Why Mozilla changed the recipe instructions

Mozilla is explaining the prompt development behind Firefox’s Shake to Summarize, which it says has been available on iOS and Android for several months. For readers opening recipes, the intended benefit is access to the cooking information without the surrounding narrative. Mozilla says that requires retaining specific ingredients and quantities instead of simply describing the dish.

Mozilla’s initial approach gave the model a general set of instructions covering different page types. Its recipe guidance called for ingredients, key steps, timing and tips. But Mozilla reports that recipe summaries sometimes omitted essential ingredients or even the recipe itself. A description could accurately convey what a page contained while failing to provide the recipe readers needed.

How Mozilla routes recipe pages

Mozilla says it addressed that problem by creating a separate prompt containing only recipe instructions and directing recipe requests to it. The company considered expanding the general prompt, but says that approach risked making recipe formatting dominate summaries of other content. The documented change therefore concerns which instructions a request receives, with recipe pages taking a dedicated path.

To choose that path, Mozilla says the system reads structured information embedded in webpages. This lets it identify page categories without asking a model to perform another classification pass. That information can be absent or incorrect, however. Mozilla says it keeps some recipe guidance in the general prompt to account for those cases.

What Mozilla reports about the output

Mozilla illustrates the change with an abbreviated soup summary organized around servings, preparation and cooking times, ingredients, instructions and tips. It also reports improved completeness and accuracy in a quick evaluation using selected recipe sites. The scope of that evaluation matters: results from a curated collection do not establish that every recipe page will yield a complete summary.

Mozilla says its current approach has just one prompt dedicated to a particular content category. It proposes that other page types might benefit from their own prompts, but presents that extension as a hypothesis. The documented mechanism is narrower: identify recipe content, give it focused instructions and retain recipe guidance in the general path.

Sources & context

  1. Prompt Tuning Firefox Shake to Summarize for Recipes | The Mozilla BlogMozilla

    Single-source report; claims attributed to the source, not independently verified. Source feed date (published): 2026-10-01T16:00:00.000Z. Study date: not established. Consulted: 2026-10-01T21:00:06.742Z.

AI assisted with preparing and checking this article. The responsible editor accepted this version for publication following an assisted review of facts, sources and attribution.

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