Hi everyone,
We’re starting an early test of Smart Window in Firefox and wanted to create a place to gather feedback.
If you’re here from Firefox and already have access to Smart Window, please tell us what’s working, what isn’t, and what you’d want next. If you’re visiting this post and don’t see Smart Window in Firefox yet, that’s expected: we’re starting by inviting a small number of waitlist users. You can sign up for the waitlist here: https://www.firefox.com/en-US/smart-window/?view=waitlist
First, and most important: the Firefox you already know isn’t changing. Your regular and private browsing windows work exactly as they do today.
Smart Window is a separate, optional window in Firefox where you can interact with an AI assistant of your choice while you browse, intended to think with you, not for you. It’s designed to help you:
- Stay in your flow: summarize what you’re reading, ask questions, and get help without bouncing between tabs and tools
- Work across tabs: compare information and organize what you’re looking at while researching or planning.
A few things we want to be clear about:
- Fully optional: the Smart Window assistant lives in its own window, and requires signing up using a Firefox Account
- You’re in control: you decide if and when to use it, and what context it can access
- Transparent by design: it shows what information it’s using, like your current session or history, and you can toggle that on or off
- No lock-in: you can choose between models or bring your own
- Built on Firefox’s privacy foundation: we don’t sell your data or track where you go, and conversations aren’t retained
- Respects Firefox AI Controls: if you’ve chosen to limit AI features, Smart Window won’t override those settings
This is still early, and we know AI in browsers raises real questions around trust, usefulness, and control. We’re trying to build this in a way that’s transparent and genuinely helpful in day-to-day browsing, but this is very much a work in progress.
Because this post is public, not everyone reading it will have access yet. That’s okay. General thoughts are welcome, and hands-on feedback from people using Smart Window in Firefox right now will be especially helpful as we improve it.
Thanks for helping shape where this goes.
Thanks for the feedback.
Trying to reproduce the lag, and I may just not be as fast as you! I'll file that issue; it's entirely possible that the Smartbar input is introducing some latency that we need to address.
Broad agreement that the current New Tab experience in Smart Window needs to be improved.
The question of "default to AI" in Smart Window is an interesting one. Generally we are treating Smart Window as a place to be consciously more AI forward. That said, we're trying to balance that posture against the backdrop of the wide variety of experiences that a browser needs to support.
Today, the Smartbar has a local language model that attempts to classify user input as appropriate either for navigation (e.g. resolve a url), traditional web search (via your preferred default engine), and AI chat. You can override this decision by using this action picker:
When adding a new tab, it drops the toolbar from the new tab page. Prefer keeping it there to access my shortcuts.
Also, as mentioned by others, the smart window popping up is very aggressive. I use my mouse shortcut to open up links in a new tab often and it will have the smart window enabled. Prefer to to enable when I need it and not automatically.
I have my mouse programmed to open a link into a new tab in the background with the scroll wheel button. I'll use that to create new tabs from links I come across in that article that I want to reference later.
When I go over to the new tab, the smart window on the right is automatically opened.
