Firefox Smart Window searches history, adds AI citations in beta

Type “running shoes I looked at last week” into Firefox, and Smart Window can sort through selected links in your browsing history, then bring back visual previews from the pages you visited. Mozilla’s AI browsing mode is now adding current web information and source links to its chat answers through a partnership with Exa. The feature is available as an opt-in beta.

The change is less about asking an AI to discover something new than about finding your way back to something you already saw. Smart Window can suggest tab groups, spot duplicate tabs and help close them. Mozilla says the system is designed for moments when a user remembers what a page contained but not which page it was.

Firefox is also leaving the choice of AI model with the user. Smart Window can use Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, OpenAI’s oss-gpt-120b, Alibaba’s Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507 or a local model. Firefox’s settings now include an AI Controls section where users can disable all AI features or select only the ones they want.

The privacy promise is specific but still comes from Mozilla and its product team. Firefox AI senior staff product manager Steve Truong said the models are covered by zero-data-retention contracts: providers process prompts in memory and do not store them for training, advertising or human review. Mozilla says it does not retain chats without user permission for model training, human review or advertising.

So what changes in practice? For people shopping or juggling many open tabs, the immediate benefit is less time retracing steps and cleaning up browser clutter. The feature is not yet a finished product: Mozilla has not set a precise date for leaving beta. Future updates are expected to surface recent browsing journeys and add AI-powered form autofill.