Firefox Feature Gets Special Mention In TIME's Best Inventions of 2025
- Reference: 0179733314
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/10/09/2110227/firefox-feature-gets-special-mention-in-times-best-inventions-of-2025
- Source link:
> Shake to summarize works exactly how you suspect: you physically shake your phone to generate a summary of a long article. This can be quite handy if you are trying to get the gist of a long read without scrolling through the whole thing. Other ways to activate the feature include tapping the thunderbolt icon in the address bar and selecting "Summarize Page" from the three-dot menu.
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> For now, the feature is limited to iOS users in the US with their system set to English, but Mozilla promises an Android version is in the works. If you have an iPhone 15 Pro or newer running iOS 26, Apple Intelligence generates the summaries on the device. For older iPhones or those on earlier iOS versions, the page text is sent to Mozilla's servers for processing.
You can view the full list of TIME's "Special Mentions" [2]here .
[1] https://www.neowin.net/news/mozilla-firefox-feature-gets-special-mention-in-times-best-inventions-of-2025/
[2] https://time.com/collections/best-inventions-special-mentions/7320805/firefox-shake-to-summarize/
Shallow Distraction (Score:4, Insightful)
> "testament to the incredible work of our UX, design, product, and engineering teams who brought this innovation to life."
You don't give a damn about "UX" to the extent it means user experience. You should be asking extension writers what they need from you to improve their work and truly improve Firefox users' experiences. That goes 10x for ad-block writers.
But it's easier to get TIME to jerk you off and Google to dump money on you with forgettable chintz like this.
Re: (Score:2)
I wouldn't go that far, but you summarize an article without ad-on tech by just reading the first sentence of every paragraph. If you reach something interesting, just read the rest of the paragraph.
Shake for flashlight (Score:3)
Moto phones let you shake the phone to turn the flashlight on and off. It's simple, but it's one of my favorite features, and when people see me do it, they usually tell me they wish *their* phone did that.
A lot more useful, IMO, than "shake to summarize".
Re: (Score:2)
I stand corrected, shake to turn a flash light app on/off does sound useful at times.
Huge innovation, yeah right (Score:2)
Summarize is just one result. Shake is just one input. Combining one input with one output is not a gynormous innovation. Now, do we have configuration possibility for many inputs to arrive to many outputs. Yes and no. Yes - menus with words in them. No - we can't reorganize and recombine them. Would that be huge innovation? No. Would it be larger innovation than this? Yes. If one input arriving to one output is celebrated as great innovation, then I have bad news, we might have arrived at the great filter.
doesn't work? oh, iOS only (Score:2)
I shook, rocked, and jerked off my phone and it didn't work. Then I read the article and realized I'm on the wrong mobile OS. I'm using the real Firefox mobile build, bot that Safari-wrapped crap.
Trivial is now "innovation" (Score:3, Interesting)
I have an innovative idea. How about turning your phone face down to mute the ringer?
Or, maybe .. put tabs vertically instead of horizontally.
Stick around, there is more where that came from. I feel I'm about to give birth to another award winning innovation. I know, I just piss innovation.
Really? (Score:2)
Wow awash google in cash and this is what they come up with. Mozilla needs fewer corp types and more technical types.
Re: (Score:2)
> "Wow awash google in cash and this is what they come up with. Mozilla needs fewer corp types and more technical types."
Unfortunately, they are caught in a bind where, like all companies and products, they seemingly "have to" put AI stuff in, or risk criticisms of possible obsolescence. I know this isn't true. You know this isn't true. Most everyone on Slashdot knows this isn't true. But there are a crapload of companies and consumers out there that eat this stuff up. I will be glad when much of thi