Mozilla ships an AI window with a kill switch and an Exa search deal

Mozilla added three new AI features to Firefox’s opt-in Smart Window on August 18. They include web search from a startup called Exa, automatic tab grouping, and visual history previews.

The beta is available only in English for users in the U.S. and Canada.

Smart Window sits beside Classic and Private modes

Smart Window is a separate window in Firefox, next to the browser’s Classic and Private modes, where users can chat with an AI assistant while they browse.

Users can choose the model themselves and turn the feature off entirely. Firefox added a one-click AI kill switch earlier this year.

“In Firefox, you’ll never be locked into one ecosystem or have AI forced into your browsing experience. You decide when, how or whether to use it at all,” Mozilla said in its announcement.

Smart Window works only with the context a user chooses to hand over, such as open tabs and relevant history. Those permissions are located in the AI Controls panel in Firefox, which also includes a switch to disable Smart Window.

Smart Window now accesses live information from the web. It shows the sources for an answer directly, avoiding a separate results page, due to a new collaboration with Exa, an AI search and web-retrieval company.

Smart Window proposes groups of related tabs and marks duplicate tabs, so a user can close them with a single click.

The third feature has to do with memory. A user types in a natural-language prompt, for example, “running shoes I looked at last week.”

Then Smart Window surfaces visual previews of pages from browsing history so that the right one is easier to spot without opening each tab.

“The browser already has much of the context around what you’re trying to do,” said Ajit Varma, Head of Firefox. “With Smart Window, we’re exploring how to make more of that context useful while keeping you in control.”

AI Window became Smart Window after months of testing

Last November, Mozilla debuted an early concept, “AI Window,” then spent months watching how testers interacted with it and factoring in their feedback. The assistant was used for common tasks such as search and navigation.

Next up on the roadmap is surfacing recent browsing journeys and stitching related tabs and history together so a user has a starting point when returning to an unfinished task.

Mozilla is also looking at how Smart Window could assist in completing online forms. Both features use the same permission model.

There are now AI-focused browsers like Perplexity’s Comet, Microsoft’s Copilot-powered Edge, and Opera Neon. OpenAI closed its Atlas browser to work on a larger app. Brave built its LEO assistant with Anthropic as a privacy-first option.

Google controls more than 63% of the global browser market, according to Cloudflare figures cited by Cryptopolitan. It has already wired its Gemini models into Chrome for U.S. desktop users.

Mark Surman, president of the Mozilla Foundation, has said the group intends to let users decide which AI model to hook up to Firefox.

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