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Orbit is Mozilla’s wild attempt to turn AI into a privacy-focused summarization service
Hot potato: Mozilla recently launched its most ambitious artificial intelligence project to date: a Firefox extension designed to convert long text or even video into more digestible formats. Orbit, however, has a strange view of the fight against artificial intelligence, despite Mozilla’s confidence that users will embrace the new technology for their online needs.
Recent Chrome Flaws and Security Issues Related to It Manifest V3 Additionally, Firefox continues to lose market share among its competitors in the desktop browser market. Although Mozilla management is doing well financiallyThe future of the open source browser may be in jeopardy after the recent antimonopoly ruling against Google. In response to this dangerous situation, Mozilla is integrating more artificial intelligence into Firefox, although it appears to be taking a different approach compared to other browser makers.
Mozilla’s latest artificial intelligence initiative is called Orbita Firefox extension designed to provide quick summaries of emails, web pages, and other lengthy documents. Orbit’s goal is to help users quickly and securely retrieve important information, Mozilla explained, without relying on an always-on cloud-based artificial intelligence model.
Orbit is currently in beta and is only available in English. It uses the large Mistral language model (Mistral 7B) and can run on popular websites such as Gmail, Wikipedia, The New York Times, YouTube and more. Users can interact with Orbit by requesting summaries or additional information about content, and the AI will gather relevant context (images, text, videos) to provide a response.
The extension does not require an account and does not store any information about user requests. Mozilla said the Mistral 7B LLM that powers the service is hosted on its own servers and requests are not passed on to Mistral or any other external companies. Each session is unique and the data is not used to train generative AI models.
Official representative of Orbit web page has a rather passive-aggressive tone, as Mozilla decided to introduce the service with a gimmicky (fake) email promoting AI chatbots, supposedly sent by “Annoying Friend/Boss/Neighbor”. The post seems to suggest that “everyone” is talking about this weird AI thing, so why not explore it in Orbit’s secure, web-based generalization environment.
I found Mozilla’s marketing approach to be quite questionable and alarming, especially given the growing challenges that generative AI poses for workers in various industries and content creators. Meanwhile, many Firefox users (including me) ask long-standing bugs that need to be fixed, or to support features that other browsers have had for years (such as HDR).
But no, it seems like the Mozilla developers are more focused on following the latest technology trends than solving the problems of their user base. So we’re left with AI summaries and possibly hallucinated queries, while Firefox risks becoming yet another mindless Chromium clone.
2025-01-03 18:34:00