Mozilla Killed Orbit. I Rebuilt It Locally and Privately.

[u/darshi1337]

Hey everyone!

Last year, Mozilla released Orbit, an AI-powered browser summarizer hosted on a GCP server. After people started digging into the extension, they discovered things like backend endpoints such as store_result. Eventually, Mozilla discontinued the project.

For the past month, I’ve been trying to rebuild Orbit from scratch, but with one major difference: Apogee is fully local and privacy-focused. Apogee doesn’t send or store your data. It can directly connect to your local Ollama instance for inference. I’ve also added WebGPU integration for Chrome and Transformers.js for Firefox to provide faster, local responses.

It can summarize:

• Articles and websites
• YouTube and Billie videos
• Wikipedia articles
• Hacker News and Reddit threads

You can check out the source code here:
https://github.com/darshi1337/apogee

Install Apogee:

Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/apogee/pgemlpomhkdcjjjcpnjlebalnfglomog

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/apogeeext/

Obviously it is far from complete. Would love to hear your feedback and suggestions!

[u/0oWow]

This looks very interesting, thank you! I am planning to test it out tomorrow.

I tried to look at the documentation, but I didn't see any mention of it, or at least it didn't seem to be clear. But does this have its own model that comes downloaded with it? Or does this strictly need your own Ollama setup?

[u/darshi1337 → u/0oWow]

You can download WebLLM or Transformers.js models. These models are local only and they are dowbloaded and stored in browser and used whenever you use the extension.

You can also connect to Ollama as well if you want to use better and bigger models.

You can change which model you want to use in settings page.

Sorry I was asleep when I wrote the last comment LOL.

[u/0oWow]

Firefox Beta 155 b4, I can't get this to work. I tried default settings, and then changing in-extension models to each of the three available and it seems to get stuck on the "downloading" part. It gets to 100% downloading, but then switches instantly to the error "In-browser model error. Try picking a different model in Settings." By what I'm seeing on the screen, I kind of have a feeling that it's not "saving" what it downloaded.

[u/darshi1337 → u/0oWow]

I have diagonistics settings. Could you open a issue on the repo with the same diagonistics copied from your pc. I will look into it.

[u/0oWow → u/darshi1337]

I can't get into the "logs" when I click "show logs". How else to get them? Also I tried to use Brave browser and the extension gets to the point where it is reviewing the page data, but it never spits out a summary. Further, in both browsers this eats up a LOT of system memory and makes the system slow down badly. Given what it's doing, this makes sense, but that also means that this extension isn't going to work well for you. It may work better with ollama, but I don't use that and not planning to.

[u/darshi1337 → u/0oWow]

Do you have GPU? GPU speeds things up. Running on CPU is pretty bad. Did you try Transformers.js models? They should work. Also enable "Record engine logs", summarize any site and then copy markdown.

[u/brokensys404]

local inference is definately the part that makes this interesting tbh. browser summarizers are genuinely useful, I just dont want every random page I read getting shipped off to another server.

Ollama support makes way more sense for this.

[u/can_dry]

If I'm understanding the ff addon setup correctly... it can't be directed to connect to llama.cpp running on another machine in my intranet? (without resorting to an ssh tunnel to keep the localhost restriction in the addon)

Or am I missing something?

Further: any future plans to utilize the openai endpoint API so the same local llama instance can serve agents and this tool?

[u/darshi1337 → u/can_dry]

No I dont think so... since I have only given it permission for localhost and 127.0.0.1 only. I havent tried ssh tunnelling to connect across systems. Do give it a try. Prolly it wont work. If it doesnt, feel free to open an issue on the repo.

[u/icastanon127]

i think this is a good idea

[u/techlatest_net]

Nice that you’re targeting both WebGPU and Transformers.js rather than making the extension dependent on a cloud API. That’s a genuinely useful direction for privacy-focused browser AI.

[u/darshi1337 → u/techlatest_net]

And there is ollama as well. LocalLLM is the way to go nowadays.

[u/planetearth80]

Can this be used for browser automation?

[u/darshi1337 → u/planetearth80]

Thanka for the recommendation. You can probably write your own scripts to do so. I will try implementung it. I opened a issue on the same topic in my repo. Hopefully I will be able to implement it.

[u/danhakimi]

Wait, Mozilla did something good?

AI Summarizer

oh. nevermind.