New in Firefox: Visual search powered by Google Lens
connect.mozilla.org>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.
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...
If the alternative is Microsoft or Meta or Amazon or OpenAI or X, then I'll happily use Google.
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.
I generally prefer to use https://tineye.com/ because it just reverse searches instead of trying to do some voodoo with the image.
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.
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.
Any search engine can implement it themselves through an extension, though?
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.
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.
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.
I've been using this extension to have this functionality for years: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/image-search-...
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
Agree, this is what I use. Wish Kagi reverse image search was better.
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?
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.