Firefox Gives Its AI Assistant Live Web Access and a Memory for Your Browsing History

Key points

• Firefox's Smart Window AI feature gained real-time web search on launch day through a partnership with Exa, a web-search company.
• Users can pick from four AI models, including options from Google, OpenAI, Alibaba, or a local model running entirely on their own device.
• Mozilla says all third-party AI providers work under zero-data-retention contracts, meaning your prompts are processed in memory and never stored.
• Smart Window remains an opt-in beta with no confirmed date to leave testing.
• Future updates will add AI-powered autofill for online forms and Chrome-style surfacing of recent browsing activity.

Firefox's built-in AI assistant just got two abilities that most browser AI tools lack: it can search the live web and dig through your own browsing history to find something you already looked at.

The feature is called Smart Window, a special mode inside Firefox that lets you ask questions about your open tabs or browser history using plain language. Until now, it worked mostly on the pages already open in front of you. Starting this week, it can also pull fresh information from the wider web, with source links shown inside the chat so you can check where the answer came from. We first covered Smart Window when Mozilla announced it on 18 August 2026.

What does the browsing-history search actually do?

It lets you describe a page from memory and Firefox finds it for you. Type something like "running shoes I looked at last week" and Smart Window sorts through your history, surfaces the relevant pages and shows thumbnail images pulled from those sites. It also suggests ways to group your open tabs and can spot and close duplicates.

That last detail is more useful than it sounds. Open dozens of tabs over a week and you'll almost certainly have the same page loaded twice. Smart Window can tidy that up automatically.

Mozilla says beta testers reported the feature helped them keep their train of thought when picking up research started earlier. The source links added to web results serve a similar purpose: if you remember something you read but can't recall where, the citation takes you straight back.

Who sees your chat history?

Nobody, by default. Steve Truong, Firefox AI senior staff product manager, told The Verge that every third-party company providing AI processing works under a zero-data-retention contract. Your questions are handled in active memory and then discarded. They're not stored, not used to train models, not used for advertising and not reviewed by human staff. Mozilla applies the same rule to its own servers unless a user gives explicit permission.

Users also choose which AI model processes their requests. The options are Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, OpenAI's oss-gpt-120b, Alibaba's Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507 (a large language model, the technology that powers chatbots like ChatGPT), or a local model running entirely on the user's own machine with no data leaving the device.

Mozilla's head of Firefox, Ajit Varma, framed the local-model option as a matter of "digital sovereignty," meaning the ability to keep your data under your own control rather than sending it to a company in another country. That framing matters more than it might seem: for anyone in a jurisdiction with different data laws, a local model is a practical shield, not just a preference.

Should ordinary Firefox users do anything right now?

Not unless you want to. Smart Window is still an opt-in beta. You have to turn it on deliberately, and Firefox added a dedicated AI Controls section in settings where you can switch off every AI feature in one step or choose which ones stay on. Nothing changes for users who do nothing.

If privacy is a priority once you do try it, the local-model option keeps everything on your own computer.

Common questions

Is Smart Window safe to use for sensitive searches?

Mozilla's contracts bar third-party providers from storing or reviewing your prompts, and the local-model option means nothing leaves your device. For anything genuinely sensitive, the local model is the safest choice.

When will Smart Window leave beta?

Mozilla hasn't set a public date. Varma told The Verge there's no "precise date" planned yet, so the feature will stay in opt-in testing for now.