Firefox’s AI Window Gets New Features Meant to Help You Stay on Task and Organized

Firefox’s AI-integrated Smart Window is getting a few new features meant to help people pick up their work right where they left off. The features, announced Tuesday, should make it easier to find answers, organize tabs together and see what you were working on earlier.

To make answers more readily available in Smart Window, Firefox is partnering with the AI company Exa as a search provider. This lets Smart Window pull current information from around the internet and it provides citations for that information. So you shouldn’t need to jump around in tabs looking for citations.

Firefox told CNET in a video call that a critical part of its doing business with Exa is that the company shares a lot of Firefox’s privacy principles, like a zero data retention policy.

“That is a red line for us to make sure [Smart Window is] as private as possible,” Ajit Varma, the head of Firefox, said.

Smart Window can also let you group tabs together so you can keep your research organized. So if you’re researching running shoes, for example, you can create a group that is all shoe-related tabs. Firefox told CNET that if you give Smart Window permission, it will use the content of the webpages to figure out related themes and group webpages accordingly. You can also manually add or remove tabs from groups.

In addition, Smart Window can easily show you the tabs you recently viewed. That way, if you’re clearing out tabs and accidentally close one that’s relevant to what you’re working on, you can ask the browser to show you the tabs you were looking at. What makes this different from a standard browser history log is that it shows you a snapshot of the webpage itself, as opposed to a URL and webpage name. So if you remember what the webpage looks like, you should be able to find it.

It’s important to note that Smart Window is not a replacement for the Firefox browser. According to Mozilla, Smart Window is an optional window type within Firefox.

“Smart Window is completely optional and opt-in,” Mozilla writes in the Smart Window privacy notice. “It builds on the classic Firefox experience (classic window) by using AI to enhance your browsing experience.”

For more on Firefox, here’s what to know about other AI features in the browser and what Mozilla’s CEO told CNET about its AI features.

Zachary McAuliffe

Senior writer

Zach began writing for CNET in November, 2021 after writing for a broadcast news station in his hometown, Cincinnati, for five years. You can usually find him hanging out with his wife, son and dog in their home.

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