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by mosselman 273 days ago
This seems ridiculously simple. It doesn’t browse for you in the background or lets you reference tabs etc. This just seems to pass the current page to an llm.

I built an extension like this with Claude-code a few days ago because I wanted to see if I could replace the ai feature of Firefox when I switched to LibreWolf. Turns out, it was quite easy for Claude code.

I want a bit further and tried to get the extension to browse around. Individual actions worked, but I couldn’t get it to follow a plan. In the end I finally looked around the code and Claude had made a huge mess with cursor etc.

The complexity of handling the array of messages was a bit too much for the AI agents.

I now have the same as this Gemini ai though and it CAN click links and it works with ollama too. So more private.

All in a few hours of development.

So I am not impressed by Google here
3 comments
Yoric 273 days ago
If I recall correctly, the main selling point of Firefox AI is that it's offline by default, which means that it doesn't rack up your token bill and doesn't expose your data.
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simonw 273 days ago
No, Firefox out of the box has an AI side panel with options to use Claude. Most machines won't run a good enough local model so they don't default to that.
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lxgr 273 days ago
Firefox does several other things with AI too, and many of them locally, e.g. suggesting tab group names, suggesting other tabs to add to existing groups, auto-generating alt texts for images pasted into edited PDFs – each supported by a dedicated local model!

You can see which ones your Firefox installation has already fetched and their purpose on about:addons.

More about this here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/on-device-models

On top of that, current mobile versions (and weirdly enough only mobile versions) can now also summarize articles using Apple Intelligence (where available) or Mozilla-hosted remote inference: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/shake-to-summarize/

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yunohn 273 days ago
> So I am not impressed by Google here

I imagine google has to build something that works for basically every kind of user out there, vs what you built. Moreover, it’s self obvious that they would support Gemini but not ollama, again given most users cannot run beefy LLMs on their consumer devices.

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moolcool 273 days ago
> It doesn’t browse for you

I would hope not

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