Firefox Smart Window is Mozilla’s attempt to bring AI into the browser without making AI the whole point of the browser. The latest update adds more useful retrieval tools, more organization features, and clearer controls over how much AI a user wants in Firefox.
The result is a feature that sits between search, history, tabs, and chat. Mozilla’s pitch is not that Smart Window should take over browsing, but that it should help people return to what they already saw, check answers, and manage open pages with less friction.
What Smart Window can do now
Starting today, AI chats inside 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. That changes the role of the chat experience: instead of only responding from a model, it can point users toward sources for the information it surfaces.
Smart Window can also suggest tab groups automatically. The feature can identify duplicates and close them, which is aimed at a common browser problem: too many open pages that are hard to sort, compare, or remember.
Mozilla is also adding visual previews for pages a user has already visited. Those previews appear when browsing history is searched with natural language, making it possible to look for something by describing it rather than remembering the exact page title or site.
A live demo showed Smart Window sorting through selected links in browsing history to find “running shoes I looked at last week.” It also displayed images pulled from the previously browsed sites. That example matters because it shows the feature working less like a general search engine and more like a memory aid for the browser itself.
The bigger idea is browser memory
Many AI browser features focus on generating new answers or opening new searches. Firefox Smart Window is being framed differently. It is designed to work with open tabs, browsing history, and pages the user has already encountered.
That approach is useful because people often remember the substance of a page before they remember its location. A user may recall a product image, a topic, or a phrase, but not the tab, page title, or site where it appeared. Smart Window’s natural-language history search and visual previews are meant to close that gap.
Mozilla’s blog post announcing the update says the feature can help users check answers or find their place again, especially when they remember what was on a page but not which page it was. Mozilla also says beta users reported that Smart Window helped them maintain their train of thought better.
Future updates are expected to add Chrome-like surfacing of recent browsing journeys and AI-powered autofill for online forms. Those additions would extend the same idea: AI as a layer that helps Firefox understand browsing activity, rather than a separate destination users have to visit.
Smart Window is still optional
Smart Window remains an opt-in beta feature. Mozilla’s head of Firefox, Ajit Varma, said there is not a “precise date” yet for when it will leave beta.
The feature was first announced last year as “AI Window,” a browsing mode in Firefox with AI features such as searching open tabs or browser history using natural language. Since then, Mozilla has added an AI Controls section to Firefox settings.
Those controls let users turn off all of the browser’s AI features or choose which ones to keep enabled. That is a key part of Mozilla’s positioning: Firefox can offer AI tools without assuming every user wants the same experience.
“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.”
Varma described Mozilla’s AI approach in Firefox as “agnostic.” In practice, that means offering Smart Window to people who want AI in the browser while leaving room for others to use Firefox without those features.
Model choice and privacy controls
Firefox Smart Window also gives users a choice of AI models. The options named by Mozilla include Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, OpenAI’s oss-gpt-120b, Alibaba’s Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507, and users’ own local AI models.
Varma connected that choice to “digital sovereignty,” saying users should be able to choose local AIs and AI from companies that may be based in their region or have different views from some large technology companies.
Privacy is another central part of Mozilla’s message. Firefox AI senior staff product manager Steve Truong said the available model options are handled under a zero-data-retention contract. He said third parties providing inference or API calls operate on the user prompt in memory and do not store it to train models, support advertising, or allow human review.
Truong also said Mozilla does not retain user chats on its servers without permission for uses such as model training, and added that Mozilla is not making models. He also said the company does not retain chats for human review or advertising.
A feedback-driven beta
Mozilla is presenting Smart Window as a user-first, user-centric feature that will continue to change based on feedback. One example is the top navigation bar in Smart Window, which Truong said Mozilla added after users asked for it.
That feedback loop matters because browser AI can easily become intrusive if it is treated as the default interface for everything. Mozilla’s current direction is more restrained: Smart Window is optional, configurable, and focused on helping with familiar browser tasks.
The open question is usefulness. Mozilla says beta users have found value in keeping their train of thought, and the new Exa-powered source links, tab grouping, duplicate closing, natural-language history search, and visual previews all point toward a browser assistant built around context. But Smart Window is still in beta, and Mozilla has not given a precise date for a wider release.