New in Firefox: Visual search powered by Google Lens

[Borgz]

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

[KronisLV]

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.

[roscas]

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...

[panarky]

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

[AlienRobot]

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

[esperent]

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.

[gpm]

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.

[freehorse]

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

[xnx]

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.

[drnick1]

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.

[samtheDamned]

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_ire]

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

[kayart_dev]

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

[stonogo]

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_ire]

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.

[roscas]

Use LibreWolf, but keep in mind that most of connections it makes it is still back to Mozilla.

So the only way to fight this is to block the connections and accept only those who we really want.

We still need to block all the crap with Chrome or any other browser or program.

There is no way you get around it without serious blocking and uBlock Origin for ads and the other crap.

The question is how much money does Google put on Mozzila.

[bcraven]

Ooh go on, tell us all about your homelab where you run multiple proxmox servers and have pi-hole DNS blocking for your whole family.

[Karrot_Kream]

Something something Brendan Eich

[jasonvorhe]

Just because it's repetitive doesn't make any of it less true.