Orbit by Mozilla

» see orbitbymozilla.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Orbit shut down on 26 June 2025 and took the Deep Fake Detector with it. Both were Mozilla add-ons, both were labeled experiments, and both were retired for the same reason: Firefox had begun shipping the same category of feature in the browser itself, a sidebar wired to whichever third-party chatbot you were already signed into.

The extension had gone up on addons.mozilla.org in September 2024 under the title Orbit [Beta]: AI Assistant and Content Summarizer, and it never dropped the bracket. Seven versions shipped across nine months. What it did was narrow on purpose. Summarize the page or the video in front of you, then answer follow-up questions about that page and refuse everything else.

Underneath it was a Mistral 7B that Mozilla ran on a cloud instance of its own rather than calling anybody's API. The promise attached to that was unusually specific for the period: your prompts were not passed to Mistral and were not used to train anything.

~ the record ~

~ the orb ~

The interface was a single small circle floating above every page you loaded. You could drag it out of the way or switch it off for a site entirely. Hovering over it made a few actions appear around the edge, which is where the name came from, and the answers slid in over the page instead of shoving the layout sideways.

The restriction was the design rather than a limitation of it. Orbit read what was on screen and answered about that and nothing else, and if you wanted a general-purpose chatbot you were pointed elsewhere. There was a button for flagging a summary that had come back wrong, which in late 2024 was still a slightly unusual thing to put in a shipping product.

~ a 7b in somebody else's cloud ~

Seven billion parameters is small, and that was the entire argument for Mistral 7B in 2023 and 2024. A model in that class quantizes down to something a laptop can hold in memory and a mid-range desktop can serve without help from anyone. Mozilla, whose whole pitch for the add-on was that your reading should not leave your machine, put the weights in a cloud instance anyway and had the browser call out to them.

I spend my working hours getting models small enough to run on a drone, so that is the decision I keep turning over. The reasons for it are sound enough. You cannot ship several gigabytes of weights inside a browser extension, and you cannot assume the machine at the far end has the memory to load them. But the honest reading of the privacy claim was that Mozilla had promised not to look, which is a weaker guarantee than data that never moves.

~ where the domain points now ~

orbitbymozilla.com still resolves. It does not serve a farewell notice. It answers with a 301 to a Mozilla blog post dated 22 May 2025 and titled Building what's next, which announces the end of Pocket and Fakespot and does not mention Orbit anywhere in its text. The add-on's listing page on addons.mozilla.org has returned a 404 since the summer of 2025.

Pocket closed on 8 July 2025 and Fakespot on 1 July. Orbit went first, on 26 June, and it is the only one of the three that got no farewell post of its own.

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