New in Firefox: Visual search powered by Google Lens (opens in new tab)

(connect.mozilla.org)

62 pointsReadCarlBarks6mo ago23 comments

23 comments

>Note: Google must be set as your default search engine for this feature to appear.

Seems like a fairly nice way to approach this (as long as it can also be disabled in the options). Heck, might as well have reverse image search context options for all the search engines that support something like it.

roscas6mo ago

When possible, don't use anything from Google.

And this is a clear move from Google. Take this money and put this on the browser...

panarky6mo ago

If the alternative is Microsoft or Meta or Amazon or OpenAI or X, then I'll happily use Google.

hagbard_c5mo ago

The alternative is to use a meta-search engine which uses all of the above without feeding these data parasites any personally identifiable data. There's plenty of those to choose from; I use SearXNG [1] which forwards my queries to a number of engines and presents the results - and with that I mean the actual results, clear from tracking links etc. It is not perfect in that there's a persistent issue with search engine timeouts which is quite irritating but I'd rather wait a few more seconds for search results than feed the data parasites.

[1] https://github.com/searxng/searxng

AlienRobot6mo ago

I generally prefer to use https://tineye.com/ because it just reverse searches instead of trying to do some voodoo with the image.

esperent5mo ago

I prefer Google Lens because the voodoo it does is far more than just image search, and is genuinely useful to me. I use it to translate text in images multiple times a day (I live in a country where I'm not a native speaker). I've used it to identify birds, plants, and even furniture - it found me the local shop for a table in a cafe that I liked, which was pretty amazing.

I'm not a Google fan, in fact I actively try to choose alternatives where possible, but they do make some good products not matched by anyone else, and it's not useful to pretend that isn't the case. Lens is one such product, Maps is another... Ok maybe that's it, since I use LLMs for most translation tasks these days.

gpm6mo ago

If this sticks around I hope (and mostly trust) that they'll make it configurable across different image search tools.

Other than that this seems... fine. Good even. It's a nice to have feature that isn't in the way and presumably doesn't share any data at all until you explicitly tell it to.

freehorse5mo ago

Any search engine can implement it themselves through an extension, though?

xnx6mo ago

Good feature. Searching an image is already an older mode of Google Lens. Chrome currently allows you to search any region, which is more useful for searching something from a video frame or a portion of an image. Not sure why Firefox would implement the older version.

drnick16mo ago

Thankfully Firefox is FOSS, which means distro maintainers and users can patch out such anti-features.

In the meantime, I'll stick to my Arkenfox user.js.

samtheDamned5mo ago

This isn't really an antifeature. If someone has Google as the default search engine I doubt they are going to be against this. If you don't have google as the default you won't even see this.

extraduder_ire5mo ago

I've been using this extension to have this functionality for years: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/image-search-...

kayart_dev5mo ago

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search_by_ima... is even better in my opinion, it supports multiple image search engines at the same time

0x2a5mo ago

Agree, this is what I use. Wish Kagi reverse image search was better.

stonogo6mo ago

Why did mozilla put so much work into an extension system if they were just going to shove random sponsored functionality into the base install?

extraduder_ire5mo ago

If you select text and right click, there's already an option to do a web search. This is a pretty obvious addition to that.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

23 comments

Borgz6mo ago

>Note: Google must be set as your default search engine for this feature to appear.

KronisLV6mo ago

roscas6mo ago

When possible, don't use anything from Google.

And this is a clear move from Google. Take this money and put this on the browser...

panarky6mo ago

If the alternative is Microsoft or Meta or Amazon or OpenAI or X, then I'll happily use Google.

hagbard_c5mo ago

[1] https://github.com/searxng/searxng

AlienRobot6mo ago

I generally prefer to use https://tineye.com/ because it just reverse searches instead of trying to do some voodoo with the image.

esperent5mo ago

gpm6mo ago

If this sticks around I hope (and mostly trust) that they'll make it configurable across different image search tools.

Other than that this seems... fine. Good even. It's a nice to have feature that isn't in the way and presumably doesn't share any data at all until you explicitly tell it to.

freehorse5mo ago

Any search engine can implement it themselves through an extension, though?

xnx6mo ago

drnick16mo ago

Thankfully Firefox is FOSS, which means distro maintainers and users can patch out such anti-features.

In the meantime, I'll stick to my Arkenfox user.js.

samtheDamned5mo ago

This isn't really an antifeature. If someone has Google as the default search engine I doubt they are going to be against this. If you don't have google as the default you won't even see this.

extraduder_ire5mo ago

I've been using this extension to have this functionality for years: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/image-search-...

kayart_dev5mo ago

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search_by_ima... is even better in my opinion, it supports multiple image search engines at the same time

0x2a5mo ago

Agree, this is what I use. Wish Kagi reverse image search was better.

stonogo6mo ago

Why did mozilla put so much work into an extension system if they were just going to shove random sponsored functionality into the base install?

extraduder_ire5mo ago

If you select text and right click, there's already an option to do a web search. This is a pretty obvious addition to that.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse