Smart Window Beta Feedback

[laustin]

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.

[Agentvirtuel]

Hello

Have you tried
1 - Go to configuration editor https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-config-editor-firefox
2 - Enter a search term browser.smartwindow.enabled
You can double-click on the preference to set the value to true

[Kiyoka221]

Adding a voice input mode instead of having to type everything would be helpful.

[ByronTheBulb]

Hello, thank you for this new feature

I have a few things I'd like to report.

1. I'm using vertical tabs. When the vertical tab bar is pinned open, it respects the colour theme of the smart window interface but when it's not pinned open, it immediately changes colour and does not follow the smart window theme anymore. That does not look good since the theme should be unified.

2. when I resize the ask bar in my preferred width the position is not remembered, I have to resize it every time I restart the browser. Is there a way that it stays in my preferred width? 

3. I understand why you choose to give this feature a distinct theme in order to clearly separate it from the default Firefox experience and avoid any confusion. However I would appreciate an option to use the same theme that I'm using everywhere else in Firefox. Or allow some sort of personalisation where the user could choose the colour of the smart window user interface. Personally I would turn it the same colour with my normal Firefox.

4. Everytime I restart the browser my default home page appears with the smart window side bar open on the right side. Only on a new tab the all new interface with the search in the middle of the screen appears. Is this normal behaviour or there is something wrong?

Thank you very much for exploring this as a feature. As AI is being more and more integrated in modern browsers, Firefox should definitely offer a private version otherwise it will fall behind. I'm looking forward to use this feature as it evolves and matures.    

[orderofthetriad]

"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." ok, but you're never going to get the accuracy for it to be "genuinely helpful," true AGI is a fantasy on the level of the philosopher's stone, it is an entirely theoretical, logistically impossible concept. The AI will confidently give incorrect information and saying "but this is very much a work in progress," should not legally cover your butt from the consequences of AI- for example- giving someone a recipe that causes botulism, or telling someone to clean something using chemicals which combined makes mustard gas.

AI has literally encouraged people to kill themselves- do you really want to risk it being YOUR browser bought to court by grieving parents of a dead kid? You must all know that's happened, so why not mention- if you truly want to be transparent- what guardrails you've put in to prevent that?

"This is still early, and we know AI in browsers raises real questions around trust, usefulness, and control." yes it does, which makes it all the more confounding that mozilla is pushing this forward. Acknowledging that people are skeptical about it doesn't make mozilla adopting it any less sketchy. It instead makes it seem like a direct, intentional slap in the face to the people who've repeatedly expressed they're sick of AI being forced into every conceivable crevice of tech use. Like a land acknowledgment from an oil company putting a pipeline through a reservation. Or like a land acknowledgment from an AI company putting a noxious, loud, polluting data center in the middle of a neighborhood against the will of its residents. 

"oh you don't have to use it, we're keeping it separate, we're following your preferences," but the resources you spend on AI are consequentially resources you are not dedicating to making your browser work. You've been bleeding DAU for years, providing a truly AI-free browser would differentiate you from other browsers, instead of copying more successful competitors whom you're delusional to think you could gain users from. If people with the competitor like what the competitor's doing, they're going to stay with the competitor so doing what they're doing will not gain you DAU. Meanwhile people who are against AI have less and less and less options for AI-free tech, being AI-free would set you apart and draw in a demographic desperate to be catered to. But some investor threw money at you to make AI work and give them a pay day I'm guessing? They're never seeing that pay day. 

And going through this thread, it's riddled with blatant usability issues. Is the work you need to put in for this actually worth it? Where are you getting the money for this? How much of mozilla's full budget is being dedicated to this? Why do you think this free AI feature is a financially viable idea when literally none of the AI companies that are charging for AI are making a profit on it? AI is a tech being held up by the dreams and cash of investors who don't understand what the hell they're doing and see something new and shiny and promising and think if they throw they're money at it it'll pay out big time. It won't. Like when I called AGI the philosopher's stone I meant it, alchemists literally used to get paid to try and create philosopher's stone. Same nonsense, different century. 

I just don't understand why mozilla is throwing time, money, effort, labor into making a product that will literally never work as promised and has such risk to it. AI is a massive economic bubble, is mozilla going to survive it popping? 

[BelFox]

• Just upgraded to FF 152.0.4
• The release notes mentioned improvements to Smart Window, which hasn't been rolled out in my region yet.
• I decided to give it a go and enabled Smart Window via about:config (browser.smartwindow.enabled = TRUE)
• The first thing I see is a new button in the toolbar.
• I switched to "Smart Window" using the button.
• The first thing I need to do is log in (in a Classic Window) using my Mozilla account.
• I read the Privacy Statement, which is informative but contains a lot of information that I would prefer to see in the onboarding process.
• It is unclear to me why I need to log in to my Mozilla account in the first place? Why can't I use this without an account? And why should I log in using a non-Smart Window? Wasn't Smart Window supposed to be something distinctly separate from Classic Windows?  -> A lot of questions pop up, eroding my trust from the very start ...
• The Privacy Statement mentions "Memories", based on browsing history in both Classic and Smart Windows. New questions arise: why does it use history from non-Smart Windows? When is my browsing history sent to build Memories? From the very moment I press the button? I don't want that! Only after I have clearly approved uploading my browsing history? And where is my browser history going? (apparently to Mozilla servers, but people will assume it goes directly to LLM providers' servers). 

My first impression:
even though I'm eager to try Smart Windows, there are too many obstacles and concerns holding me back from even trying it (and I have a high level of trust in Mozilla!). I certainly appreciate the detailed and informative Privacy Statement, but how many users will read it? My first trial ended straight away on the Mozilla Account login screen ...

My suggestion:
the onboarding process needs significant improvement. It should be clear what happens to my browsing history at each stage. I don't want it to start uploading my history in the background without a clear notice beforehand. That would result in an immediate breach of trust for me and thousands of Firefox users! It should explain upfront how Memories are built, and where they are stored. Memories should only be built after explicit user approval and with the option to include/exclude previous browsing history.

More feedback will follow if you earn my trust to activate Smart Window.

[thegyanipintu]

Sometimes, the agent or the underlying code for the search box that handles sending over the query to the AI model or open it as a URL is getting confused. Can we have the open url button below the search bar and have a keyboard shortcut for it, like Cmd/Ctrl+Enter or something?

[erickc947]

I’ve encountered a frustrating workflow issue with how Smart Window handles searches. Whenever I use the Smart Window in its own tab to search for something, it automatically opens the results in my other currently active tab. This overwrites the page I was already reading or working on, which disrupts my workflow. Ideally, if I open a new tab for the Smart Window and initiate a search, the results should either load within that same tab or open in a completely new tab to preserve the chat.

[Ying_ck]

In Classic Mode, the AI shortcut still appears when text is selected, but it cannot be clicked or used, regardless of
whether the feature is enabled. The toggle only takes effect after switching to Smart Window.

Also, when using a custom API, even if I specify a custom model name, it still attempts to use models such as gemini-
3.1-flash-lite, which are not supported by my configured API endpoint. It also automatically uses Mistral for
searches, which often results in long waits. I hope separate toggles can be added to control these behaviors.

Finally, when I ask a question in the right sidebar, the browser automatically navigates to a search engine results
page. This forces me to manually return to the previous page and may cause form data to be lost.

Version: 156.0a1 (2026-08-13) (64-bit)
Operating system: Windows 11 25H2

[fizzyfrys]

I just tried it out and I quite like it, but some suggestions I would make:

- Let us choose between the smart window theme vs our add-on themes. I really love my add-on theme, and not being able to use it with smart window sucks. 

- Add vision / image processing to the chat window. I often take screenshots and upload them (paste from clipboard) to chats, and not being able to do that in this without doing some hacky thing like opening the image in a new tab would be appreciated. This feature is missing from google chrome's browser ai as well, so it'd be a nice feature to set smart window apart too.
File uploading in general would also be great.

- I'm sure this has already been considered, but feature parity to google chrome's auto-browse would be incredible, especially with a local model!

- I haven't tested the local model feature yet, but if multiple local models could be added, with a toggle in the settings to disable or enable each of the cloud or local models that'd be nice. 
Also earlier about the mozilla account requirement to use smart window--if only local models are configured, then I feel that should be a simple way to bypass the requirement at least for now.


Thanks for adding this, it seems to have been very thoughtfully implemented into the browser while considering aspects like privacy and not forcing cloud / AI on everyone. 

[Jon]

Hey all, 

Thanks for your active participation and discussion here — lots of really great feedback!

Just wanted to jump in here real quick and let you all know that the team has shared some updates on Smart Window in a new post here on Connect: 

What’s new in Smart Window 

Please feel free to check it out and join the discussion 🙌

[cadwellm]

I just tried Smart Window on Firefox version 154.00 for the first time.

1. It turned my browser lavender and I couldn't get the theme _I WANT TO USE_ to work.
2. I opened a new tab, typed something in the Smart Window field, hit Enter...and it took me to Google Search.

Basically it took a few more clicks to get me to Google Search....when I could do that with fewer clicks without using the Smart Window!

So, what's the point in having it anyway????

I turned it off and won't be using it. And my theme was restored.

Smart Window is basically Maxwell Smart in a lavender suit. At least Get Smart was semi-funny.
The only thing Smart Window has going for it is... ... ...hold on, I'm trying to think of something...anything...

[lolrepeatlol]

Really interesting beta, but I have a specific piece of feedback:

IMO, the Smart Bar is almost aggravating to deal with because it doesn't deterministically choose between when to search and when to ask. This is incredibly confusing as a user and slows me down because I have to check what it'll choose before pressing "enter."

In practice, if I type and have a basic query like "Command A+" (which chooses Ask first for whatever reason), I would expect this to search the web so I could find information on this Cohere model. Instead, I get something like: 

"Command A+ is not a recognized Firefox feature or setting. Did you mean one of these?

• Smart Window features like managing memories or tab groups?
• Firefox keyboard shortcuts (e.g., Ctrl+A for select all)?
• A custom command or extension you installed?"

The worst part is if I say "search" after, it continues being confused, like: "what would you like to search for?"

There should be some option for deterministic behavior instead. I would like something like:
- Enter: Searches the web.
- Shift+Enter: Asks the AI assistant.

Also: Because the AI assistant takes the place of an address bar, the assistant should also be smart enough to just search the web with Exa when it's confused, instead of giving what is essentially a useless answer. It should search the web by default.

[ordinary_user]

In order to use Smart Window as a default for new windows and new tabs, it should offer all of the features of Classic Window.  This includes Widgets, Shortcuts, Stories, Support Firefox, Recent Activity, Wallpaper, and Logo.  (A given user would not necessarily want all of these features, but the options should be the same.)

Settings > AI controls > Smart Window > Smart Window settings could have options similar to Settings > Home and startup > Homepage and > Firefox Home.  One of the options under Homepage for Smart Window could be "same as Classic Window Home".

As it is now, if a user has Smart Window as a default, and wants these features in a particular new window or tab, they have to keep switching back to Classic Window.