New in Firefox: Visual Search Powered by Google Lens

Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago

ReadCarlBarks

62 points

23 comments

connect.mozilla.orgTechstory

controversialmixed

Debate

80/100

FirefoxGoogle LensVisual SearchBrowser Extensions

Key topics

Firefox

Google Lens

Visual Search

Browser Extensions

Firefox has introduced a new visual search feature powered by Google Lens, sparking debate among users about its integration, configurability, and potential data sharing.

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Moderate engagement

First comment

22m

Peak period

0-2h

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Comment distribution17 data points

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01Story posted
Sep 27, 2025 at 4:01 PM EDT
3 months ago
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Sep 27, 2025 at 4:23 PM EDT
22m after posting
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6 comments in 0-2h
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04Latest activity
Sep 28, 2025 at 2:21 PM EDT
3 months ago
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Discussion (23 comments)

Showing 17 comments of 23

Borgz

3 months ago

1 reply

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

KronisLV

3 months ago

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.

drnick1

3 months ago

1 reply

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

3 months 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.

roscas

3 months ago

1 reply

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

3 months ago

1 reply

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

hagbard_c

3 months 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

gpm

3 months ago

1 reply

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

3 months ago

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

stonogo

3 months ago

1 reply

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

3 months 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.

AlienRobot

3 months ago

1 reply

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

esperent

3 months 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.

extraduder_ire

3 months ago

1 reply

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

kayart_dev

3 months ago

1 reply

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

0x2a

3 months ago

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

xnx

3 months 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.

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