Firefox Introduces AI-Powered Link Previews: A New Frontier in Web Browsing

The war on links escalates with Firefox's experimental AI previews

The new feature summarizes a webpage before you click on the link. 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.

Firefox 139 adds experimental AI-powered link previews- 9to5Mac

Today, Mozilla released Firefox 139.0, which brings an interesting AI-based feature: by pressing a keyboard shortcut, the browser opens a small pop-up with a preview of a link's content. Here's how to test it out. Browsers are quickly becoming the next battleground for AI features. While companies like Perplexity work on the much-anticipated Comet, some more traditional players have started rolling out their own ideas of what a browser in the AI era should look like. Recently, Google announced plans to integrate Gemini directly into Chrome, letting users interact with its LLM about the contents of any page. Microsoft, meanwhile, says it will allow websites to access a local AI model in Edge to offer features like summarization and, eventually, translation. Even Apple has implemented AI-based summaries in Safari, although they're only accessible from Reader Mode, making them a bit inconvenient to use. Now, Mozilla has released Firefox 139.0 with Link Previews, an experimental AI feature that summarizes the key points of a webpage before you click on its link. As Mozilla explains it: "Link Previews is currently available as an experimental feature which can be enabled via Firefox Labs in the Firefox settings. After enabling, use the Alt+Shift keyboard shortcut when hovering over a link to see the previews in action!" This feature was first announced las month as part of Firefox Labs 138, but it's now more widely available. While it raises the usual questions about how AI previews might affect website traffic, this kind of low-key AI feature can make browsing feel faster and more useful to technical and non-technical users alike.

I tried Firefox 139's new AI-generated link previews - and while I love the idea, I'm skipping them for one key reason

Like all AI generation, it needs time to think - which can be a pain With artificial intelligence (AI) all the rage these days, it's not uncommon to find your favorite web browser has added a bunch of AI features designed to change the way you surf the internet. Firefox is no exception: as explained in the release notes of its latest version 139 update, the browser has brought AI-powered link previews to its users. Once the experimental feature is enabled, you can activate it by hovering your mouse pointer over a link and pressing Alt+Shift. This fires up a preview box that summarizes key info about the web page so that you can see what it's about without needing to visit. On first glance, I love this idea. Imagine you land on a web page and you're not sure if you can trust its embedded links. Or you're super busy and just want to know if it's worth clicking through to a linked page. With an AI link preview, you can get artificial intelligence to do the work for you. Firefox's AI comes into play by showing a set of key points that sum up the main ideas of the linked page, helping you to understand it before you click through. But although that initially sounds great, I'm not totally convinced just yet. I've been a loyal Firefox user for 20 years now, and I've seen it change a huge amount in that time. And with the rise of AI, I shouldn't be surprised that developer Mozilla has been leaning into machine learning features in recent years. While link previews feel like a good idea on the surface - for one thing, they let you check if a link is actually what it claims to be without having to click and find out - they suffer from a common AI problem: you have to wait for them to be generated. It's the same with tools like ChatGPT, where you need to wait for the AI to think up a response. Firefox's link previews are not instant, and when I tried them out, I found they ended up slowing down my browsing experience. Still, they have to be activated with a specific keyboard shortcut, which means they won't appear when you simply hover over a link, minimizing the risk of accidental activations. That's good, since a slow-generating box that obscures the text you're trying to read would quickly get annoying. As it is, you can activate the previews if you want, or totally ignore them if you don't. This is far from the only AI tool that Firefox has added over the last year or so. You can now add an AI chatbot to your sidebar, use AI to overhaul your tab groups, and more. And while link previews help it keep up with the current tech zeitgeist, I'm not sure it's a feature I'll be using a whole lot right now.

Firefox's New Link Previews Are Actually a Good Example of AI Search

If it seems like every tech company is trying shove AI into all of their products and services, that's because they are. And as someone who rarely (if ever) uses AI, it's a lot: I don't need AI to write my emails, nor do I want it to generate realistic videos that might trick viewers into thinking they're human-made. I certainly don't need it to serve up incorrect information when I try to search the internet. But Firefox's latest AI feature seems genuinely useful, likely because it isn't "making" anything for me. Instead its new AI-powered link previews simply show a small summary of the content on a webpage hidden behind a URL, so you'll have a better idea whether or not it's worth clicking on. Mozilla first announced these AI-generated link previews last month, before rolling them out as part of Firefox 139. The feature is currently in the "experimental" phase, and Mozilla is open to user feedback on how to adjust it. Here's how it works in its current iteration: When you hover your cursor over a URL and hit the corresponding keyboard shortcut, Firefox retrieves and analyzes the webpage's HTML without actually loading the page. It then looks for metadata that can help inform the page's title, description, and cover image. Once it has the data it needs, it displays whatever it has pulled up in a pop-out window. Like what you see? Go ahead and click through to see the full page. Not what you're looking for? Move on to the next link. Assuming the summaries are accurate, I can actually see this being something I rely on to give me an idea of whether or not a particular link is relevant to my current query -- especially once Mozilla irons out some of the bugs. In order to try AI link previews for yourself, you need to be running Firefox 139 (or newer). (If you're not sure which version you're on, open Firefox, head to Settings > General, then scroll to Firefox Updates. If there's a new update, install it, then relaunch the browser.) That accomplished, head back to Settings, then select Firefox Labs. Under "Customize your browsing," click the checkmark next to "Link previews." Now, open any website, hover over any link on your screen, and hit Shift + Alt (Windows) or Shift + Option (Mac). A small pop-up window should open immediately, along with the webpage's title and a brief description. Soon, you should also see the cover image for the page, then, after a few moments, Firefox will generate the page's "Key points." So far, the feature has been a bit hit-or-miss for me. Sometimes the key points it offers up are three well-summarized takeaways from the article. Other times, they are quotes lifted straight out of the article. Plagiarism aside, it's tough to get a sense of the scope of an article if the "key points" are just listing the first few ideas in the text. I suspect part of the problem is that what the AI sees as most important will vary based on how each site is configured: I found the previews frequently copied the text on Lifehacker articles verbatim, for example, while summarizing articles found on other sites. Again, this feature is in development, so Mozilla may need to figure out how to accommodate the variations in in websites design to make it uniformly useful. But as AI features go, I don't hate it, and in 2025, that's saying something.