Mozilla has announced a new feature for Firefox on iOS. The browser will summarize web pages when you shake your iPhone, yes it uses AI for this.
The feature, which was reported by Engadget, works on web pages that have fewer than 5,000 words. When you visit a web page, just shake your phone and Firefox will generate a summary about the content on the page. You can also tap on the thunderbolt icon in the address bar, or tap on the three-dot menu and select Summarize page. That's three ways to access the feature.
According to the announcement, this summarization takes place locally on your device using Apple Intelligence on iOS 26 and above. That means it uses a local language model on iPhone 15 Pro or later, specifically the Mistral Small 3.1 model. However, if you have an earlier iOS version, or an older iPhone, Firefox's summarization feature will send the text on the page securely to Mozilla's cloud-based AI, and fetches a summary from the servers. Oh, goody! That's just what we asked for!
Naturally, this has drawn criticism from the Firefox community. That is understandable. Local language models are fine, cloud-based have some privacy risks. A lot of other browsers have some form of web page summarization. Not everyone is a fan of AI. Think about this. You are on a web page that contains your sensitive data (medical, financial, personal, etc.) or your family or children's data, and it gets sent to the cloud for summarization. Are you really okay with that?
Potential privacy issues aside, there is also a chance that the summarization gesture could be triggered when you don't want it to. For example, let's say you use the double-tap gesture, where you tap twice on the back of your iPhone to take a screenshot. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't register the taps accurately. What if this makes Firefox trigger a summary instead of iOS' screenshot functionality? Something similar could happen if you're talking and gesturing with the phone in your hand. There is a way to disable the shake to summarize gesture, and leave the other ways on. (refer to the settings section below).
Anyway, you can check out a video demo of Firefox's shake to summarize on Mozilla's blog. AI summarization in Firefox is rolling out to English language users in the U.S. Mozilla says the feature will roll out to others soon. I don't have access to it. I wanted to test it, just to see if it was enabled by default, and to tell readers how to disable it. Thankfully, there is a support page on Mozilla's website that describes the process.
To disable AI summarization in Firefox, go to the Settings > (General Section) Page Summaries and toggle it to off. You can also disable the shake gesture.
I won't pretend to be unconcerned about cloud-based AI features slowly creeping into a privacy-friendly browser that I've been using for 17 years. What else am I going to do, switch to Vivaldi because it doesn't have AI features? Oh, wait. I'm just kidding. No need to hit the panic button yet.
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