Firefox's Smart Window AI mode adds live web search

Mozilla said on August 19, 2026 that Firefox's Smart Window, its opt-in AI browsing mode, can now search the live web and show source links directly inside chat answers, through a new partnership with search company Exa. The update also adds automatic tab-group suggestions and visual previews of previously visited pages when users search their browsing history in natural language. The features are rolling out first in the Firefox beta channel on macOS and Windows, according to Mozilla and to hands-on testing by ZDNET.

Live search with citations, and smarter tabs

Before this update, Smart Window's AI chat leaned mainly on what a user had already browsed or on general knowledge baked into the underlying model. With the Exa partnership, the assistant can now fetch current information from the open web and attach source links to its answers, similar to citation-backed AI search products. Mozilla head of Firefox Ajit Varma told The Verge that the goal is to keep Firefox 'user-first' rather than turning the browser into a tool built mainly to drive more chat queries.

The tab-group suggestions work automatically in the background: Smart Window groups related open tabs by topic and can identify and close duplicate tabs, according to The Verge's report on a live Mozilla demo. ZDNET's hands-on testing, done on Firefox 153 beta on macOS Tahoe, confirmed the feature runs without noticeably slowing the browser down, and found it did not yet appear on Firefox Nightly builds for Linux at the time of testing.

Searching your own browsing history in plain language

The history search lets users type a natural-language query, such as looking up 'running shoes I looked at last week,' and Smart Window surfaces matching pages along with visual previews pulled from the sites originally browsed, The Verge reported after seeing a live demo. In a blog post announcing the update, Mozilla said this is meant to help users retrace a page they remember by its content even when they cannot recall which site it came from, and that beta testers reported it helped them keep their train of thought while researching.

• Live web search with source links in chat answers, powered by a partnership with Exa
• Automatic tab-group suggestions that can also spot and close duplicate tabs
• Natural-language search across browsing history, with visual page previews
• Choice of AI model per chat, including Google Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, OpenAI gpt-oss-120b, and Alibaba Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507, or a local model
• A dedicated AI Controls settings section to turn features on or off individually

Model choice, privacy terms, and what is still missing

Smart Window lets users pick which AI model answers their chats, choosing among Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, OpenAI's gpt-oss-120b, Alibaba's Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507, or a locally run model. Varma told The Verge this is meant to support 'digital sovereignty,' letting people choose regional providers instead of relying only on large US tech companies. Firefox AI senior staff product manager Steve Truong said the third-party models are used under a 'zero-data-retention contract,' meaning providers process prompts in memory without storing them for training, advertising, or human review, and that Mozilla itself does not retain chat data on its servers without user permission.

Smart Window remains an opt-in beta with no fixed date for general release, Varma said. It began last year under the name 'AI Window,' offering natural-language search across open tabs and browsing history before this expansion. Mozilla says future updates will add Chrome-style surfacing of recent browsing journeys and AI-assisted autofill for online forms. ZDNET's review noted the biggest gap for some users switching browsers is still the lack of a built-in Workspaces feature to organize tabs into separate profiles, something competitors Opera and Vivaldi already offer.

For US users and developers weighing AI-integrated browsers from Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity, Smart Window gives Firefox a citation-backed live search option built on a stated zero-data-retention policy for third-party models, plus the ability to run a local model entirely instead. That combination of model choice, cited web answers, and granular AI Controls settings gives privacy-conscious users and developers building on the open-source browser a concrete alternative to evaluate against Chrome's and Edge's more tightly integrated AI assistants, though the feature's usefulness for daily tab and history management will depend on how it performs once it leaves beta.