Mozilla brings live web search and tab suggestions to Firefox’s Smart Window AI

According to The Verge, Smart Window’s AI chats can now retrieve live web information and include source links through a partnership with Exa, an AI search company. The feature also automatically suggests tab groups, can find and close duplicate tabs, and shows visual previews of previously visited pages when a user searches history with phrases such as “running shoes I looked at last week.” Mozilla said beta users reported the tool helped them maintain their train of thought, and it plans future updates adding Chrome-like surfacing of recent browsing journeys and AI-powered form autofill.

Smart Window remains an opt-in beta feature, Mozilla said. It is available in English for users in the United States and Canada. The feature evolved from ‘AI Window,’ first introduced last November as a browsing mode for searching open tabs and history in natural language. Ajit Varma, head of Firefox, told The Verge that there is no precise date for leaving beta. He described Mozilla’s approach as ‘agnostic,’ offering AI to those who want it without forcing it on everyone. “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 said. In a separate statement reported by SiliconANGLE, he added: “The browser already has much of the context around what you’re trying to do — the research in your tabs, the pages you’ve visited, the things you’ve found along the way. With Smart Window, we’re exploring how to make more of that context useful while keeping you in control.”

Users can choose which AI model powers Smart Window, including Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, OpenAI’s oss-gpt-120b, Alibaba’s Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507, or a local model, according to The Verge. Firefox AI senior staff product manager Steve Truong said third-party model providers operate under zero-data-retention contracts, and Mozilla itself does not retain user chats on servers without permission for model training, human review, or advertising. Varma said the choice of local and regional AI providers supports ‘digital sovereignty.’

Varma told The Verge that Mozilla wants to make it easy for people to configure Firefox as they see fit and that the company sees itself as a neutral party on the internet. He said the top navigation bar in Smart Window was added after users requested it.

SiliconANGLE’s report attributes the Exa partnership to Google, while The Verge says it is Mozilla’s arrangement. The two accounts otherwise describe the same update.