About Page Assist
Page Assist is a sidebar and web interface for AI models you run yourself, and it is the only good option here for Firefox. You bring your own model, usually through Ollama, so setup takes effort and quality depends on your hardware. If you want the page and your questions to stay off other companies' servers, this is the one.
It connects to Ollama, to any OpenAI-compatible endpoint such as LM Studio or llama.cpp, and in beta to Chrome's built-in Gemini Nano. In the sidebar you can chat about the current page, add PDFs and documents, use vision models and run web search. Newer beta features include tab mentions, an MCP client and memory. The README says chat history and settings are stored locally in the browser.
The Chrome Web Store listing says the developer will not collect or use your data, and the MIT-licensed code is public, so you can check. Point it at a cloud endpoint and that traffic goes where you send it. You need a computer able to run a model. It is one developer's project, though it has about 8,000 GitHub stars. The README also carries an affiliate-tagged sponsor link to a model-routing service; we saw that in the README, not in the extension.
Pros and cons
- Open source under the MIT licence, with an active repository
- Works with local models via Ollama or LM Studio, so data can stay on your machine
- Listed on both the Chrome Web Store and Firefox Add-ons
- Chrome listing says the developer collects no data
- You must set up and run a model yourself
- A single independent developer, not a company
- Local models are usually weaker than cloud models
Permissions
Asks for access to all http, https and file pages, plus the side panel, active tab, scripting and storage. That lets it read the page you ask about.
