AI chatbot sidebar, but only for the current tab?
I’ve started using the “Summarize page” feature in Firefox via the AI chatbot sidebar.
My problem is that when I open the sidebar in one tab (e.g. a news article) and click Summarize, the sidebar with the summary stays open when I switch to other tabs. This does not make sense to me. The sidebar takes up space, which leaves less space for the web page. It’s a compromise. I take away space from the web page in order to get a summary of the page. But I don’t want to take away space from all pages across all tabs. That makes no sense. I want all other tabs to still have all the space.
You may say that I should just read the summary first and then close it before moving on to other tabs. But that’s not how I work. I create a summary, and then as I read that summary, I check something in other tabs. Doing research is not a linear process. You have multiple tabs open and switch between them.
For now, I’m opening a new Firefox window, so that I can still view other websites “in full” while a summary sidebar is open in my main Firefox window, but that’s not ideal. I would prefer if the AI sidebar was tied to the individual tab, so that it’s only shown when that tab is active.
If the limitation is that there can only be one chatbot instance in Firefox at the same time, that’s fine. Firefox can show a message like ”Chatbot is already being used in another tab”. I can live with that. One summary at a time is fine.