Firefox’s Smart Window promises a better AI browser - The Verge

Mozilla says its AI browser feature is user-first and privacy-focused, without taking over your browser.

Starting today, AI chats in Firefox’s Smart Window AI browsing mode can pull from current web info and show source links in chat responses through a partnership with Exa. Smart Window can also now automatically suggest tab groups and show visual previews of pages you previously visited when you search your browsing history using natural language.

I saw a live demo that showed how the Smart Window AI could sort through selected links in your browsing history to pull up “running shoes I looked at last week,” and pop up images pulled from the sites browsed previously. The suggested groups of tabs can also find and close duplicates, making it easier to keep track of what’s important. Instead of mostly having the AI present new results from searches and browsing, it’s sorting through what you’ve already seen and adding citations for results it pulls up from Exa.

In a blog post announcing the update, it says that this can help you check answers or find your place again, especially if you remember what was on a page even if you don’t specifically remember which page you were looking at before. I’ll need to try it to find out how useful that actually is, but Mozilla says that beta users said it helped them maintain their train of thought better. Future updates will add Chrome-like surfacing of recent browsing journeys, and AI-powered autofill for online forms.

Smart Window is still an opt-in beta feature, and Mozilla’s head of Firefox, Ajit Varma, said in an interview with The Verge that there isn’t a “precise date” yet for when it will leave beta. It was initially announced last year as “AI Window,” a browsing mode in Firefox with AI features like searching through your open tabs or browser history using natural language. Since then, Mozilla added a new AI Controls section to Firefox’s settings where users can turn off all of the browser’s AI features or pick and choose which ones to leave on.

Varma said Mozilla is trying to take an “agnostic” approach to AI in Firefox, offering AI features like Smart Window for those who want them without forcing everyone to use those features. “They didn’t create a browser for you to go to Wikipedia more; they created a browser for you to generate more LLM and chat queries. Whereas for us, we are just looking at more just browser experience, user experience.”

Users can choose which AI model they want to use in Smart Window, including Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, OpenAI’s oss-gpt-120b, Alibaba’s Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507, or their own local AI models. “We’re looking at making sure that there is a possibility for digital sovereignty, so you can choose local AIs and AI from companies that are maybe based in your region that have different views than maybe some of the big tech companies,” Varma said.

Firefox AI senior staff product manager Steve Truong said the models users can choose from “are all done under a zero-data-retention contract. So, when we work with the third parties either providing inference or API calls, we ensure that they are operating on the user prompt in memory and then not storing anything to train their models, to support advertising, or to generally allow for human review.” He added, “We also ourselves do not retain user chats in our servers without user permission to do things like model training — we’re not making models — and certainly not for human review and for advertising.”

“We want to make sure it’s easy for people to get [Firefox] into the state that they want, but we also don’t want to be prescriptive to say there’s only our way of doing things or only one way to do things. But it’s really recognizing that we’re a neutral party on the internet and we want to cater to everybody,” Varma said.

This “user-first, user-centric” approach involves adding new features and making changes based on user feedback — for instance, Truong said Mozilla added the top navigation bar in Smart Window after users asked for it.