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>Note: Google must be set as your default search engine for this feature to appear.
Thankfully Firefox is FOSS, which means distro maintainers and users can patch out such anti-features.

In the meantime, I'll stick to my Arkenfox user.js.

When possible, don't use anything from Google.

And this is a clear move from Google. Take this money and put this on the browser...

If this sticks around I hope (and mostly trust) that they'll make it configurable across different image search tools.

Other than that this seems... fine. Good even. It's a nice to have feature that isn't in the way and presumably doesn't share any data at all until you explicitly tell it to.

Good feature. Searching an image is already an older mode of Google Lens. Chrome currently allows you to search any region, which is more useful for searching something from a video frame or a portion of an image. Not sure why Firefox would implement the older version.
Why did mozilla put so much work into an extension system if they were just going to shove random sponsored functionality into the base install?
If you select text and right click, there's already an option to do a web search. This is a pretty obvious addition to that.
I generally prefer to use https://tineye.com/ because it just reverse searches instead of trying to do some voodoo with the image.
I prefer Google Lens because the voodoo it does is far more than just image search, and is genuinely useful to me. I use it to translate text in images multiple times a day (I live in a country where I'm not a native speaker). I've used it to identify birds, plants, and even furniture - it found me the local shop for a table in a cafe that I liked, which was pretty amazing.

I'm not a Google fan, in fact I actively try to choose alternatives where possible, but they do make some good products not matched by anyone else, and it's not useful to pretend that isn't the case. Lens is one such product, Maps is another... Ok maybe that's it, since I use LLMs for most translation tasks these days.