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Firefox Extensions That Use AI Locally: No Cloud, No Account, No Data Sharing

#firefox #privacy #webextensions #javascript

Most AI tools in the browser send your content to external servers: Grammarly, Copilot, ChatGPT browser extensions, and similar tools process your text via cloud APIs.

Here are Firefox extensions that use AI or intelligent processing locally — no cloud required.

Grammar and writing: AI Writing Assistant

AI Writing Assistant — grammar checking and text rewriting that runs in Firefox using a local model. Your text is processed by JavaScript executing in the browser. No API call is made.

What "local AI" means here: A smaller language model is embedded in the extension. It runs on your device's CPU (or GPU, depending on the browser's WebAssembly performance). The model is less capable than GPT-4 or Claude, but handles standard grammar checking for most use cases.

Privacy benefit: Your documents, drafts, and sensitive writing do not leave the browser.

Smart scheduling: NightOwl

NightOwl — calculates sunset and sunrise times mathematically for your coordinates. This is an algorithm, not AI, but it is worth noting: it requires no network call. The scheduling is computed locally based on your location and the date.

Why local AI matters

Cloud AI tools create two risks:

  1. Privacy: Your content is processed on third-party servers
  2. Availability: If the service is down, the tool stops working

Local AI processing has two trade-offs:

  1. Accuracy: Smaller local models are less capable than large cloud models
  2. Speed: Browser-based models may be slower for complex tasks

For most common tasks (grammar checking, text improvement), local accuracy is acceptable and the privacy benefit is real.

The state of local AI in browsers

Browser-based AI is improving rapidly. WebAssembly and WebGPU allow increasingly capable models to run in-browser. The gap between local and cloud model quality is narrowing, though it has not closed.

For users who want AI assistance without the data exposure, the local option is viable for straightforward writing assistance tasks.

Install AI Writing Assistant for Firefox

AI Writing Assistant is one of 11 Firefox extensions I built — see the full series.

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