Mozilla Evolves Smart Window in Firefox Ahead of General Release

Mozilla announced several new features for Smart Windows in Firefox today and it has even bigger plans for the future.

“Smart Window is Firefox’s privacy-first, AI-powered browsing experience designed to help people finish what they start online,” the Mozilla announcement explains. “It works with the context you choose to share, such as your open tabs and relevant browsing history, so you can get back to what you were doing without retracing your steps.”

Mozilla announced Smart Window (originally called AI Window) last November, and it’s been refining this optional new way to access AI capabilities in Firefox ever since. As Mozilla head of Firefox Ajit Varna told me this past March, Smart Windows works like the Firefox Private Window feature in that it’s a “one-way door to AI” that lets you access AI functionality without giving your browser context to the AI.

Smart Window has been in beta since the beginning of the summer, and now Mozilla is adding some new features based on feedback. These include:

Get answers without leaving the page. Mozilla is partnering with Exa, the makers of a web search service that’s built for the AI era, to power search in Smart Window in Firefox on the desktop and in Quick Answers in Firefox on the iPhone and iPad, providing users with a way to get current, source-backed answers without leaving the page they’re viewing.

Suggested tab groups. Smart Window will now suggests groups for related tabs, and it can spot and remove duplicate tabs with a single click.

Visual previews. Smart Window will now show visual previews of pages in your browsing history so you can more easily find the exact page you wish to return to.

In the near future, Mozilla will add other features to Smart Window, including surfacing recent browsing activities and related tabs and history so you can pick up where you left off, and a way for Smart Window to help you fill out web forms without needing to re-enter the same information over and over again.

Smart Window is optional, and the user can choose to use it or not, pick the browsing context it can use to help with tasks, and even pick the AI model, and this is all handled in the new AI controls interface in Firefox settings. The feature is still in beta, however, and available to Firefox users in English in the U.S. and Canada. You can learn more and join the waitlist if it’s not available in your locale on the Firefox website.