Running Inference In Web Extensions
We’re shipping a new API in Firefox Nightly that will let you use our Firefox AI runtime to run offline machine learning tasks in your web extension.
We’ve recently shipped a new component inside of Firefox that leverages Transformers.js (a JavaScript equivalent of Hugging Face’s Transformers Python library) and the underlying ONNX runtime engine. This component lets you run any machine learning model that is compatible with Transformers.js in the browser, with no server-side calls beyond the initial download of the models. This means Firefox can run everything on your device and avoid sending your data to third parties.
Web applications can already use Transformers.js in vanilla JavaScript, but running through our platform offers some key benefits:
This platform shipped in Firefox 133 to provide alt text for images in PDF.js, and will be used in several other places in Firefox 134 and beyond to improve the user experience.
