After the launch of a new stable version of Firefox, Mozilla also updates the rest of the channels. There is a beta channel and another for developers, which are quite similar, but the newest and where they experiment the most is in Firefox Nightly. It is 8 weeks ahead of the stable version, and much of what they implement reaches it. But there are also many others that don't, so what we see in Nightly are new features that may or may not arrive.
A recent development is in the Firefox Nightly Labs. It is a section in the settings with functions that can be activated and deactivated, without us having to go to about: config Nor nothing alike. The change proposed in Mozilla is integrate artificial intelligence chatbots, like ChatGPT, in the browser. How would all this work? That is what we are going to explain below.
Firefox Nightly embraces AI
The first thing to do to try this feature is to get Firefox Nightly. In this link we can get it though from there we will download a compressed file. We can start Firefox Nightly by double-clicking on the "firefox" or "firefox-bin" icon. Updates will be done automatically, just as they do in Windows and macOS.
With Firefox Nightly already on our computer, we open it, click on the hamburger and then go to "Settings". Over there We click on "Firefox Labs" and inside we check the box “AI Chatbot Integration”. At the time of writing this article everything is in English. In this section we also have to choose a chatbot, and for this explanation we have chosen the most famous one: ChatGPT.
Once the option is activated and the chatbot is chosen, to see the header capture we will have to select a text, in the example "Firefox 128", right click and choose "Ask ChatGPT". There will be three options:
- Summarize It's to summarize. It can be useful to select all the text of an article and summarize its content.
- Simplify Language It is similar to the previous one, but it will be written in a language that is easier to read.
- Last we have Maybe I, which is something like "Ask me", and it will explain something like we are on a page with some text selected. After that, it can ask us to enter an option from a list.
In order to use any AI model, it is necessary to use an account, different from what DuckDuckGo proposes.
Editor's opinion
What do I think of this function? As a Vivaldi user who has ChatGPT in his side panel, I think it is a function with its lights and shadows. To begin with, it is not in Spanish at the moment. The good thing is that the option is integrated into the context menu, so we can make inquiries quickly. That it requires an account also means that we will only be able to use GPT-4o a few times before it moves us to GPT3.5.
But in general, if we are not concerned about privacy, something that we should not if we usually use any of these chatbots, it is something that contributes. Will we see it in Firefox 130?