Firefox surprises no one by adding AI to the browser

Firefox 135 debuts today, with (what else?) AI built right into the browser.

Unlike Microsoft Edge and Copilot or Brave’s own Leo AI chatbot, Firefox isn’t investing in its own AI capabilities. Instead, the company is building in AI access to third-party chatbots such as Anthropic’s Claude and ChatGPT, plus lesser-known LLMs like HuggingChat and Le Chat Mistral.

As of a week ago, this AI capability was labeled “experimental” and was being pushed to a small part of the Firefox user base. Now, the Firefox release notes state that it’s being pushed out gradually to all users. Additionally, Firefox is providing a wider variety of translations, as Firefox can now translate Chinese, Japanese, and Korean pages.

Some additional features are also welcome. Firefox is stepping in to prevent sites from abusing the history function by injecting additional pages. You’ll probably see this when you try to “back out” of a page by clicking the back arrow; sites that abuse this on other browsers will take you to another page on that site itself.

There are also behind-the-scenes improvements, such as enforcement of the CRLite certificate revocation checking mechanism, which can help enforce certificate transparency — a requirement that a web server provide proof that certificates were publicly disclosed.

Firefox isn’t paying for or providing AI subscriptions to third-party services; you’ll have to do that yourself. To access it, you can pick the “sparkle” button from the sidebar. You can also switch AI providers via a drop-down menu.

Not everyone wants AI. But it you’re a Firefox user and want AI, you’re in luck.