Firefox’s Smart Window promises a better AI browser
The Verge Stevie Bonifield ● Covered by 2 sources
Firefox's Smart Window can now search the live web and cite sources in chat, thanks to a partnership with Exa. It also finds old tabs by describing them in plain English.
Based on reporting by The Verge, Stevie Bonifield — read the original for the full story.
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Mozilla just made Firefox's experimental Smart Window a little more useful, and a little less of a closed box. Starting today, the AI browsing mode can reach out to the current web instead of just reasoning over whatever it already knows, and it will show source links right in the chat responses. That capability comes from a new partnership with Exa, a search company handling the retrieval side of things.
The more interesting update, though, is what Smart Window does with your own browsing history. Type something like "running shoes I looked at last week" and it will dig through the tabs you've had open, sort out the relevant ones, and surface visual previews pulled straight from the pages you visited. I watched a live demo of this, and the effect is closer to describing a memory to a friend than typing a search query into a box.
Smart Window is also getting smarter about tab management, which for a lot of people is the actual daily pain point. It can now suggest tab groups on its own, and as part of that cleanup it will find and close duplicate tabs — the kind that pile up after a week of forgetting you already have three copies of the same article open.
None of this reinvents what an AI browser is supposed to do, but it does close a gap that made earlier AI chat features feel disconnected from the way people actually browse. Search that understands your own history in natural language, paired with sourced answers instead of confident guesses, is a modest but real step forward for a feature that's still very much in progress.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Sourced answers and natural-language history search sound small, but they're the difference between an AI browsing feature people actually trust and one they quietly stop using after the novelty wears off. Auto-closing duplicate tabs is the kind of unglamorous fix that will win over more regular users than any flashy chat demo. Mozilla clearly knows its audience cares about transparency, and tying answers to visible sources is a smart way to earn goodwill in a space where plenty of AI tools still just make things up.
Read more about this at: The Verge