Firefox tests a built-in checker for fake reviews from Fakespot

An Amazon item listing. On the right side of it is a window pane with the heading Review Checker with a reliability score of B for the reviews, and an adjusted product rating of 4,5 stars. Below that it shows highlights from recent reviews.

Firefox’s Review Checker is now preparing to give users the tools to weed out unreliable reviews. Screenshots posted by MSPowerUser show how the tool is accessible via a price tag icon in the browser’s URL bar, which brings up a sidebar with details on the current open product page. The tool assigns the product’s reviews a grade based on how reliable it believes them to be, offers an “adjusted rating” out of five stars with “unreliable reviews removed,” and pulls out some highlights of the existing reviews.

Fakespot already offers its review checking services via its website, extensions for browsers like Chrome and Safari, and iOS and Android apps.

It is being tested in the USA currently, but unfortunately, Fakespot only works with some of the major US shopping sites. Currently, those sites are: Amazon, BestBuy, Flipkart, Home Depot, Sephora, Steam, TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Walmart. It would be really useful if this could also work on AliExpress and many other international eCommerce sites.

It’s worth noting that such extensions require access to the content of visited pages to work, so where you have this installed as an extension, you can use an extension like Extensity to quickly deactivate/activate it when needed.

See https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/11/23912457/firefox-review-checker-fakespot-feature-test-experiment

Comments