Firefox for iOS will summarize web pages when you shake your iPhone

[harlan4096]

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?

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