Feed: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics
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Title: The war on links escalates with Firefox's experimental AI previews

Date: Wed, 28 May 2025 12:30:59 +0000
Link: https://www.engadget.com/ai/the-war-on-links-...

Mozilla's Firefox has joined Chrome, Edge and other browsers in offering AI-
powered overviews, but this time with a twist. The latest version lets you
use a keyboard shortcut to open a pop-up that previews a link's contents when
you hover over it from any web page. It's a new way that AI is being
integrated into browsers that may help users but hurt publishers.

To try the new feature you need the latest Firefox release channel version
139.0. Within the settings under "Firefox Labs," simply turn on Link
Previews. "After enabling, use the Alt+Shift keyboard shortcut when hovering
over a link to see the previews in action," Mozilla writes.

Once turned on, you can hover your mouse over a link on any webpage and a
vertical window will pop up showing an image on top, the publisher's link and
a quick summary. Below that are AI-generated "key points" that provide
further information. Mozilla previously said that it uses the SmolLM2-360M
language model from Hugging Face, on-device with Reader's View content to
ensure privacy.

Link Previews first came along last month in beta but is now widely available
in some regions. Like Google's AI previews, it could risk harming publishers
by reducing traffic (which is likely why neither of those features are
available in France where I live). It's also not clear if Firefox is paying
publishers to use their information in AI-powered summaries.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at
https://www.engadget.com/ai/the-war-on-links-...
experimental-ai-previews-123059735.html?src=rss

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