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?
It's an idea that makes a lot of sense on Wikipedia, because every page there explicitly starts with a short summary, and often an image that can be pulled from the infobox. I'm not yet convinced it will work well on the rest of the Web.
But also that's been part of Wikipedia's website for years now, no special browser support necessary. And because it's tailored specifically to Wikipedia, it works great!
Page preview seems nice in theory, but I'm unconvinced it'll be that useful. Web pages just don't have a the level of standardization necessary to automatically grab a useful preview. And I don't think Firefox has a big enough pull to make that sort of standard.
I used to appreciate it (on Wikipedia), but too often it gets triggered by accident and prevents me from reading what I actually want to read. So much so that I had to find some way to disable it (probably by blocking JS via uBO).
Similar story with GitHub "hovercards". They were helpful, but someone recently decided they have to work in the Issues/PR lists too and, again, it just prevents me from reading the very thing I want to read. Had to disable them (everywhere, unfortunately).
>> 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.
Out of the box, a minority of computers have a third button to click: it's pretty much just desktop mice not from Apple. Laptops and Apple mice require a power user to jump through hoops to have a way to express a middle click that's easier than reaching for the control key.
It's just horrible. For me the preview doesn't show until I've hovered for ~3 seconds (even before I turned on AI), in which time I could have long since middle clicked the page, skimmed, and closed it again.
This is the content for the preview:
> www.mozilla.org
> What's new with Firefox 142
> What's New | Firefox 142
> 3-4 mins reading time
No OpenGraph descriptions are good, so I can't see it ever being better than this. I don't know why this reading time metric has become a thing, it's useless because it doesn't know which parts of the page I'm interested in. I could actually see the full url from the immediate link preview, so having only the domain here is worse than useless.
The AI summary is both too short and too slow to be useful (unless maybe you're running an RTX 6000 or whatever). For this link, it only mentions Relay.
And even the basic behaviour seems broken. The preview appears at seemingly random locations on the page, sometimes under the cursor and sometimes far below. When it does decide to appear away from the cursor, releasing the mouse button actually follows the link, completely negating the purpose of the preview!
> 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?
This was the primary reason I'd never used Vivaldi browser's long-standing feature of being able to set sites within a side panel, since it ignored addons. Was only last year that was changed to allow addons.
I quite prefer the link "peek" in Zen, which I'm led to understand is based on the one in Arc. Shift click a link, it opens up in a configurable-size floating modal (90% by default) on top of the current page, with controls to pop it out into a full tab or close it. It's only a small improvement over "open in new tab, switch to new tab, close new tab", but it feels nice.
The new link preview in Firefox seems a lot less useful.
Interesting thought. A lot of sites have been adding various META tags for link previews in social media, it might be neat to have a browser native form of that, especially because making it a browser feature could help push it back to open standards (right now most of them are OpenGraph which despite "open" in the name is still somewhat proprietary to Facebook/Meta and Twitter Cards which will probably forever be called that).
(ETA: This does seem to be what the feature actually does, having now tried it. Ignoring the AI Summary feature part of it, most of it does appear to be META tag driven and uses the card images of OpenGraph/Twitter Cards.)
It seems like Firefox (Mozilla) looks for any excuse to make an HTTP request
I can't think of another software program I have ever seen that makes so many non-user-initiated, i.e., automatic, HTTP requests by default; some of this behaviour cannot be disabled
> I have other questions as well -- does the link preview ignore your plugins?
If it’s anything like Reader View in Firefox, I would expect it to ignore plugins, which is absurd in the Reader View case, and would be in the link preview case as well. So much for my browser being a user agent.
for me I'm interested in the preview so I know where the link goes in a general sense, not what it looks like. i would use it for shortened or redirected links to see where a random anchor is pointing before I actually open it?
It already seems to basically grab the text from reader mode. What might be more useful is a way to just open a link directly in that to avoid paywalls or annoying uis though
> 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.
I agree with the other comments that say it's not discoverable. I've been using MacOS for 10 years and I didn't even know that "Force Click" is a thing. This comment caused me to look it up and then try it.
I disagree that it's "everywhere". I just tried it in Spotlight Search (Command + Space). I can never remember how to see where a thing is located there and I hoped a force click might show me. Hint: pressing command will do it but it takes 250ms to 500ms to show up and somehow I never wait that long.
Not only does Spotlight Search not show me where it is, force clicking doesn't show me a preview, or seem to do anything else.
In Finder force click edits the name of the item you're clicking. So, this doesn't seem to be terribly universal.
I suppose I'll slowly figure out how this works now that I'm aware of it.
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).
> 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.
Pretty typical of browsers and especially of Firefox. Took them 7 years to use native scrollbars post Lion, it looked like cross-platform junk for the longest time.
Back when Chrome was still trying to gain traction, they came out supporting native Keychain Access for password management. Firefox, which had a 4 year head start, never implemented it.
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.
It is very likely that one single site is responsible for this. For example in my usage, Jenkins portal is leaking memory like hell, will fill up a few GBs in a a day and jack up CPU utilization to 100%.
I has hundreds of tabs at that point, so I had to find out the culprit. What I did was open a task manager and expand Fifefox process to see dozens of subprocesses. I then sorted by memory (or by cpu) to find out worst offender and killed only that single subprocess without touching others. And after doing that I've looked at the list of tabs and saw that one of them has changed to the crash report tab, with a visibly different icon. And looking at it I saw that it was originally Jenkins portal. Now I proactively close it's tabs and leaks stopped. Maybe this will help you.
cool. There is also about:performance with cpu & memory for each tab / addon. Hmm, it looks like all extensions are combined in a single entry. So, maybe not per addon.
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/ ? This is a point release, even more changes are linked at the bottom of the release notes page.
Next up would be looking closer at the pages you frequent. I think many people would be surprised at all the ways web apps screw up these days.
All that said, the browsers, as unfair as it may seem, should do better at handling all of the slop that web app and extension developers put out there. It’s sometimes just a whole lot easier to make the browser more bulletproof than it is to make a bajillion JavaScript/python monkeys conscientious and competent.
An alternate between those two endpoints would be to offer better tooling to enable both users and monkeys to identify things contributing to bad outcomes. I don't just mean devtools, either, I mean "oh, it seems this tab is taking up $foo memory because the background image is a 400MB .mp4 and ..." type thing. They went through all the trouble to put AI in the browser, so ask it :-/
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.
I've used firefox for 15+ years, but it starting to bug me too much. Memory issues, forced restarts that block navigation (wth!), clutter all around, having to disable sponsored crap, and random incompatibilities are starting to take a toll. I've been falling back to Edge for crying out loud.
From what I understand, this is because the OS package manager changed some of Firefox's files in a background update (Ubuntu does this through unattended-upgrades), and Firefox's built-in updater doesn't have this problem.
Go into about:config and search for browser.ml stuff. Some of it is just for text completion, but you can also load models - transformer js, and also send stuff to chat gpt.
No they don't, please stop spreading misinformation. There was a performance regression due to the new vector search which was fixed before it even reached 1% of Firefox users in the US alone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44912974
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.
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!
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.
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.
The browser bit was also much, much snappier than anything else in common use, except maybe Opera. Including the Mozilla browser.
Performance took a giant hit some time in the 1.x series and never recovered, but before that, it was remarkably lightweight and snappy, so much so that normal people would notice.
Or maybe fixing a few dozen open bugs about losing all open tabs to a /dev/null once in a while. I had it happen twice this year and now extremely vary about even simply normally using browser. Sigh...
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
> 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.
Their heading a bit misleading: "See what's behind the link before you click." really should have said "see what's behind the link after you click but before you release the button".
You can set it to always do it on hover, which is actually more annoying (you toggle it by tapping shift) because I did not realize it was permanently on, so every link on HN became a link preview for me the other day.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
I have had the same experience. The vast majority of the time I use relay masks to sign up for stuff they work as expected. It is incredibly irritating when it does not work, but I blame the vendor and take that into account to decide whether I actually want to give this vendor a "real" email address. I often bail on these kinds of failed signups. Voting with my wallet.
I'd say that's lucky. I'm using "Masked Email" on Fastmail with a personal domain and I still find that I get blocked from signups from time to time. I assume they're looking for some sort of pattern?
In the alternative, you can configure Fastmail to allow sending and receiving to/from a wildcard address (which for sending allows you to specify the sending address at send time). In my experience this works far more reliably, and is one of the features that pushed me to move to Fastmail many years 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
I have a very useful plugin that automatically deletes website data (other than history and downloads) after a configured interval once you’ve closed the tab or window. You can define an exception list. I cannot recall its name, I’ll post back when I’m back at my computer.
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?