Technology

Earlier on, Mozilla released a plugin called Orbit that summarized Youtube videos with a single click. Then they shut it down. I'd love to see that back. I've found some similar plugins since then but none as elegant and integrated as Orbit was. "Chat with this page" features in general are nice when I come across a big paper or news story where I only want a specific bit of information out of it.

I use the "translate this" function quite frequently, and I'd like to see that using local models instead of relying on Google Translate. I avoid Chrome because I don't want everything to be Google dominated.

I suspect AI is still too heavyweight for this application yet, but as the advertising wars continue and advertising starts getting slipped directly into the content of pages I bet an AI-enabled adblocker would be nice.

A fact-checker AI that goes through the content of a page and adds footnotes and references would be great. I try to fact-check news stories but it's a lot of manual drudgery so I'm sure I miss a lot.

Sure, much of this could be done with plugins. Orbit was one originally. But if everybody's having to create the AI framework for plugins from the ground up that's going to result in a ton of inconsistency, extra resources wasted, and potential insecurities. I'd like Firefox to provide some kind of unified interface to plugins to let them call AIs as part of whatever they're doing so that I can pick which models I'd like them to use. I run Ollama on my computer, it provides AI inference to anything that wants to use it locally through a unified API. Something like that built into Firefox would be awesome.

And there'll likely be plenty of other new things I haven't thought of to try out. AI is a very active field, there are new models with new capabilities coming out all the time.