What would your browser history say about you? Whether you were getting things done this week or just collecting tabs, a new Firefox extension helps you reflect on your digital habits.
Designed as a personal productivity tool, Fox Recap is a capstone project from a group of college seniors at California State University, Monterey Bay. It categorizes your browsing history, shows how much time you’re spending on different sites, and turns that data into simple visual reports. Everything happens locally on your device, so your information stays private.
How Fox Recap works
Once you [download](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/f…
What would your browser history say about you? Whether you were getting things done this week or just collecting tabs, a new Firefox extension helps you reflect on your digital habits.
Designed as a personal productivity tool, Fox Recap is a capstone project from a group of college seniors at California State University, Monterey Bay. It categorizes your browsing history, shows how much time you’re spending on different sites, and turns that data into simple visual reports. Everything happens locally on your device, so your information stays private.
How Fox Recap works
Once you download and open the extension on Firefox for desktop, click on settings and grant permission to run the ML engine. From there, you can choose to view your browsing history for today, this week or this month.
Fox Recap then lays out your activity in simple charts and categories like technology, shopping, education and entertainment.
“It’s really a tool for you to know how you use your browser,” said one of the student developers, Taimur Hasan. “Maybe you want to lessen the amount of time you spend on entertainment, and see that you use more education sites.”
Kate Sawtell wanted to create a tool that helps people see how they spend their time on the internet. “As a busy mom with a bunch of side projects, I love how it shows where my time online actually goes,” Kate said. “Am I researching, streaming shows or slipping into online shopping holes? It’s not super serious or judgmental, just a quick snapshot of my habits. Sometimes it makes me feel productive, other times it’s like, wow okay maybe I should chill on the shopping tab.”
Members of the Fox Recap team at California State University, Monterey Bay, presenting their capstone project. Pictured (left to right): Taimur Hasan, Mozilla community manager Matt Cool, Kate Sawtell, and Diego Valdez. Not pictured: Peter Mitchell.
‘Useful AI and strong privacy can coexist’
Firefox machine learning engineer Tarek Ziadé served as a mentor for the project. He was struck by how quickly Taimur, Kate, Diego and Peter internalized both the technical challenges of building AI features and their privacy implications.
“I had assumed younger developers might treat privacy as an afterthought,” Tarek said. “I was wrong. They pushed for privacy by design from the start.”
Taimur, who trained the model himself rather than using an existing one, explained: “It’s not an off-the-shelf model that I pulled off the internet. I trained it myself using my gaming computer.”
Tarek believes that what the group built reflects the direction in which privacy-focused technology is headed.
“Intelligence should be local by default, data should be minimized, and anything that needs to leave the device should be explicit and consented,” Tarek said. “As AI capabilities become a commodity, the differentiator will be trust.”
That’s exactly where Mozilla should be leading, Tarek added: “making high-quality, on-device AI the default, and proving that useful AI and strong privacy can coexist.”
A glimpse of the next generation of web builders
For team member Diego Valdez, the project’s value is personal and practical: “I hope people who use Fox Recap can learn about their browsing activity in an engaging way, in hopes [of helping them] improve their productivity.”
Mozilla community manager Matt Cool sees it in a larger frame. “It’s a scary and exciting time to enter the tech industry,” Matt said. “The next generation of open web builders is already stepping up. Right here in Monterey, they’re building real-world projects, contributing to open-source, and tackling some of the toughest problems facing the future of the web.”
Fox Recap is one of several student projects showcased at this spring’s Capstone Festival by the School of Computing and Design at Cal State Monterey Bay. Professor Bude Su, who chairs the department, emphasized the value of mentorship as students prepare for what comes next.
“Mozilla’s involvement brought an added layer of motivation for our students,” Professor Su said. “The opportunity to work on a real-world project under industry mentorship has been invaluable for our students’ learning and professional growth.”
The collaboration shows what can happen when education, mentorship and Mozilla’s values of openness and trust come together. Fox Recap helps make sense of the tabs we collect, but it also points to something bigger: a new wave of developers building tools that respect the people who use them.