IT Home June 10th news, Mozilla announced that it will officially close its Firefox Firefox browser's AI Assistant Extension Orbit on June 26, 2025. Orbit was launched online in January this year and has a lifespan of only 6 months.
IT Home reported in January that Orbit supports most web text content, as well as summary of YouTube, Vimeo and Twitch videos (subtitles required).
Orbit In addition to one-click summary of the current page content, it also has a built-in chatbot that can ask questions about the page content, but does not support queries with irrelevant content. Users can customize the summary format (key points, short overview or detailed paragraphs) and set up automatic summary functions.
Mozilla In its latest blog post, it believes that it is unnecessary to maintain a separate plug-in. Firefox's latest sidebar feature has enabled all users to easily access mainstream AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. Orbit's unique user experience (UX) seems a bit redundant.
Close Orbit doesn't mean Mozilla abandons AI technology. Instead, Mozilla is pushing all the way to embed AI capabilities directly into the Firefox browser. They believe that building AI features into the browser can reach more users instead of relying on users to actively seek and enable standalone plugins.
Orbit provides many features such as "Summarize", "Explain this" and "Quiz me" in the right-click menu of the web page, which are also natively integrated into Firefox, and can use these AI tips even when browsing PDF files.
However, a highlight of Orbit—the privacy protection function, has not been retained. Orbit used Mozilla's self-hosted Mistral 7B LLM model to ensure user queries are not shared with Mistral or other services.
Now, Firefox is relying on third-party AI infrastructure, which Mozilla says will allow users to choose chatbots from the market with “more control.”
