Firefox Smart Window Gets AI-Powered Search, Tab Groups & Visual History - All Optional

Firefox's AI Window Gets New Features Meant to Help You Stay on Task and Organized - CNET

Zach began writing for CNET in November, 2021 after writing for a broadcast news station in his hometown, Cincinnati, for five years.... Read full bio Firefox's AI-integrated Smart Window is getting a few new features meant to help people pick up their work right where they left off. The features, announced Tuesday, should make it easier to find answers, organize tabs together and see what you were working on earlier. To make answers more readily available in Smart Window, Firefox is partnering with the AI company Exa as a search provider. This lets Smart Window pull current information from around the internet and it provides citations for that information. So you shouldn't need to jump around in tabs looking for citations. Firefox told CNET in a video call that a critical part of its doing business with Exa is that the company shares a lot of Firefox's privacy principles, like a zero data retention policy. "That is a red line for us to make sure [Smart Window is] as private as possible," Ajit Varma, the head of Firefox, said. Smart Window can also let you group tabs together so you can keep your research organized. So if you're researching running shoes, for example, you can create a group that is all shoe-related tabs. Firefox told CNET that if you give Smart Window permission, it will use the content of the webpages to figure out related themes and group webpages accordingly. You can also manually add or remove tabs from groups. In addition, Smart Window can easily show you the tabs you recently viewed. That way, if you're clearing out tabs and accidentally close one that's relevant to what you're working on, you can ask the browser to show you the tabs you were looking at. What makes this different from a standard browser history log is that it shows you a snapshot of the webpage itself, as opposed to a URL and webpage name. So if you remember what the webpage looks like, you should be able to find it. It's important to note that Smart Window is not a replacement for the Firefox browser. According to Mozilla, Smart Window is an optional window type within Firefox. "Smart Window is completely optional and opt-in," Mozilla writes in the Smart Window privacy notice. "It builds on the classic Firefox experience (classic window) by using AI to enhance your browsing experience." For more on Firefox, here's what to know about other AI features in the browser and what Mozilla's CEO told CNET about its AI features.

Firefox's Smart Window promises a better AI 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.

Firefox Is Rolling Out Three New Features for 'Smart Window'

Eventually, Mozilla wants Firefox to remember what you do in the browser. If you like to be on the cutting edge, you might know about Firefox's "Smart Window" feature -- formerly "AI Window." If not, here's an intro: Smart Window is Firefox's take on an AI web browsing assistant. You can use the chat feature to ask general questions (like you would with ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude) or send queries about the pages you're looking at. The feature lives in Firefox's menu bar: You can engage it whenever you want -- with three models to choose from -- and shut it off just the same. Since Firefox's whole schtick is privacy-first, it emphasizes how none of your interactions with AI Window are used to train Mozilla's models, and your data is never sold to third parties -- similar to DuckDuckGo's approach to AI. But Mozilla says that it changed Smart Window throughout its initial beta testing period. While the feature is still in beta, the company is now announcing more updates coming down the pike. New features coming to Firefox's Smart Window On Tuesday morning, the company officially revealed three new Smart Window features that beta testers can now take advantage of. First, Mozilla announced a new way to browse the internet for answers without actually leaving your current window. The experience comes through a partnership with Exa, and lets you look up web info with sources without leaving for a new search results page. I suppose it's a new take on using two windows in split-screen -- though I usually don't find it hard to do a quick search in a new tab and close it when I'm done. Second, Smart Window now supports automatic tab groups. If your Firefox window has multiple tabs, Smart Window can suggest groups for tabs that are similar to one another. This is something other browsers like Chrome have implemented for some time now, but a first for Firefox, which previously only offered manual tab groups. Finally, Smart Window will be able to show you "visual previews" of the pages in your browsing history. The idea is to make it easier to spot the pages you're looking for in your digital past, rather than hunt through various text-based URLs. Mozilla wants Smart Window to remember what you do in Firefox Mozilla wants Smart Window to be more than Firefox with a chatbot. Following user feedback, the company is working on features that would keep tabs on what you do in Firefox, in the name of making it easier to pick up where you left off last. The idea is, rather than thinking through what you were looking up earlier in the day, or trying to remember the sites you were browsing last night, you can ask Smart Window to help you get back to it. In that way, it's similar to features like ChatGPT's Computer History, which tracks your general computer usage so you can ask the bot questions about what you did on your Mac. Mozilla says that in the near future, you'll be able to pull up "recent browsing journeys" from Smart Window, pulling from your tabs and history, so you can effectively return to a previous browsing session. While browsing history has been a standard for decades, how many of us really want our browsers keeping a dedicated log of everything we do each session? I think I'd rather think for a few moments about what I was doing last -- or at the very least write down notes to myself -- rather than let Firefox track my every move. In addition, the company is working on adding an AI form-filler, similar to tools advertised by Google at I/O. This is the type of AI feature I imagine more people will be open to: I'd rather Firefox to be better at filling out forms on my behalf, than "remember" what I did Monday night. But maybe I'd rather keep its AI away from both: All of Firefox's AI features are optional Like all of Firefox's AI features, Smart Window is entirely optional. Not only can you toggle it on or off at any time, but you can also completely disable it, as well as all other AI features. While even Firefox has jumped on the AI bandwagon, it's helpful to offer easy ways to block these new additions for users who want a traditional, simple web browsing experience.

Mozilla is bringing AI to Firefox -- but only if you want it

A new feature called Smart Window adds AI chat, web search, and browsing-based 'memories' to Firefox while giving users the option to keep AI turned off entirely. Artificial intelligence is coming to Mozilla Firefox -- but only for users who want it. Through a deal with AI search provider Exa, Mozilla announced on Tuesday what it calls Smart Window, browser windows and tabs augmented with AI chat interfaces that can answer questions and help users with content on open tabs and material from the broader internet. Perhaps most critically for many users, and in line with Mozilla's ongoing approach to AI, the feature will only be shown to those who opt in, and users will be able to opt out at any time or temporarily toggle the feature off. Though that likely won't satisfy all of Mozilla's critics, some of whom are ardently opposed to generative AI and others who discourage Mozilla from investing in anything but core browser technology, the Firefox maker appears intent on catering to both AI aficionados and those who want nothing to do with large-language models. "With Firefox, we are really focused on building the best browser," says Ajit Varma, head of Firefox at Mozilla. "Some people definitely want AI, some people don't, and so, what we're looking at is really choice." The feature is currently rolling out to users who opt in in the U.S. and Canada. For those who do opt in, Smart Window can answer questions similar to those people might ask other AI chat tools like ChatGPT or Claude. The interactions take place within a panel that sits alongside ordinary browser content. But unlike third-party chatbots, the Smart Window AI can answer questions specifically about open tabs and based on "memories" derived from users' browsing histories. Questions relying on internet content are powered by Exa's search engine, which the company says uses custom AI models and databases, along with ongoing crawls of more than 500 billion web addresses, to deliver relevant material. When a user asks a question that calls for information from the web, the AI model generates a search query and sends it to Exa through its API, then uses Exa's response to formulate an answer, similar to the tool-calling approach used by other AI systems. Mozilla and Exa say neither retains the information sent as part of those searches. Exa, which announced in May it had raised a $250 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $2.2 billion valuation, also powers search for software companies including Cursor, Cognition, and HubSpot. "We train everything in house. We crawl everything in house," says Exa cofounder and CEO Will Bryk. "And then a query comes in, and we rapidly search over all those documents that provide the highest quality."