Firefox Smart Window to Add Real-Time Source Links to AI Answers

Starting today, Mozilla is rolling out an update to Smart Window, Firefox's AI browsing mode, that includes this feature. Through a partnership with real-time web search service Exa, AI chat answers now pull in up-to-date web information alongside source links, and searching history in natural language brings up visual previews of the pages visited.

Letting AI Handle Tab Cleanup

Smart Window analyzes open tabs and proposes grouping them, and in the process identifies and closes duplicate tabs. As the number of open tabs piles up, it becomes easy to lose track of what matters — this feature is designed to hand that cleanup task over to AI instead of the user.

In a blog post announcing the update, Mozilla said the feature helps users relocate answers or pick up where they left off, even when they can't remember a page's title but vaguely recall its content. The company said beta users reported that the feature was useful for maintaining work context. Future updates are expected to add a Chrome-like feature showing a recent browsing journey at a glance, as well as AI-powered auto-fill for online forms.

Smart Window first launched last year as a browsing mode called "AI Window." Its early core feature was natural-language search across open tabs or browser history. Mozilla later added a new AI Controls section in settings, letting users turn off all AI features or selectively enable only the ones they want. This latest update is an extension of that ongoing effort. Smart Window remains an opt-in beta, and Firefox General Manager Ajit Varma told The Verge in an interview that there is "no exact date" yet for when the beta will end.

How to Use It

Smart Window is an opt-in feature that can be turned on or off from the AI Controls menu in Firefox settings. Here's how it works:

1. Open the AI Controls section in Firefox settings and enable Smart Window.
2. Open a new Smart Window and summon the AI chat panel from the top navigation bar.
3. Ask a question that requires up-to-date web information, and the Exa integration will return an answer along with source links.
4. Search history using natural language phrases like "that [item] I saw last week," and image previews of the relevant pages will appear.
5. When too many tabs pile up, Smart Window automatically suggests groupings and flags duplicate tabs to help with cleanup.
6. In settings, choose which AI model to use: Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, OpenAI's oss-gpt-120b, Alibaba's Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507, or a local AI.

For example, even if you can't remember the title of a shopping page you visited a few days ago, typing just "the running shoes I was looking at" is enough to find it again, and AI groups multiple open research tabs by topic without requiring manual sorting.

Model Choice and Privacy Policy

Item	Detail
Available models	Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, oss-gpt-120b, Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507, local AI
Data retention	Zero-data-retention agreement; data processed in memory during inference and not stored
Server storage	Chats are not stored on Mozilla servers without user permission
Approach	Model-agnostic, offered as a choice rather than a mandate

Steve Truong, Firefox's senior AI product manager, explained that third-party model providers process user prompts only in memory and do not store them for training, advertising, or human review. Mozilla itself said it does not retain chats on its servers without user permission. Varma said that allowing users to choose local AI or region-based AI providers is meant to ensure "digital sovereignty."

Editor's Take

One line from Varma's interview with The Verge sums up the direction of this update: they didn't build the browser to get people to visit Wikipedia more often — they built it to generate more LLM queries. Here, "they" refers to Chrome. What Mozilla is trying to do with Smart Window is the opposite — keep AI as a tool that assists the browsing experience rather than one that replaces the browser itself.

This framing lines up precisely with the current trend in browser AI competition. Google expanded Gemini Spark to more than 160 countries including Korea on July 30, pitching automated Chrome navigation as a core feature, and startups like Utori and Nous Research's Hermes are rushing out their own browser-manipulating agents. While everyone else competes over how much AI can act "on its own" inside the browser, Mozilla alone is asking a different question — can AI be useful without taking over the browser?

Trying the approach firsthand makes the difference clear. Chrome and many AI browser extensions tend to keep pushing new search results, turning the browser into a chat window, whereas what Smart Window emphasizes is a "memory assist" function that helps you find what you've already seen. The running-shoe search demo is compelling not because it's flashy, but because it precisely targets a frustration people actually run into often in browsers — not being able to find a page they've already visited.

For domestic companies and dev teams, two things about this update are worth watching closely. One is model choice. Being able to pick between Google, OpenAI, and Alibaba models within a single browser — and switch to local AI — gives practical grounds for considering an AI adoption strategy that isn't locked into a single vendor. The other is the condition of a zero-data-retention agreement. For browsing environments that handle internal documents or customer information, whether such contractual terms are actually honored will become a key criterion for future adoption decisions.

The fact that Smart Window remains a beta without even a firm release date shows this experiment is still a work in progress. In the coming weeks, features like a Chrome-style recent browsing journey view and AI auto-fill forms are expected to arrive, offering the next signal of how far Mozilla will push its "decentralized AI browser" path.