Firefox's Smart Window AI now retrieves live web data and organizes your browsing history

Firefox's Smart Window AI mode has gained new capabilities that center on understanding and organizing what you've already done online rather than forcing new searches. The tool can now tap into live web information through a partnership with Exa, displaying source links alongside its responses, and intelligently suggest tab groupings while showing previews of pages from your browsing history when you search using everyday language.

What's new#

The update introduces three main features. When you describe what you're looking for—say, "running shoes I checked out last week"—Smart Window can scan your history, surface those pages with images, and organize related tabs into groups. It can also identify and eliminate duplicate tabs, making it simpler to keep your workspace tidy. Unlike AI assistants that primarily surface new search results, this approach leans on what you've already encountered, adding sourced citations from the web where appropriate.

Mozilla says early testers found this history-focused approach particularly helpful for picking up where they left off on a topic, even if the exact page has faded from memory. Coming soon are features inspired by Chrome's journeys feature—allowing you to revisit browsing sessions—plus AI-assisted form filling.

Privacy and choice at the core#

Smart Window remains in opt-in beta with no firm timeline for wider release. Mozilla emphasizes a user-first stance: the feature is available to those who want it, but entirely optional. Firefox's head of product, Ajit Varma, framed this as an "agnostic" approach to AI—offering tools without the pressure to use them, and crucially, without trying to lock users into particular search or chat habits.

The privacy protections are granular. Users can select their preferred AI model—whether Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, OpenAI's gpt-120b, Alibaba's Qwen3, or a local AI running on their own machine. Each partnership operates under zero-data-retention contracts; Mozilla and its vendors process your prompts in real time but don't store them for training, advertising, or review unless you explicitly allow it.

A neutral player in the browser space#

Varma stressed that Mozilla sees itself as a "neutral party on the internet," aiming to serve diverse users rather than steer them toward a single approach. This ethos extends to model selection—offering both major-company and regional AI options to support what Varma calls "digital sovereignty."