Every age has its petitioners and its forms. Once a person stood at a clerk’s window with papers in hand. Now the clerk is a web page, and the forms keep asking for the same things: work history, a professional bio, a story about “a time when…”. Usually the answers have already been written somewhere else, on a portfolio site or a professional profile. The applicant copies them over one field at a time.

On 27 October 2026 Mozilla offered a small mercy. In a post on its Firefox blog, the company announced two additions to Smart Window, the opt-in AI browsing mode in its browser. The first fills in web forms using information from tabs the user picks. The second watches web pages and reports back when a specific change appears. Mozilla pitched both at people shopping early for the holidays or planning their next career move.

The form

Here is how it works. You click into a form field. If the form has at least four text fields Smart Window can help with, the dropdown shows “Fill from sources” next to a suggested source page. A pencil icon opens “Edit sources”, where you can swap that page out or add other tabs. Smart Window then produces suggestions, and you review and edit them before anything is filled in. The browser will not submit the form for you.

That last restraint matters. Other companies are building agents that go much further. Meta’s Muse, for one, shops and checks out on the user’s behalf. Mozilla’s assistant can draft your answers, but you still have to press the button yourself.

There is a cost. When the feature is used, text from the chosen pages goes to Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, a Google model, which identifies the fields and pulls out the relevant details. Mozilla says this doesn’t change whichever model the user has picked for Smart Window chat. It also says saved autofill values stay on the device. Name and address are still filled by Firefox’s ordinary autofill, without any AI model. For now the feature handles only text fields and saves none of the generated answers. Mozilla says it is exploring dropdown menus, PDF forms and ways to keep generated answers for later forms.

The watch

The second feature is for waiting. The company’s own line on it is this:

A watched pot never boils, and refreshing a web page won’t make an update appear any sooner.

You type “/watch” in the Smart Window chat and describe what you are looking for. That might be a price cut, or a job listing that names a company or title you follow. You add up to five pages per task and choose daily or weekly checks. The checks run only while the browser is open. When something matches, an alert appears under a Tasks button in the toolbar. If desktop notifications are on, Firefox can also send one directly, and clicking it opens the watched pages.

The limits are written out precisely. A user can have up to 15 active tasks and can edit, pause or delete them. A task pauses itself after 60 days without a matching change. After 90 days without one, it stops checking for good. This monitoring runs on Qwen, a model from Alibaba, rather than on Google’s.

Many powers in one window

So two features lean on two foreign models, and the user may be chatting with a third. That is how Smart Window was built. According to News Anyway’s account of the beta, it shipped in Firefox 153 for macOS and Windows. It offers three model options: Fast, running on Google’s Gemini; Flexible, on Alibaba’s Qwen; and Personal, on OpenAI’s gpt-oss-120b. In September, 9to5Mac and others reported that Mistral AI planned to add its own model. A Mozilla account is required.

It took a while to get here. Mozilla first showed the idea, then called AI Window, in November 2025, presenting it as fully opt-in. Around the same time, the company’s new chief executive, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, said he wanted to turn Firefox into “a modern AI browser”. Many of the browser’s loyal users did not want that. TechRadar reported the backlash and the promise that followed. On Reddit, Enzor-DeMeo wrote: “You will have a clear way to turn AI features off. A real kill switch is coming in Q1 of 2026.”

He kept his word. Firefox 148, released on 24 February 2026, added an AI Controls section to the settings, with a single switch that blocks the browser’s AI features. Critics noted that a switch for turning features off sits awkwardly next to the word “opt-in”. The switch covers only Firefox’s own features. Websites and extensions can still use whatever AI services they like.

Mozilla’s privacy promises sit alongside all this. As 9to5Mac reported in its coverage of the update, the company says it does not keep chat transcripts, does not use conversations to train models and does not sell user data. Saved names, addresses, passwords and payment details are filled straight from the device and are not sent to any model.

Where it reaches, for now

For now, the form filler and the page watcher are available only in the desktop Smart Window beta, in English, in the United States and Canada. Mozilla says more markets will follow in the coming months and asks users to share their experiences on Mozilla Connect.

For now, the assistant will write your answers and watch the pages for you, but it does not act on your behalf. After 90 days with nothing to report, it stops watching.