Mozilla is about to change the way you shop online, or more accurately, help you buy real products. The company plans to introduce a new feature called “Review Checker” in its web browser, Firefox. This feature will help you eliminate fake reviews on Amazon, Flipkart and other e-commerce websites and make users’ online shopping more honest.
Reportedly, the Review Checker feature is powered by FakeSpot, a startup recently purchased by Mozilla earlier this year. According to a recent report from MSPowerUser, the new feature in Firefox will initially work on e-commerce sites like Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy in the US, with plans to add support for more websites in the future.
“Confirming the feature to The Verge, Byron Jordan, Firefox’s senior director of product management, revealed that the company is currently testing the review checker functionality with a limited audience in the United States.”
A screenshot of the Firefox tool published by MSPower for how the feature will work shows that Review Checker will use machine learning and artificial intelligence to help users identify and remove unreliable reviews from e-commerce websites. Users will be able to access the feature via the price tag icon in the URL bar of the browser, which when clicked will bring up a sidebar displaying details about the product page being viewed. The sidebar will further display a grade for product reviews, an “adjusted rating” out of five stars by removing unreliable reviews, and highlights from existing reviews. Specifically, FakeSpot is using a grading system from A to F for product reviews, with A representing the most trustworthy and F representing the least trustworthy.
While the feature has not yet been officially launched, reports suggest that Mozilla has started testing the Review Checker feature and plans to release it to everyone on November 21 with Firefox version 120 for desktop and Android. The company says that Review Checker uses Oblivious HTTP, which prevents Mozilla from linking the user to the device they are using and the products they have viewed.
Mozilla’s Review Checker tool is designed to help users identify and remove unreliable reviews from e-commerce websites. This will be a valuable tool given the growing problem of fake reviews. Relatedly, in 2021, Trustpilot removed approximately 2.7 million fraudulent reviews, revealing that fake reviews are more common than one might think. While platforms like Amazon have made efforts to remove fake reviews in recent years, advances in generative technology may make it more difficult to distinguish between genuine and fake reviews in the future.