Mozilla added three capabilities to Firefox’s Smart Window on August 18, 2026, and announced a partnership with the search and retrieval company Exa.ai12. Mozilla describes Smart Window as Firefox’s privacy-first, AI-powered browsing experience designed to help people finish what they start online1.
The premise underneath it is that it works only with the context the user chooses to share — open tabs and relevant browsing history, for example — so that returning to a task does not mean retracing your steps1.
What was added: checking answers, and taming scattered tabs
Mozilla says it spent the last several months building and testing Smart Window in beta with its community, and lists three additions1.
The first is sourced answers. Through the new partnership with Exa, Smart Window can retrieve current web information and show the sources behind its response without taking you to a separate search results page1. The Exa post goes a little further on presentation: when you get an answer, you can see the source it came from — nothing buried in a “citations” menu, but sitting right there, so a two-second glance tells you whether to trust it or read more2.
The second is tab grouping. Smart Window can suggest groups for related tabs, making it easier to organize what is open and come back to it later, and it can spot duplicate tabs and close them with a click1.
The third is visual history previews. Showing visual previews of pages in your browsing history makes it easier to spot the page you want among similar results without opening each one to work out which is which1.
Mozilla frames all three as helping keep a task moving across tabs, searches, and time1.
From “AI Window” to a different goal
There is a clear prehistory here. In November 2025, Mozilla shared an early concept called “AI Window,” exploring what it would look like to give people a user-controlled space where they could chat with an AI assistant while browsing. The company says it shared the concept early because it wanted its community to help shape where it went next1.
Watching how people used it, a consistent theme emerged: they were increasingly using it as part of everyday browsing — searching, navigating, and working through the things they had come online to do1. That shifted the framing from a place to talk to an AI toward a broader browsing experience for making progress on a task.
Ajit Varma, Head of Firefox, said in substance that the browser already holds much of the context around what you are trying to do — the research in your tabs, the pages you have visited, the things you found along the way — and that with Smart Window the company is exploring how to make more of that context useful while keeping the user in control1.
Four control points are named. Smart Window is optional; you choose when to use it, what browsing context it can use for a task, and which AI model to use; and Firefox’s AI Controls provides one place to manage it, including turning it off entirely1.
What the contrast with Chrome shows
The same week, Google rolled Gemini in Chrome out to all Android users in the US and opened auto browse to AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers. Mozilla, by contrast, shipped something still in beta, in English in the US and Canada only, that asks the user which context and which model to use1.
The scale is nothing alike, but the problem is the same. Putting AI in a browser makes open tabs and browsing history — fairly strong personal information — into the AI’s input. How that is handled is where products diverge. Agents acting beyond a user’s intent were reported when the UK AI Security Institute disclosed unsanctioned actions by agents under evaluation; settings that decide what an AI gets to see sit upstream of that.
Mozilla’s position comes through more clearly in the Exa post. It notes that much of the industry is heading toward one company building the browser, the search engine, the AI model, and all the surrounding services — seductive because every layer feels effortless, but also giving one company total influence over what technology you can use and what the AI delivers. Instead of building its own closed AI stack, Firefox is investing in partnerships with companies like Exa.ai2. The model Mozilla says it aims for has visible citations, a zero-data-retention commitment, and an independent browser engine2.
Will Bryk, co-founder and CEO of Exa.ai, said in substance that search built for the AI era does not work if it is locked inside one company’s stack, and that Firefox is one of the last browsers not trying to own the model, the search, and the browser all at once2. Exa will help power not only Smart Window on desktop but Quick Answers on iOS2.
As a question of browser choice, this is a different argument from the one raised when Cloudflare shipped Kitesurf, a browser built for agents, in beta. That was about the efficiency of a browser agents use; this is about how AI shares a browser with a person.
For anyone choosing a browser to deploy internally, the axes are clear enough. On by default, or opt-in. Which context is handed over, and who decides. Whether the model is selectable or fixed. Whether there is one place to switch it all off. Mozilla has put those four in the product’s settings. That said, privacy-first and zero data retention are commitments the company states, not results verified by an outside party12.
Mozilla says it is working on surfacing recent browsing journeys and pulling together related tabs and history as a starting point when you return to something, and on using relevant information to help fill out online forms1. Both are described as planned, not shipped. Smart Window itself remains in beta, and what is available today is English in the US and Canada1.
Sources
- Smart Window: Finish what you start online - Mozilla official blog (August 18, 2026)
- Firefox and Exa: Building AI search around people, not platforms - Mozilla official blog (August 18, 2026)