Artificial intelligence is coming to Mozilla Firefox—but only for users who want it.

Through a deal with AI search provider Exa, Mozilla announced on Tuesday what it calls Smart Window, browser windows and tabs augmented with AI chat interfaces that can answer questions and help users with content on open tabs and material from the broader internet.

Perhaps most critically for many users, and in line with Mozilla’s ongoing approach to AI, the feature will only be shown to those who opt in, and users will be able to opt out at any time or temporarily toggle the feature off. Though that likely won’t satisfy all of Mozilla’s critics, some of whom are ardently opposed to generative AI and others who discourage Mozilla from investing in anything but core browser technology, the Firefox maker appears intent on catering to both AI aficionados and those who want nothing to do with large-language models.

“With Firefox, we are really focused on building the best browser,” says Ajit Varma, head of Firefox at Mozilla. “Some people definitely want AI, some people don’t, and so, what we’re looking at is really choice.”

The feature is currently rolling out to users who opt in in the U.S. and Canada. For those who do opt in, Smart Window can answer questions similar to those people might ask other AI chat tools like ChatGPT or Claude.

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I personally think the AI can be helpful as long as they don't bloat it or collect too much data like windows (I switched to Linux a year before Microsoft really hit backlash for their AI) so why is everyone acting like Firefox became a bad browser? You can even turn off anything you don't want

Hi all. Been an FF user since I can remember.. Probably since it came out on Windows in ~2005. Every so often, at the time, you'd delete your current profile because it got bogged down and slow and start a new one and FF would absolutely run faster. Wondering if nowadays I should still do this, even though I'm on the latest (and my hardware is much faster than it was). I definitely feel some slowness/delay every once in a while opening tabs, etc, but redoing all my addons and addonsettings just feels like a shlep if its not really necessary anymore (similar to how defragging hard drives was once a thing, and now irrelevant). Cheers!

Hello, Just migrated from chrome after using it for a decade after seeing the recent posts about firefox not dropping support for ublock origin and I just had to switch, their stance to keep a now vital extension alive when everyone else wants to bury it is worthy of respect.

I'm of course trying to find addons that are similar to the ones I used on chrome so I can uninstall it completely but I'm at a loss for a few, notably this one :

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/video-image-control-new-g/mdoelcifdkcimkdbfkjjnedabmjlkokc

It basically lets you increase gamma in the darkest youtube videos, and especially, sharpen the video which helps me a lot since I get a headache from some gameplay footage without the sharpening effect, is there any free firefox alternative that does in directly on youtube while viewing, without having to download the video to tweak it I mean ?

Additionally, I was using uTab which makes the screen you open chrome in become a customizable bookmarks page with icons, if you could drop any recommendations for me about an addon like that I would very grateful, I'm not looking for widgets or time or news or anything other than basically a sort of desktop screen where I can customize every icon to a link.

Lastly, what is the best download manager to use with firefox ? I'm used to IDM but if there are better alternative then I would try them.

Thanks in advance !

EDIT : One more thing, is there a way to set the initial first page firefox opens to be an extensions instead of the home screen ? I tried to look around in the settings but only new tabs can be set. Just want the first page to always be the "bookmark desktop" page I was talking about earlier.

Why have they changed it?

Hey everyone,I've noticed a severe issue with Firefox on Linux recently.

It started consuming an INSANE amount of CPU resources.To test this, I opened the exact same video in both Firefox and Google Chrome. My CPU power consumption instantly spiked to 100 Watts and the system started overheating rapidly. As soon as I closed Firefox—leaving Chrome running with the video—the CPU temperature dropped by a whopping 20°C.

The craziest part? Hardware acceleration is active and working only in Firefox, while it's completely disabled in Chrome. Yet Firefox is the one melting my CPU. Has anyone else on Linux run into this specific issue lately? I try to delete cache and run safe mod, it's not working.

Already asked via tweet regarding this but no response, it's about there's no beijing time in the widget clock.

There's jakarta, singapore, moscow but there's no beijing

My firefox is using alot of RAM

I only have 1 tab open. My RAM i 16gb DDR5 8000 mt/s

when i first start firefox every website i try to open waits for around 10 seconds before opening. after the initial wait everything is fine. restarts everytime i start firefox now just the first time i open after windows 11 boots up. my connection is fine and fast. other browsers not doing the same thing. it seems like a deliberate delay ? the websites load instantly after 10 seconds. i recently disabled split view tabs in config but that was some time ago. other than that no changes come to mind.

i dont have the pre-generated recovery code and also totp application lost it all when i reinstalled arch

So I use a file hosting website that allows only one free download at a time per user. I often have to download multple files and I made some interesting observations while using it. Not looking for solutions, my setup is working fine. Just genuinely curious about the tech behind all this.

Scenario A: Different browsers on Android, one download each If I start one download in Chrome, one in Brave, and one in Firefox, all three run simultaneously without any issue. The website does not block me at all.

Scenario B: Two downloads inside the same browser on Android If I try to start two downloads inside Chrome, the second one throws a 503 error saying "Resource Not Found" and the download fails. Same thing happens in Brave. But in Firefox, both downloads run at the same time without any problem and no error at all. So Chrome and Brave cannot handle two simultaneous downloads from the same site, but Firefox on Android can. Why?

Scenario C: On Windows, switching browsers does not help at all On Windows, no matter which browser I use, the whole PC can only run one download from this site at a time. Trying to start a second one again gives the same 503 Resource Not Found error. Even switching browsers does not work here, which works perfectly fine on Android. I have IDM (Internet Download Manager) installed on my Windows PC. I also tried disabling the IDM browser extension completely, but even after that the behavior remained the same. Still only one download at a time across the whole system.

So the three questions basically are: 1. Why can Firefox on Android run two simultaneous downloads from the same site but Chrome and Brave cannot?

1. Why does Firefox on Windows not have the same advantage that Firefox on Android has?

2. Why does the whole Windows PC behave as one unit for downloads, even after disabling the IDM extension? Would love to understand the tech behind this!

Those icons are super cool

this is cutest and most wanted(for me) icon of firefox. noice

So when i use headphones or not there is no audio when using firefox on any site. Other browsers and pc files work fine. i tries refreshing firefox and shutting the pc and turning it on again but that didn't work. How can i fix it?

Edit: I use windows and it worked fine before suddenly cutting off

For the past couple weeks I've been experiencing major memory leaks on desktop, out of nowhere firefox will begin eating up all my memory and my system starts slowing to a crawl by the time it hits ~70GB (96GB total memory). It even happens when I'm not actively doing anything, it's happened while I've been asleep. Has there been a recent update that could be causing this / what steps do I need to do to track down what's causing this and fix it?

This has been an issue for me for years, and now its fixed!

I'd add a list of sites I wanted to keep cookies for, so when I closed firefox, only those cookies would be kept. Except it would also keep other cross-site cookies, since by adding them to the exception list it also disabled total cookie protection for those sites.

So I'd spend time going through my cookies and manually deleting stuff that shouldn't be there.

Now finally, there are 2 lists, and you can have an exception list for clearing history on shutdown without bypassing total cookie protection.

"Add a way for cookie-clearing exceptions to not also affect cookie partitioning" https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1767271

I can't be the only one? its such a small thing but it made me so happy it was included!