is a very commonly used phrase among English speakers I would challenge the "very common" claim. But sure, the phrase is in use. Mostly not in tech, though. And you are using it wrong. If you wanted to express "in-place translation", you could have done so using your native tongue. You're welcome.
    - gucci-on-fleek 1y ago
      > My only wish was that I can force it to always allow me to try translating things, even if it doesn't identify it as some specific language. You can, but it's somewhat hidden. Open the hamburger menu in the top right, then select “Translate page…”.
  - sorenjan 1y ago
    I can't get it to always translate a page, it keeps asking me every time I visit.
  - NoboruWataya 1y ago
    I agree, I'm generally sceptical of new AI "features" in the browser and will be turning most of them off. But the translation feature (which has been in Firefox for a while now) is great. The difference is that translation in a browser is something that is clearly useful and has always been AI-based to an extent, so shipping with a local model for translation is a strict improvement (leaving aside any difference in translation quality, which I have not noticed). The other AI features are not obviously useful IMO.
  - logicprog 1y ago
    Yeah! I have it on my phone and its legitimately super helpful; especially since I go to a lot of obscure websites and personal blogs!
  - deivid 1y ago
    The models[0] are open and great, I find them so useful that I ended up making an Android app[1] just to have them available also outside of Firefox. [0]: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations-models/ https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations-models/ [1]: https://github.com/davidventura/firefox-translator https://github.com/davidventura/firefox-translator
    - neobrain 1y ago
      That translation app is so cool, exactly what I've always been looking for (offline + camera integration + clean UI). Thanks for putting in the work and for putting it on F-Droid even!
- captainepoch 1y ago
  I moved long ago, I don't regret anything.
saagarjha 1y ago
> Link Previews show a snapshot of a page before you open it, helping you decide what’s worth your time. Just long press any link to preview and reduce distractions. On macOS there is a native affordance for this by using force click. It's kind of annoying that Firefox chose to not support this and instead made it click-and-hold only.
- artemisart 1y ago
  This seems to be exclusive to Safari, I can't get it to work in Chrome either (and didn't know about the feature before right now, the discoverability is terrible).
  - saagarjha 1y ago
    It's that Safari implemented support for it. Firefox added their own version and chose to give it a different affordance
    - Y_Y 1y ago
      > You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means. - Inigo Montoya This is no affordance. There's nothing the design of either browser that suggests you can obtain a link preview by those actions, you just have to be told what action to take beforehand.
      - saagarjha 1y ago
        What part of long pressing a link is discoverable to you
  - frizlab 1y ago
    It’s system-wide. chrome explicitly did not support it.
- drcongo 1y ago
  It's a three finger touch for me.
wkat4242 1y ago
That link preview bothers me a bit from a privacy standpoint. Hovering over a link will now hit that website. Hmm.
- AltF4me 1y ago
  It says you have to click and hold
  - JohnFen 1y ago
    Sure, but (I think this is what the commenter was asking about), it has to hit the page in order to generate the preview, does it not?
    - Vinnl 1y ago
      Yes, but clicking also results in your browser having to hit the page. The concern is doing so accidentally, which is reasonable if it required a hover interaction (but luckily, it doesn't).
    - ErneX 1y ago
      Obviously but you are triggering it, if you don’t do it it won’t do it. Safari is exactly the same on iOS at least.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
  I was wondering about that, anybody know how that works?
  - dkdbejwi383 1y ago
    If you click the “learn more” link it explains it.
- tethys 1y ago
  The post (and this clarification [0]) state that you have to either long click or select "Preview Link" from the context menu. [0] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/try-link-previews-in-firefox-142-see-what-s-behind-a-link-before/m-p/103631/highlight/true#M40210 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/try-link-previews...
capitainenemo 1y ago
I wonder how the link preview will work on mobile. In the past, click and hold on a partially obscured URL on mobile basically worked like "hover" on the desktop and revealed the whole link (useful to see if the link was malicious, or had click tracking, or just didn't go to the site you thought it did). I hope there's still a way to do that feature. If nothing else, by disabling the preview which I doubt I would find as useful. edit just retested on mobile. click and hold is basically the context menu. If you tap on the first item in the context menu (the link ended in …) you get the full link wrapped. So, more correct to say that click and hold is the right click context menu on mobile, even though I mostly just used it for that display whole link feature. Perhaps they could put the preview as a sub item of the context menu.
giancarlostoro 1y ago
Link Preview is a little weird, but also interesting, you can run a local AI model that summarizes the page for you, so its not using ChatGPT, or any of the cloud APIs.
nemomarx 1y ago
If you turn off the ai part the preview just pulls in the title and the first chunk of text on the page. Actually still fairly useful for shortened links or ambiguous urls, etc
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
deanc 1y ago
I have found the majority of these relay services utterly useless. A large number of sites are using some kind of email verification service/API that detect all these relay/trash domains (mailinator etc.) and you can never sign up unless you have a legit domain. I'd be astonished if mozmail.com wasn't already on this list. I'm not saying I don't value the idea behind this, but at least with Apple they are using their primary domain as a relay meaning it's too risky to block all the legitimate addresses.
- Vinnl 1y ago
  It's a risk, and it would be great if they worked on more sites, but "utterly useless" is too brash in my opinion - there are still a lot of sites that do accept them, and each one is one account fewer that can be linked to your others. I don't think I've had problems receiving concert or cinema tickets, for example - the one-time uses for which they are most beneficial. I just checked, and I currently have 385 email masks used. Certainly worth the €1 a month. (Disclosure: I used to be on the Firefox Relay team.)
- someone4874726 1y ago
  Have been using FireFox Relay for a couple of years now and can coun't the amount of sites which have denied my signup on a single hand.
  - keepamovin 1y ago
    How many fingers do you have - on that hand?
    - mnmalst 1y ago
      1583
    - Vinnl 1y ago
      It's an AI-generated hand, probably.
  - mantra2 1y ago
asimovDev 1y ago
Anyone else was under a naive impression that the preview would go through the Mozilla servers? something like DuckDuckGo has(had? haven't used it for a while)
- nemomarx 1y ago
  Like running the llm part on their servers, or as a proxy for other reasons?
  - asimovDev 1y ago
    I meant as a proxy. I saw the Mozilla.org in the preview and my mind immediately jumped to the DDG proxy thing
- Vinnl 1y ago
  Just to be explicit: it doesn't go through any server, all processing happens on your device. Edit: ah, just saw the clarification. So the content is not sent anywhere to create the summary, but you do visit the original site, just like you would have if you had done a regular click.
Shank 1y ago
Lately, I’ve experienced memory leaks in Firefox that I’m too amateur to diagnose, that leads to Firefox eating 8gb of memory in some web renderer process. So when I excitedly check the changelog hoping for a summary of possible changes, I’m disappointed that there isn’t a verbose changelog for advanced users. I’m sure I could search bugzilla, but it makes me sad that the only “important” things are the headlining features.
- throwaway48476 1y ago
  Try about:processes and take a snapshot.
  - odie5533 1y ago
    Google AI studio sitting doing nothing (not even a chat loaded) was eating 8 GB and lots of CPU.
- mnmalst 1y ago
  You mean more verbose than the landing page or the release notes which are also linked in the landing page: https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/142.0.1/releasenotes/ https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/142.0.1/releasenotes/ ? This is a point release, even more changes are linked at the bottom of the release notes page.
- Anthony-G 1y ago
  I’ve had similar issues running the latest Firefox (currently 142 as per this discussion) on the latest Fedora (42). I used to be able to lock the screen and go home but I’ve recently had a couple of mornings where I’d come into work and find my system unresponsive. I use the Magic SysRq command to trigger the OOM (out-of-memory) killer as many times as required to free up enough resources that I could log in on a virtual console (Alt-Ctrl-F2). This would allow me to manually kill Firefox, freeing up about 15GB of RAM and all 16GB of the swap file. I’ve been too busy with work to spend any time investigating the cause. At first I had been blaming the `teams-for-linux` electron app but figured that wasn’t the culprit because I close it every evening. In Firefox, `about:processes` is useful while actually using the application but I’m not really sure how best to diagnose what’s happening after the fact.
thegabriele 1y ago
I'm on FF 142.0.1 (64 bit) windows and i've no link preview. I think it's a good news they're introducing some paid features for pro users
- esnard 1y ago
  > 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. Not available in Italy yet.
  - filenox 1y ago
    You can enable it by setting 'browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled' to true via about:config. A restart of Firefox is required.
- odie5533 1y ago
  Open Settings. You can enable it at the bottom of the General tab.
filenox 1y ago
You can trigger the Preview functionality by holding the Shift key while hovering over a URL. This feels much snappier - and therefore more useful. Additional settings can be found and adjusted via about:config.
everdrive 1y ago
I'm genuinely perplexed why people find link previews useful. The page image is too small to really see, and it's not as if rapidly opening and closing a tab actually takes effort. It may be faster than the long click depending how comfortable you are with keyboard controls. I have other questions as well -- does the link preview ignore your plugins? So if you loaded the web page, would uBlock Origin prevent tracking which is _not_ prevented when loading the preview? If you have a phishing test url with a unique identifier, do you flunk the test even if you don't click through?
- Y-bar 1y ago
  Mostly in agreement, though I could perhaps find them useful if not for: Four times of five the link previews are blocked by a cookie consent or newsletter signup modal anyway.
- zerkten 1y ago
  >> it's not as if rapidly opening and closing a tab actually takes effort. It may be faster than the long click depending how comfortable you are with keyboard controls. For normal people, i.e. those who aren't techies, you have your answer right there on why this may be useful. We are very efficient with our browser usage. Normal people struggle with this task because they get lost in the steps. Even if they can do the steps at a slow pace, it doesn't stick because it's too slow. The leap to using keyboard shortcuts just won't happen for the majority of people. I think your points on how this is implemented are fairer. That said, that said it seems like the best approach is to follow the simplest and most efficient approach, which is to not load extensions, or use what is loaded. The success of features like this is known with technical users like us. We don't like them because we have a workflow that avoids the issue like the phishing one you describe. It's unclear whether this helps users and is likely somewhat experimental. I think it's a much better place to be doing work that other areas where they have invested even if it has many issues.
  - ffsm8 1y ago
    Eh, isn't it even quicker without keyboard? Third button opens in New tab, third button again closes the tab. But you're point is correct that the majority of people do indeed not use any device quickly. No matter wherever it's a phone or desktop browser.
josefritzishere 1y ago
Every new release of 2025 is full of AI features which end up being either useless and/or annoying. I always turn them off if I can. This is the most tiresome hypecycle in history.
anvuong 1y ago
Anecdotally but Firefox has become slower and slower in the past few years for me. I have no idea what is going on behind the scene but it's getting nearly unusable. Tried Edge yesterday and it was so much faster, but the amount of ads pushing is yikes.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  The chrome ecosystem is pulling away. At its core, chromium contains a state-of-the-art language runtime for JS. The fact that V8 stands alone as a project and contributor community gives it an advantage over Firefox, which lacks the resources to keep pace.
- bestregards 1y ago
  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-cant-load-websites-other-browsers-can#w_ipv6 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-cant-load-websi... Not sure if this is what you're experiencing but I don't have IPV6 and this was causing a number of issues for me. Firefox has been so much better since disabling this.
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
  What extensions do you have? I've not experienced this, so my guess is that it's an extension.
mantra2 1y ago
Does Firefox still block clipboard history apps from accessing private windows with no way to turn it off? Haven't used Firefox since that change.
- mdaniel 1y ago
  Friend, do I understand that you're mad that private windows don't allow the system to introspect what content you're viewing in a private window? BTW, in the spirit of being helpful: if you're using private windows just for 'fresh session' behavior, Firefox offers two other knobs for that outcome: Profiles and Containers. In Chrome I'm with you that Incognito can be a very cheap way to login to a site multiple times, but in FF you have more choices about that problem
  - mantra2 1y ago
    I am, yes. It worked as I described up until I think October of last year. I’m logging in and out of client accounts - often for services that don’t do delegate access - so private windows work nice for me to make sure that I’m always cleared out of what I was working on before changing to a different project. Often I copy things in private windows that aren’t secrets, it just happens to be how I used the feature. Containers and Profile are great - but - I’m not trying to have 50+ of them at work, much easier to flip open a private window. I acknowledge my usecase is unusual and for most I think the feature makes sense - I just want to be able to turn it off, an about:config would be fine.
    - mdaniel 1y ago
      If you haven't seen it, there's also https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con... (https://github.com/stoically/temporary-containers https://github.com/stoically/temporary-containers MIT) when you don't care about the containers but do care that their browsing context is isolated. The screenshot even shows the handy "delete temporary container 15 minutes after the last tab closes") Actually, sorry, it seems to be https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-containers-plus/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con... and https://github.com/GodKratos/temporary-containers https://github.com/GodKratos/temporary-containers) based solely on the language present in the add-on and commit history
Workaccount2 1y ago
I wonder if it addressed something practical and meaningful...like implementing a spell check that at least covers all of the English language. Maybe then they can start working on the 5 year trek to also make the spellchecker somewhat competent. Or maybe we'll just keep packing features, because everyone here knows, features are what save products! Not usability!
- mrweasel 1y ago
  I should probably bug report this, but I don't even know where to start. For as long as I can remember "find" has been semi-broken. Hit Ctrl+f to search for a word you know for sure is on a page and Firefox might not find it. You type in the first five characters and Firefox goes "Nope, can't find it", then enter character number six, and then Firefox sees it, enter another character and nope, lost it, can't find it anymore. You look stare right at a word and find will be unable to locate it. But yeah, there's nothing I really care about, haven't been in a while. Funny enough, given how Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix started, I just want a slimmed down browser without a ton of features. Tabs and an extension API, that's it.
- Voultapher 1y ago
  At this speed Ladybird might be the browser to use in a couple years, even though I find their decision to use a memory unsafe language for their core tech foolish in the year 2025.
  - beng-nl 1y ago
    I remember the original reasoning for creating Firefox (first Phoenix) was to create a more lightweight and faster version of the Mozilla browser, which initially was true.
    - dydkgbufxuf 1y ago
      a big part of making it lightweight wasn't stripping away browser bits, but stripping away non-browser bits. mail, newsgroups, irc. mozilla (the suite) was a lot more than a browser.
larschdk 1y ago
Here's a feature request: Disallow any and all unsolicited attention-seeking pop-ups or notifications from the browser itself.
righthand 1y ago
> For users in the United States, article recommendations on your New Tab page are now grouped into topic sections like Sports, Food, and Entertainment to make stories more organized and easier to scan. You can also follow topics you’re interested in and block ones you’d prefer not to see, giving you more control over what shows up when you open a new tab. Ladybird cannot come fast enough…
- mdaniel 1y ago
  Look, I'm with you on alternate implementations, but throwing out Firefox just because they decided to follow Edge down the "be the Yahoo of browsers" may be baby-with-the-bathwater type thing. It's painless to evict all that junk, even though I strongly agree that it should not be necessary in a browser
- NoGravitas 1y ago
  It's trivial to turn those off. They are in the regular preferences, you don't even have to go into about:config.
  - righthand 1y ago
    Some times they release a new enhancement to an already existing feature I have to disable the setting AGAIN.
worldsavior 1y ago
Nothing new with the security of the browser? I expect some security improvements knowing the severe security state of Firefox.
jdlyga 1y ago
At least they're finally working on improving the browser UI.
bachmeier 1y ago
This is a promising move in the right direction. Allowing users to pay for Relay Premium lets them take advantage of their reputation for privacy to make money. Let's hope they promote it and give it more than three months before dropping it.
AnonC 1y ago
Link previews reminds me of classic (XUL) Firefox extensions from a couple of decades ago that provided previews when the mouse was hovered over a link (with a short delay). "Cool Previews" was one of those extensions. I'm sure there must be WebExtensions that have the same feature with configurability in how they work. This built in feature requires a click and hold though.
captainepoch 1y ago
So... Nothing really useful or what users are asking for a long time... And we then ask why people aren't using Firefox...
- samtheDamned 1y ago
  Tab groups is pretty useful. My partner refused to try firefox in the past because it didn't have tab groups and now they're able to use it as their main browser.
  - captainepoch 1y ago
    It's useful, but it's a meaningless feature. We've been asking for a good JS and HTML engine, faster than what Firefox uses, and for better compatibility with websites (there are webs that don't work properly with Firefox). And to not put the Manifest V3 into Firefox (which it's done already, besides we still have uBlock Origin working as intended, for now, because nobody knows what's going to happen with that in the future). And I think that's way more important that being able to group tabs.
outlore 1y ago
tab groups organized by domain or regex seems like a more deterministic and power user friendly feature compared to organizing it by an LLM

178 points by keepamovin 1y ago

logicprog 1y ago

I really like those local AI features. It's tempting me yo move to vanilla Firefox over LibreWolf...

gucci-on-fleek 1y ago
I'm still ambivalent on the rest of the AI features, but the AI translation is absolutely amazing. The translation quality isn't perfect, but being able to seamlessly translate 20+ languages 100% locally is amazing.
- robertlagrant 1y ago
  Yes - agree. It's a lovely feature.
- diggan 1y ago
  Agree, for us switching between languages all the time, with some of those languages being less known to us, it's a great tool! My only wish was that I can force it to always allow me to try translating things, even if it doesn't identify it as some specific language. Sometimes what I want to translate is like 30% one language and 70% another language, and I still want to translate it to another language, but since the tool doesn't see it as "foreign enough" or something, I don't even get the choice of having it translated. Besides that, it's a wonderful despite it not being perfect. Hopefully with time it'll only get better as they get more data. On that note, I'd be more than happy to contribute data if they added some way of giving "good translation / bad translation" feedback, but haven't seen that. I guess I had two wishes in the end.
  - jffry 1y ago
    If you select a chunk of text in the page and right click there should be a context-menu option to translate the text. It's a popup with a textarea and not in-situ, but it's the same local model as far as I can tell
    - zveyaeyv3sfye 1y ago
      > in-situ I believe you mean ex situ: > By contrast, ex situ methods involve the removal or displacement of materials, specimens, or processes for study, preservation, or modification in a controlled setting, often at the cost of contextual integrity. Might as well use the correct words if you want to talk above people's heads.
      - jffry 1y ago
        First: No need to be rude, "in situ" is a very commonly used phrase among English speakers, as should be evident from the Wikipedia article [1] you yourself cited Second: The normal Firefox translate feature replaces the text in the page with the translated text - retaining its styling, position, context w/ images, etc. The right click menu, does not. I described the right click menu as "not in situ" which is correct. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ
        zveyaeyv3sfye 1y ago
        > "in situ" is a very commonly used phrase among English speakers I would challenge the "very common" claim. But sure, the phrase is in use. Mostly not in tech, though. And you are using it wrong. If you wanted to express "in-place translation", you could have done so using your native tongue. You're welcome.
  - gucci-on-fleek 1y ago
    > My only wish was that I can force it to always allow me to try translating things, even if it doesn't identify it as some specific language. You can, but it's somewhat hidden. Open the hamburger menu in the top right, then select “Translate page…”.
- sorenjan 1y ago
  I can't get it to always translate a page, it keeps asking me every time I visit.
- NoboruWataya 1y ago
  I agree, I'm generally sceptical of new AI "features" in the browser and will be turning most of them off. But the translation feature (which has been in Firefox for a while now) is great. The difference is that translation in a browser is something that is clearly useful and has always been AI-based to an extent, so shipping with a local model for translation is a strict improvement (leaving aside any difference in translation quality, which I have not noticed). The other AI features are not obviously useful IMO.
- logicprog 1y ago
  Yeah! I have it on my phone and its legitimately super helpful; especially since I go to a lot of obscure websites and personal blogs!
- deivid 1y ago
  The models[0] are open and great, I find them so useful that I ended up making an Android app[1] just to have them available also outside of Firefox. [0]: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations-models/ https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations-models/ [1]: https://github.com/davidventura/firefox-translator https://github.com/davidventura/firefox-translator
  - neobrain 1y ago
    That translation app is so cool, exactly what I've always been looking for (offline + camera integration + clean UI). Thanks for putting in the work and for putting it on F-Droid even!
captainepoch 1y ago
I moved long ago, I don't regret anything.

saagarjha 1y ago

> Link Previews show a snapshot of a page before you open it, helping you decide what’s worth your time. Just long press any link to preview and reduce distractions. On macOS there is a native affordance for this by using force click. It's kind of annoying that Firefox chose to not support this and instead made it click-and-hold only.

artemisart 1y ago
This seems to be exclusive to Safari, I can't get it to work in Chrome either (and didn't know about the feature before right now, the discoverability is terrible).
- saagarjha 1y ago
  It's that Safari implemented support for it. Firefox added their own version and chose to give it a different affordance
  - Y_Y 1y ago
    > You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means. - Inigo Montoya This is no affordance. There's nothing the design of either browser that suggests you can obtain a link preview by those actions, you just have to be told what action to take beforehand.
    - saagarjha 1y ago
      What part of long pressing a link is discoverable to you
- frizlab 1y ago
  It’s system-wide. chrome explicitly did not support it.
drcongo 1y ago
It's a three finger touch for me.

wkat4242 1y ago

That link preview bothers me a bit from a privacy standpoint. Hovering over a link will now hit that website. Hmm.

AltF4me 1y ago
It says you have to click and hold
- JohnFen 1y ago
  Sure, but (I think this is what the commenter was asking about), it has to hit the page in order to generate the preview, does it not?
  - Vinnl 1y ago
    Yes, but clicking also results in your browser having to hit the page. The concern is doing so accidentally, which is reasonable if it required a hover interaction (but luckily, it doesn't).
  - ErneX 1y ago
    Obviously but you are triggering it, if you don’t do it it won’t do it. Safari is exactly the same on iOS at least.
Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
I was wondering about that, anybody know how that works?
- dkdbejwi383 1y ago
  If you click the “learn more” link it explains it.
tethys 1y ago
The post (and this clarification [0]) state that you have to either long click or select "Preview Link" from the context menu. [0] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/try-link-previews-in-firefox-142-see-what-s-behind-a-link-before/m-p/103631/highlight/true#M40210 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/try-link-previews...

capitainenemo 1y ago

I wonder how the link preview will work on mobile. In the past, click and hold on a partially obscured URL on mobile basically worked like "hover" on the desktop and revealed the whole link (useful to see if the link was malicious, or had click tracking, or just didn't go to the site you thought it did). I hope there's still a way to do that feature. If nothing else, by disabling the preview which I doubt I would find as useful. edit just retested on mobile. click and hold is basically the context menu. If you tap on the first item in the context menu (the link ended in …) you get the full link wrapped. So, more correct to say that click and hold is the right click context menu on mobile, even though I mostly just used it for that display whole link feature. Perhaps they could put the preview as a sub item of the context menu.

giancarlostoro 1y ago

Link Preview is a little weird, but also interesting, you can run a local AI model that summarizes the page for you, so its not using ChatGPT, or any of the cloud APIs.

nemomarx 1y ago

If you turn off the ai part the preview just pulls in the title and the first chunk of text on the page. Actually still fairly useful for shortened links or ambiguous urls, etc

deleted 1y ago

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deanc 1y ago

I have found the majority of these relay services utterly useless. A large number of sites are using some kind of email verification service/API that detect all these relay/trash domains (mailinator etc.) and you can never sign up unless you have a legit domain. I'd be astonished if mozmail.com wasn't already on this list. I'm not saying I don't value the idea behind this, but at least with Apple they are using their primary domain as a relay meaning it's too risky to block all the legitimate addresses.

Vinnl 1y ago
It's a risk, and it would be great if they worked on more sites, but "utterly useless" is too brash in my opinion - there are still a lot of sites that do accept them, and each one is one account fewer that can be linked to your others. I don't think I've had problems receiving concert or cinema tickets, for example - the one-time uses for which they are most beneficial. I just checked, and I currently have 385 email masks used. Certainly worth the €1 a month. (Disclosure: I used to be on the Firefox Relay team.)
someone4874726 1y ago
Have been using FireFox Relay for a couple of years now and can coun't the amount of sites which have denied my signup on a single hand.
- keepamovin 1y ago
  How many fingers do you have - on that hand?
  - mnmalst 1y ago
    1583
  - Vinnl 1y ago
    It's an AI-generated hand, probably.
- mantra2 1y ago

asimovDev 1y ago

Anyone else was under a naive impression that the preview would go through the Mozilla servers? something like DuckDuckGo has(had? haven't used it for a while)

nemomarx 1y ago
Like running the llm part on their servers, or as a proxy for other reasons?
- asimovDev 1y ago
  I meant as a proxy. I saw the Mozilla.org in the preview and my mind immediately jumped to the DDG proxy thing
Vinnl 1y ago
Just to be explicit: it doesn't go through any server, all processing happens on your device. Edit: ah, just saw the clarification. So the content is not sent anywhere to create the summary, but you do visit the original site, just like you would have if you had done a regular click.

Shank 1y ago

Lately, I’ve experienced memory leaks in Firefox that I’m too amateur to diagnose, that leads to Firefox eating 8gb of memory in some web renderer process. So when I excitedly check the changelog hoping for a summary of possible changes, I’m disappointed that there isn’t a verbose changelog for advanced users. I’m sure I could search bugzilla, but it makes me sad that the only “important” things are the headlining features.

throwaway48476 1y ago
Try about:processes and take a snapshot.
- odie5533 1y ago
  Google AI studio sitting doing nothing (not even a chat loaded) was eating 8 GB and lots of CPU.
mnmalst 1y ago
You mean more verbose than the landing page or the release notes which are also linked in the landing page: https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/142.0.1/releasenotes/ https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/142.0.1/releasenotes/ ? This is a point release, even more changes are linked at the bottom of the release notes page.
Anthony-G 1y ago
I’ve had similar issues running the latest Firefox (currently 142 as per this discussion) on the latest Fedora (42). I used to be able to lock the screen and go home but I’ve recently had a couple of mornings where I’d come into work and find my system unresponsive. I use the Magic SysRq command to trigger the OOM (out-of-memory) killer as many times as required to free up enough resources that I could log in on a virtual console (Alt-Ctrl-F2). This would allow me to manually kill Firefox, freeing up about 15GB of RAM and all 16GB of the swap file. I’ve been too busy with work to spend any time investigating the cause. At first I had been blaming the `teams-for-linux` electron app but figured that wasn’t the culprit because I close it every evening. In Firefox, `about:processes` is useful while actually using the application but I’m not really sure how best to diagnose what’s happening after the fact.

thegabriele 1y ago

I'm on FF 142.0.1 (64 bit) windows and i've no link preview. I think it's a good news they're introducing some paid features for pro users

esnard 1y ago
> 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. Not available in Italy yet.
- filenox 1y ago
  You can enable it by setting 'browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled' to true via about:config. A restart of Firefox is required.
odie5533 1y ago
Open Settings. You can enable it at the bottom of the General tab.

filenox 1y ago

You can trigger the Preview functionality by holding the Shift key while hovering over a URL. This feels much snappier - and therefore more useful. Additional settings can be found and adjusted via about:config.

everdrive 1y ago

I'm genuinely perplexed why people find link previews useful. The page image is too small to really see, and it's not as if rapidly opening and closing a tab actually takes effort. It may be faster than the long click depending how comfortable you are with keyboard controls. I have other questions as well -- does the link preview ignore your plugins? So if you loaded the web page, would uBlock Origin prevent tracking which is _not_ prevented when loading the preview? If you have a phishing test url with a unique identifier, do you flunk the test even if you don't click through?

Y-bar 1y ago
Mostly in agreement, though I could perhaps find them useful if not for: Four times of five the link previews are blocked by a cookie consent or newsletter signup modal anyway.
zerkten 1y ago
>> it's not as if rapidly opening and closing a tab actually takes effort. It may be faster than the long click depending how comfortable you are with keyboard controls. For normal people, i.e. those who aren't techies, you have your answer right there on why this may be useful. We are very efficient with our browser usage. Normal people struggle with this task because they get lost in the steps. Even if they can do the steps at a slow pace, it doesn't stick because it's too slow. The leap to using keyboard shortcuts just won't happen for the majority of people. I think your points on how this is implemented are fairer. That said, that said it seems like the best approach is to follow the simplest and most efficient approach, which is to not load extensions, or use what is loaded. The success of features like this is known with technical users like us. We don't like them because we have a workflow that avoids the issue like the phishing one you describe. It's unclear whether this helps users and is likely somewhat experimental. I think it's a much better place to be doing work that other areas where they have invested even if it has many issues.
- ffsm8 1y ago
  Eh, isn't it even quicker without keyboard? Third button opens in New tab, third button again closes the tab. But you're point is correct that the majority of people do indeed not use any device quickly. No matter wherever it's a phone or desktop browser.

josefritzishere 1y ago

Every new release of 2025 is full of AI features which end up being either useless and/or annoying. I always turn them off if I can. This is the most tiresome hypecycle in history.

anvuong 1y ago

Anecdotally but Firefox has become slower and slower in the past few years for me. I have no idea what is going on behind the scene but it's getting nearly unusable. Tried Edge yesterday and it was so much faster, but the amount of ads pushing is yikes.

jeffbee 1y ago
The chrome ecosystem is pulling away. At its core, chromium contains a state-of-the-art language runtime for JS. The fact that V8 stands alone as a project and contributor community gives it an advantage over Firefox, which lacks the resources to keep pace.
bestregards 1y ago
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-cant-load-websites-other-browsers-can#w_ipv6 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-cant-load-websi... Not sure if this is what you're experiencing but I don't have IPV6 and this was causing a number of issues for me. Firefox has been so much better since disabling this.
SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
What extensions do you have? I've not experienced this, so my guess is that it's an extension.

mantra2 1y ago

Does Firefox still block clipboard history apps from accessing private windows with no way to turn it off? Haven't used Firefox since that change.

mdaniel 1y ago
Friend, do I understand that you're mad that private windows don't allow the system to introspect what content you're viewing in a private window? BTW, in the spirit of being helpful: if you're using private windows just for 'fresh session' behavior, Firefox offers two other knobs for that outcome: Profiles and Containers. In Chrome I'm with you that Incognito can be a very cheap way to login to a site multiple times, but in FF you have more choices about that problem
- mantra2 1y ago
  I am, yes. It worked as I described up until I think October of last year. I’m logging in and out of client accounts - often for services that don’t do delegate access - so private windows work nice for me to make sure that I’m always cleared out of what I was working on before changing to a different project. Often I copy things in private windows that aren’t secrets, it just happens to be how I used the feature. Containers and Profile are great - but - I’m not trying to have 50+ of them at work, much easier to flip open a private window. I acknowledge my usecase is unusual and for most I think the feature makes sense - I just want to be able to turn it off, an about:config would be fine.
  - mdaniel 1y ago
    If you haven't seen it, there's also https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con... (https://github.com/stoically/temporary-containers https://github.com/stoically/temporary-containers MIT) when you don't care about the containers but do care that their browsing context is isolated. The screenshot even shows the handy "delete temporary container 15 minutes after the last tab closes") Actually, sorry, it seems to be https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-containers-plus/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con... and https://github.com/GodKratos/temporary-containers https://github.com/GodKratos/temporary-containers) based solely on the language present in the add-on and commit history

Workaccount2 1y ago

I wonder if it addressed something practical and meaningful...like implementing a spell check that at least covers all of the English language. Maybe then they can start working on the 5 year trek to also make the spellchecker somewhat competent. Or maybe we'll just keep packing features, because everyone here knows, features are what save products! Not usability!

mrweasel 1y ago
I should probably bug report this, but I don't even know where to start. For as long as I can remember "find" has been semi-broken. Hit Ctrl+f to search for a word you know for sure is on a page and Firefox might not find it. You type in the first five characters and Firefox goes "Nope, can't find it", then enter character number six, and then Firefox sees it, enter another character and nope, lost it, can't find it anymore. You look stare right at a word and find will be unable to locate it. But yeah, there's nothing I really care about, haven't been in a while. Funny enough, given how Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix started, I just want a slimmed down browser without a ton of features. Tabs and an extension API, that's it.
Voultapher 1y ago
At this speed Ladybird might be the browser to use in a couple years, even though I find their decision to use a memory unsafe language for their core tech foolish in the year 2025.
- beng-nl 1y ago
  I remember the original reasoning for creating Firefox (first Phoenix) was to create a more lightweight and faster version of the Mozilla browser, which initially was true.
  - dydkgbufxuf 1y ago
    a big part of making it lightweight wasn't stripping away browser bits, but stripping away non-browser bits. mail, newsgroups, irc. mozilla (the suite) was a lot more than a browser.

larschdk 1y ago

Here's a feature request: Disallow any and all unsolicited attention-seeking pop-ups or notifications from the browser itself.

righthand 1y ago

> For users in the United States, article recommendations on your New Tab page are now grouped into topic sections like Sports, Food, and Entertainment to make stories more organized and easier to scan. You can also follow topics you’re interested in and block ones you’d prefer not to see, giving you more control over what shows up when you open a new tab. Ladybird cannot come fast enough…

mdaniel 1y ago
Look, I'm with you on alternate implementations, but throwing out Firefox just because they decided to follow Edge down the "be the Yahoo of browsers" may be baby-with-the-bathwater type thing. It's painless to evict all that junk, even though I strongly agree that it should not be necessary in a browser
NoGravitas 1y ago
It's trivial to turn those off. They are in the regular preferences, you don't even have to go into about:config.
- righthand 1y ago
  Some times they release a new enhancement to an already existing feature I have to disable the setting AGAIN.

worldsavior 1y ago

Nothing new with the security of the browser? I expect some security improvements knowing the severe security state of Firefox.

jdlyga 1y ago

At least they're finally working on improving the browser UI.

bachmeier 1y ago

This is a promising move in the right direction. Allowing users to pay for Relay Premium lets them take advantage of their reputation for privacy to make money. Let's hope they promote it and give it more than three months before dropping it.

AnonC 1y ago

Link previews reminds me of classic (XUL) Firefox extensions from a couple of decades ago that provided previews when the mouse was hovered over a link (with a short delay). "Cool Previews" was one of those extensions. I'm sure there must be WebExtensions that have the same feature with configurability in how they work. This built in feature requires a click and hold though.

captainepoch 1y ago

So... Nothing really useful or what users are asking for a long time... And we then ask why people aren't using Firefox...

samtheDamned 1y ago
Tab groups is pretty useful. My partner refused to try firefox in the past because it didn't have tab groups and now they're able to use it as their main browser.
- captainepoch 1y ago
  It's useful, but it's a meaningless feature. We've been asking for a good JS and HTML engine, faster than what Firefox uses, and for better compatibility with websites (there are webs that don't work properly with Firefox). And to not put the Manifest V3 into Firefox (which it's done already, besides we still have uBlock Origin working as intended, for now, because nobody knows what's going to happen with that in the future). And I think that's way more important that being able to group tabs.

outlore 1y ago

tab groups organized by domain or regex seems like a more deterministic and power user friendly feature compared to organizing it by an LLM