Mozilla is bullish on the benefits AI can offer users of its Firefox web browser, and is planning a dedicated AI-powered browsing mode.
Firefox already offers (you may have been bugged by callouts to try) a sidebar for interacting with chatbots, as well as AI summaries and AI-powered tab groups.
Now, Mozilla is going further by adding a new AI mode to Firefox.
Firefox AI Window is described by Mozilla as “a new, intelligent and user-controlled space we’re building in Firefox that lets you chat with an AI assistant and get help while you browse, all on your terms.”
Adding that “with AI Window, you have the option to opt in to our most intelligent and personalized experience yet — providing you with new ways to interact with the web”.
The feature is currently at an early stage (at the time of writing this; November 2025). Mozilla has launched a sign-up form so interested users can be notified of its progress and gain early-access. Once launched to all, the feature will be opt-in; Mozilla says users can choose to not use it.
How well Firefox AI Window can compete with dedicated AI browsers like Perplexity’s Comet and OpenAI’s Atlas – Chromium-based browsers not yet available on Linux – or Google Chrome’s deepening Gemini integration remains to be seen.
What’s clear is that Mozilla does see AI as the future of Firefox and the web.
Mozilla AI: All-In
I often refer to Mozilla as being “all-in” on AI (and no, it isn’t merely a churlish initialism). Rather, the company’s leadership see AI as the next stage of the web, where agents browse for us, generate what we want to say and let us cognitively offload.
Mozilla says “standing still while technology moves forward doesn’t benefit the web or humanity” and sees its responsibility to “shape how AI integrates into the web — in ways that protect and give people more choice, not less“.
The pursuit of ‘choice’ is, presumably why the browser is filled in-app nags to “try” CoPilot, Gemini, ChatGPT, et al integration inside of the browser already.
Mozilla’s leadership is staking the company’s future, and that of the browser, on some of this stuff sticking and making it money. Not all of it involves fuelling user queries to big AI companies. It ships small, on-device AI models to power some features, link summary previews.
The Firefox 145 update added low-level changes to allow browser AI agents to do things on behalf of users, too. It’s likely those changes were added, partly, to benefit the new AI Window mode as the agentic web is viewed as the next big thing.
As I’ve mentioned in my recent coverage of Firefox, the browser’s developers were working on a new Firefox AI feature called ‘Page Buddy’. It’s not clear if that work was for this new AI Window mode, or if it’s for a separate feature entirely.
Chasing their bottom line
Despite the effusive statements it’s putting out, I do feel there’s a disconnect with Mozilla. It’s been frenetic at adding the same AI features other browsers offer, framing this as giving browser users more “choice” – but a choice between the same kind of things?
For OpenAI, et al it’s easy to see the point of their AI browsers: isolating us from each other, devaluing human-made content and eroding our collective sense of agency and competence to ensure more of our interactions are mediated through their products.
Or, to put it more bluntly: engagement = money.
I expected more from Mozilla. It, of all companies, ought to be asking the deeper, more fundamental questions about how AI can be used for to keep the open web and preserve that wide-eyed wonder of connection and discovery, rather than passive consumption and attention-capture.
To me, putting a “window” between people browsing the web and people that make up the web feels off-brand.
As long as users have a choice to swerve the AI bits they don’t want, and use the bits they do – ideally, without Mozilla constantly trying to steer them towards using what it needs them to, to make it money – then few will have issue with AI Window.
Like a real window, they could choose to look out of it, or not – that’s choice.
Sign up for AI Window waiting list