Mozilla Introduces 'Orbit' Extension For Firefox As An 'AI You Can Trust

Orbit by Mozilla

The web offers an abundance of information—sometimes overwhelmingly so.

In the competitive arena where tech giants battle to develop the most powerful Large Language Model (LLM)-driven AI, Mozilla often feels like it is left out. Despite it doesn't conduct the same business as those LLM developers, and that it's definitely not a fan of OpenAI's ChatGPT, Mozilla is already famous for being the creator of Firefox.

However, with nearly every tech company exploring LLM technology, Mozilla isn't staying on the sidelines.

Enter ‘Orbit’—Mozilla’s ambitious foray into the world of AI.

Orbit by Mozilla is essentially an AI-powered assistant for the Firefox web browser that makes summarizing web content while users browse as easy as clicking a button.

After all, why sift through an entire article when an AI can deliver a concise, rephrased summary in seconds?

Orbit by Mozilla

On the announcement, Mozilla said that:

"Orbit is a Firefox add on that uses AI to summarize and answer queries about web content such as articles and videos."

"When a user asks Orbit to summarize or query content, Orbit gathers the context (eg. text, images, videos, etc.) of the page the user is viewing and provides a summary or answer. Orbit works on websites including Gmail, Wikipedia, NY Times, YouTube, and more."

Orbit by Mozilla

As an extension, Orbit allows users of Firefox to interact with an LLM-powered AI, directly from any webpage or video (select services only) users are viewing.

What this means, users of Firefox don't have to open any LLM app or any LLM website, because Orbit lives right there in the browser.

In other words, Orbit works more like Apple Intelligence does in Safari.

Users can set a preferred response format, like whether they would like the AI to summarize the content using bullet points, short blurb, or verbose paragraphs, and whether they want content to be auto-summarized the moment they load the page.

Summary responses of Orbit will appear in the side panel.

Initially in beta, Orbit lives as an add-on to Firefox, which works on Firefox for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Orbit by Mozilla

Once the Orbit extension is installed in Firefox, users will see a small circular animated orb as an action button, floating on all webpages they visit.

This button can be dragged around, or minimized. Users can also hide it if they want to.

To use Orbit, interacting with the button will give users access to several options, like "summarize," for example.

And because Orbit is an LLM, users can interact with it like any other AI-powered chatbots, and ask questions about the content on the page.

To do this, Mozilla said that Orbit uses Mistral 7B, which is hosted in the cloud by Mozilla.

Orbit by Mozilla

And to preserve users' privacy, using Orbit doesn't require any sign ups, and that no user queries are shared with Mistral.

The AI also doesn't store any session history, not it uses users' queries to train or improve the underlying LLM.

"We have built Orbit to remain agnostic about which model we use and we are constantly benchmarking the most recent open-source models available. This allows us to easily swap out models as technology improves," said Mozilla.

Published: 
04/01/2025