Mozilla has unveiled its new AI browser features, emphasizing a user-centric and privacy-focused design that integrates artificial intelligence without disrupting the core browsing experience.
As of today, the Smart Window AI browsing mode in Firefox enables AI chats to access current web information and display source links within chat responses, thanks to a collaboration with Exa. Furthermore, Smart Window now offers automatic suggestions for tab groups and provides visual previews of previously visited pages when users conduct natural language searches within their browsing history.
A live demonstration illustrated Smart Window AI's capability to efficiently sift through selected browsing history links, for instance, retrieving “running shoes I looked at last week” complete with images from previously visited sites. The tab grouping feature also intelligently identifies and closes duplicate tabs, streamlining organization. Notably, this AI functionality primarily processes content the user has already encountered, providing citations for information retrieved via Exa, rather than predominantly generating entirely new search results.
According to a blog post detailing the update, these features aim to assist users in verifying information or re-locating content, particularly when they recall a page's visual elements but not its specific URL. While its practical utility remains to be personally assessed, Mozilla reports that beta testers found it beneficial for maintaining their focus. Upcoming enhancements include surfacing recent browsing journeys, akin to Chrome, and AI-driven autofill for online forms.
Smart Window remains an optional beta feature, and Ajit Varma, Mozilla's head of Firefox, informed The Verge that a “precise date” for its public release is not yet available. Initially unveiled last year as “AI Window,” this Firefox browsing mode offered AI capabilities such as natural language searching across open tabs and browsing history. Since its announcement, Mozilla has integrated a dedicated “AI Controls” section into Firefox’s settings, allowing users to disable all AI features or selectively enable specific ones.
Varma articulated Mozilla’s commitment to an “agnostic” approach to AI within Firefox, providing features like Smart Window to users who desire them, rather than imposing them on everyone. He contrasted this with other AI integrations, stating, “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.”
Within Smart Window, users have the flexibility to select their preferred AI model from options such as Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, OpenAI’s oss-gpt-120b, Alibaba’s Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507, or even their own local AI models. Varma emphasized this choice supports “digital sovereignty,” enabling users to “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.”
Steve Truong, Firefox AI senior staff product manager, confirmed that the available AI models operate “under a zero-data-retention contract.” He elaborated that when collaborating with third parties for inference or API calls, Mozilla ensures these providers “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.” Truong further stated, “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.”
Varma reiterated Mozilla’s commitment to user autonomy, stating, “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.”
This overarching “user-first, user-centric” philosophy guides the development of new features and modifications, directly incorporating user feedback. As an example, Truong mentioned that Mozilla implemented the top navigation bar in Smart Window specifically in response to user requests.
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