New In Firefox Nightly Builds: Copilot Chatbot, New Tab Widgets, JPEG-XL Support

The blog OMG Ubuntu notes that Microsoft Copilot chatbot support has been added in the latest Firefox Nightly builds. 'Firefox's sidebar already offers access to popular chatbots, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Le Chat's Mistral and Google's Gemini. It previously offered HuggingChat too.'

As the testing bed for features Mozilla wants to add to stable builds (though not all make it — eh, rounded bottom window corners?), this is something you can expect to find in a future stable update... Copilot in Firefox offers the same features as other chatbots: text prompts, upload files or images, generate images, support for entering voice prompts (for those who fancy their voice patterns being analysed and trained on). And like those other chatbots, there are usage limits, privacy policies, and (for some) account creation needed. In testing, Copilot would only generate half a summary for a webpage, telling me it was too long to produce without me signing in/up for an account.
On a related note, Mozilla has updated stable builds to let third-party chatbots summarise web pages when browsing (in-app callout alerts users to the 'new' feature). Users yet to enable chatbots are subtly nudged to do so each time they right-click on web page. [Between 'Take Screenshot' and 'View Page Source' there's a menu option for 'Ask an AI Chatbot.'] Despite making noise about its own (sluggish, but getting faster) on-device AI features that are privacy-orientated, Mozilla is bullish on the need for external chatbots.

The article suggests Firefox wants to keep up with Edge and Chrome (which can 'infuse first-party AI features directly.') But it adds that Firefox's nightly build is also testing some non-AI features, like new task and timer widgets on Firefox's New Tab page. And 'In Firefox Labs, there are is an option to enable JPEG XL support, a super-optimised version of JPEG that is gaining traction (despite Google's intransigence).

Other Firefox news:
There's good news 'for users still clinging to Windows 7,' writes the Register. Support for Firefox Extended Support Release 115 'is being extended until March 2026.'

Google 'can keep paying companies like Mozilla to make Google the default search engine, as long as these deals aren't exclusive anymore,' reports the blog It's FOSS News. (The judge wrote that 'Cutting off payments from Google almost certainly will impose substantial — in some cases, crippling — downstream harms to distribution partners...' according to CNBC — especially since the non-profit Mozilla Foundation gets most of its annual revenue from its Google's search deal.)
Don't forget you can now search your tabs, bookmarks and browsing history right from the address bar with keywords like @bookmarks, @tabs, and @history. (And @actions pulls up a list of actions like 'Open private window' or 'Restart Firefox').

Read more of this story at Slashdot.