Mozilla is pushing Firefox’s AI browsing mode further into useful territory, adding live web results with citations through a partnership with Exa, plus some genuinely clever history recall. The Smart Window beta can now surface visual previews of pages you visited when you search your browsing history in plain English — ask for “running shoes I looked at last week” and it pulls up images from those sites, not just text links. It will also suggest tab groups and automatically close duplicate tabs, which addresses a real pain point for anyone who lives with dozens of open tabs.
The citations are the headline feature here. Instead of the AI inventing answers or presenting fresh search results, it’s sorting through what you’ve already seen and linking back to sources from the live web. Mozilla’s blog post frames this as a way to help you check answers or find your place again, especially when you remember what was on a page but not which page it was. Beta users reportedly said it helped them maintain their train of thought — a claim I’d want to test myself, because AI recall features often sound better in demos than they feel in daily use.
Mozilla’s positioning is aggressively different from Chrome’s. Ajit Varma, Firefox’s head, took a direct shot at Google in an interview with The Verge: “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.” Firefox, he insists, is taking an “agnostic” approach. The model picker reflects that — users can choose Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, OpenAI’s oss-gpt-120b, Alibaba’s Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507, or run a local model entirely. That last option is the interesting one. Browser-based local AI has been talked about for years without really landing, but Firefox making it a first-class option is a meaningful step toward what Varma calls “digital sovereignty.”
Privacy is the other pillar. Product manager Steve Truong said all third-party models operate under zero-data-retention contracts — prompts are processed in memory and nothing is stored for training, advertising, or human review. Mozilla also says it doesn’t retain user chats on its own servers without permission. That’s the right stance, and it’s verifiable in a way that most AI privacy promises aren’t. The feature remains opt-in beta with no launch date, and Mozilla added an AI Controls section in settings so users can disable everything or pick and choose. Future updates include Chrome-style recent browsing journeys and AI-powered form autofill. The question is whether a privacy-first, model-agnostic approach can win over users who’ve already defaulted to whatever Chrome ships.
