Planet Mozilla

Institutions are recalculating who controls the technology they rely on. Mozilla has an independent option to offer.

For years, organizations consolidated technology around a small number of providers to make things simpler. Fewer systems. Tighter integrations. More economies of scale. But that consolidation went well beyond technology. It consolidated dependency, too. The resulting risks have been debated, studied, and challenged along the way, but concentration continued. More work, data and critical infrastructure kept moving to the same few providers, while credible alternatives narrowed.

The deeper that dependency runs, the harder and more costly it becomes to change course. When something fails, changes or falls outside an institution’s control, that dependency becomes a risk for CIOs and CISOs to manage.

Nowhere are these stakes more visible than in Europe. Now institutions are re-assessing. Governments are pushing for greater digital autonomy, while regulated industries face growing pressure to find and manage their dependencies. 

There’s a name for much of this debate about technological control: “sovereignty.” 

What digital sovereignty means in practice varies. Across Europe, governments are investing in the security and resilience of critical IT infrastructure, reducing strategic dependencies and putting technological autonomy higher on national agendas. Different approaches, same underlying concern. Strip away the regional policy definitions and industry distinctions and a pretty practical, universal question emerges: how much technological dependency should we risk?

And a very specific, very important layer has been largely missing from that conversation: the browser.

The overlooked layer of modern business

The browser. Applications run there. Employees authenticate in it. Sensitive data transits through it. Files are uploaded and downloaded and AI tools are increasingly used through it. That raises the same questions of dependency and control: whose browser technology are you relying on, and who controls the infrastructure used to manage it?

Introducing Firefox Enterprise

Firefox Enterprise is built for organizations with strict security, governance, and compliance requirements. It pairs the Firefox browser, built on Mozilla’s independent Gecko engine, with a management console organizations can run on their own infrastructure. From that console, IT teams can centrally manage browser policy and access, govern how data moves through the browser and set controls around AI use.

IT and security teams get more control over their data, IT infrastructure and browser environment — helping strengthen technological independence and operational resilience.

“If all your options are built with the same technology underneath, ‘choice’ is a lie. So is control,” said Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, CEO of Mozilla. “We built Firefox differently. And we’re bringing its independent architecture to institutions that are ready to rethink their dependencies and risk.”

Bringing the browser under control

We’re starting with the browser because we see it as a key, but under-governed, layer. Firefox Enterprise gives institutions more control over the browser and the infrastructure managing it.

And because Firefox runs on Gecko, the only major browser engine developed outside Google and Apple, institutions have another path towards reducing dependence on a single architecture.

Finally, Firefox Enterprise is built to live alongside the systems that IT operations already use. Keep your identity provider. Keep your SIEM. Keep your MDM. Just add a browser whose management infrastructure you operate, so you decide where data lives and have greater visibility into how it moves.

For us, supporting the goal of technological sovereignty comes down to four things: More control. More transparency. More choice. More resilience.

Learn more about Firefox Enterprise.

A big bet on familiar ground

We know this territory. Independence isn’t a new direction for Mozilla. We’ve spent more than 25 years building and securing browser technology that intentionally works outside of the dominant architecture of the day. Firefox is used by roughly 200 million people every month and is already deployed across thousands of organizations.

That independence has always mattered to the web. Now it has practical value for institutions looking to reduce technological concentration — and dependency — in their own environments. 

This is the beginning

Our ambition is big but simple: make technology independence practical.

That means putting institutions in real control of the infrastructure and data they depend on, without asking them to rebuild or start over. Closing blind spots. Defining where policies, access and data live. Keeping core management within the institution’s environment. And bringing an overlooked layer — the browser — under institutional control. 

Firefox Enterprise is unveiling across Europe with an initial sales focus on France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with more markets to follow. Thunderbird Enterprise is also in development, extending this customer-controlled approach to email and communications. We’ll have more to share as that work progresses.

If your organization wants greater control over its browser infrastructure, we’d like to work with you.

The post Mozilla introduces Firefox Enterprise appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Firefox is teaming up with AEG and taking to the main stage at Berlin’s biggest and best indoor arenas. Starting this October, as the indoor music scene heats up and the basketball and ice hockey seasons are in full swing, fans flocking to the Uber Arena, Uber Eats Music Hall, and Uber Platz will see Firefox highly visible around the venue. They may even bump into our very own mascot, Kit, who will be on hand to help them skip the main queues courtesy of Firefox. 

We know that the experiences people care about often begin online. The internet is the gateway to how they discover, plan, and navigate their way to concerts, sports events, and nights out before they happen in real life. 

Firefox’s presence will help make every step of that journey simple and smoother, starting at the door.

People with Firefox downloaded on their phone will have access to a dedicated Firefox Fast Lane that allows them to skip the main line at the Uber Arena. To ensure the smoothest possible entry, a QR code for downloading Firefox will also be available at the Fast Lane.

“People who use Firefox tend to choose things deliberately, their browser, their music, their nights out. This partnership is for them. A first for Firefox. Most browsers want more of your time online. We want you at the show, faster. Berlin is where we are starting, right across the river from our office. See you there,” said John Solomon, Mozilla-Firefox Chief Marketing Officer.

We are excited to bring what we stand for to Berlin’s premier entertainment venue — choice, control, and a better experience to the moments that people want to enjoy and truly care about.

The post Firefox partners with Anschutz Entertainment Group at the Uber Arena and Uber Eats Music Hall in Berlin appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Today, we are very pleased to announce two new additions to the Mozilla Corporation Board of Directors: Jambu Palaniappan and David Parry-Jones.

As we build the next chapter of Mozilla, we’ve been focused on bringing people onto our Board who combine deep operating experience with a real commitment to the values Mozilla stands for. Jambu and David bring deep experience building and leading technology businesses, and each brings a unique perspective to our Board.

Jambu Palaniappan is the Chief Executive Officer of Checkatrade, where he drives the company’s mission of Powering Great Work. The home improvement platform connects consumers across the UK with quality tradespeople — every year, Checkatrade improves millions of homes and delivers billions of pounds of work to small and medium-sized businesses.

Before joining Checkatrade, Jambu was Managing Partner and Head of Europe at OMERS Ventures, where he invested in and supported high-growth technology companies. Earlier in his career, he spent several years at Uber and Uber Eats, joining as one of the first 100 employees and leading expansion across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Jambu holds a degree in Public Policy and Economics from Vanderbilt University.

David Parry-Jones is a board director and former Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) with more than 30 years of experience scaling technology businesses internationally. Most recently, he served as CRO at DeepL and previously held senior leadership roles at Microsoft, VMware, and Twilio. He has led large teams across diverse markets and cultures, working with both early-stage companies and global enterprises. 

As a board member and adviser, he brings a practical perspective on growth, international expansion, and building strong teams that turn strategy into results.

Please join me in welcoming Jambu and David to the Mozilla Corporation Board of Directors.

The post Jambu Palaniappan and David Parry-Jones join the Mozilla Corporation Board of Directors appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

One hundred days ago, Mozilla released Over The Edge 2.0, the second independent report from leading experts on deceptive design Dr. Harry Brignull and Cennydd Bowles, on how Windows, Edge, Bing, and Copilot are designed to steer people away from the browser they chose. 

We published the report, and the researchers published the evidence for anyone to analyze. 

Browsers are a powerful tool. So it’s no surprise that the history of the web has many examples of powerful platforms trying to deny people browser choice. Now, as AI reshapes our online experiences, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Browsers are a key distribution layer for AI tools and services, while still determining many of the privacy and security functionality people rely on every day. Steering people toward one browser can therefore shape which AI services reach users and the protections that come with it. 

We also shared the report with Microsoft and talked to them about the issues raised in the report. We knew that an immediate change was unlikely, but we hoped that, when faced with independent evidence of harmful design practices impacting Windows users, they would also want better for people.

Instead, it became clear that Microsoft will respect user choice only when it is forced to. It is important to think about what that means for a company whose operating system runs on more than a billion machines. Microsoft’s standard for respecting people’s choices is legal compliance. Not what’s best for its users. Not its own published principles. Not what’s technically feasible. Not even what it already does for users in Europe.

That’s the most shocking part. Not that Microsoft engages in such tactics – we’ve seen that before. It’s the fact that a better version of Windows already exists, and it is already available today – but only if you live in the European Economic Area (EEA), where the Digital Markets Act (DMA) forced the issue. If you live in the United States, India, the United Kingdom, or most other locations around the world, your experience and your freedom to choose for yourself are worse.

One hundred days later, here is what people outside of the EEA still get: 

• The Windows 10 message “You’re almost done setting up your PC” uses tricky wording to pull people off the default they picked. 
• Windows Search and Widgets open links in Edge instead of the browser set as default. 
• Windows keeps Edge as the default for common browser file types like PDFs and SVG images, even after another browser has been set as default.
  

And people in the EEA also deserve better:

• Edge remains pre-pinned to the taskbar; this seems to directly violate the “principled approach to app pinning and app defaults.” 
• Copilot, Microsoft’s AI tool opens web links in a side-panel instead of the browser people chose, in every region tested, Europe included.
• Windows Backup, the tool Microsoft uses to guide people through the migration to Windows 11, silently tries to set Edge as the default when it restores a PC and fails to properly bring the user’s own browser along. 

Most of the 2024 patterns are still there. The 2026 patterns are worse. Microsoft is using new surfaces like Copilot and the migration to Windows 11 to further undermine user choice.

Our ask has always been simple: First, give all Windows users the fairer designs that are live in the EEA – regardless of where they are located. Second, stop the remaining harmful design practices that persist in the EEA. That means:

• Stopping the remaining harmful design tactics in the EEA and ship that standard worldwide.
• Honoring people’s browser choice everywhere it is currently ignored, including Windows Search, Widgets, Copilot, and Windows Backup restoration. 
• Applying Microsoft’s own 2023 app pinning principles to Edge itself. 

The Mozilla-commissioned report has never been about intent. It’s about accountability and Microsoft’s responsibility to stop undermining people’s choices. The practices we documented need to change. Statements about intent are not a substitute for action.

In the past 100 days, we’ve stopped waiting for Microsoft to act. Instead, we’ve stepped up public pressure on the company to respect people’s choices.

We are also taking the report’s findings to regulators and policymakers. In Europe, the DMA is the only thing that has moved Microsoft. Everywhere else, the lesson is the same: Microsoft ships only when a regulator requires fairer design. 

We hope that regulators in the US, the UK, India, and Brazil are paying attention. 

Microsoft can do better. It already has, for people in the EEA.

Until it does the same in all jurisdictions, we will keep pointing out the company’s choices and the impact they have on hundreds of millions of users who want something different.

The post 100 days later: Microsoft still steers Windows and Copilot users to Edge, everywhere the law lets it appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Every October, Cybersecurity Awareness Month reminds us the importance of protecting our digital lives.

The theme for 2026 is ‘Don’t Make It Easy for Them,’ with the National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) providing simple, actionable steps users can take to make it harder for cybercriminals to attack.

Everyone wants to be safe online, but one of the most common excuses we hear is “I don’t have the time or the money to invest in it right now.” Well, we have good news: you can improve your online security easily, for the low price of $0.

Firefox provides several free features designed to make it easier to protect your online life and harder for cybercriminals to target you. 

Password manager: Use a unique password for every account

Reused passwords are one of the easiest ways attackers break into multiple accounts. If one site is breached, your login details could be tested on many others.

Firefox’s free password manager can generate and securely store a strong, unique password per site, which is the single highest-leverage fix against password stuffing. For convenience, Firefox can automatically fill in your saved login information the next time you access a previously visited site. However, you still have the option to turn off password saving for specific websites, or completely if you’re using a shared device or simply prefer to enter it each time.

You can manage your stored logins on a singular device at any time. To get a head start, you also have the option to import passwords saved on several other popular browsers. In addition, you can create a free Mozilla account to safely sync them across your signed-in devices.

VPN: Privacy built into the browser

Imagine you’re settling into a corner table at a bustling airport cafe, checking some emails on your phone before you board your flight. Or perhaps you took your laptop to the campus library to finally start that research paper you’ve been putting off. Maybe you’re polishing off that last presentation slide between sessions at an out-of-state conference.

While these moments are routine, connecting to public Wi-Fi anywhere can open a small window of risk – as your IP address, approximate location, and browsing activity can be more exposed on networks you don’t control.

That’s where Firefox’s free built-in, browser-based VPN steps in. While Firefox already encrypts your traffic with HTTPS, the built-in VPN feature routes your browsing traffic through a proxy network, hiding your IP address before it reaches a website. This means the sites you visit will see a proxy IP address instead of your own. It offers an industry-leading 50 gigabytes of free VPN-browsing each month, with no extension or extra app to install. Simply sign in, turn it on, and start browsing.

Firefox’s free built-in VPN first launched on desktop in March, later expanding to Android in July. Unlike a standalone or full-service VPN, it’s designed specifically to protect your browsing traffic within Firefox, not your entire device. This means apps, downloads, and other system traffic are not routed through the browser-based VPN. For people who need broader, device-wide VPN protection, Mozilla also offers a separate paid VPN service.

You can check the full list of regions where built-in VPN in Firefox is currently available here, and learn more about the differences between Firefox’s free built-in VPN and Mozilla VPN here.

Relay: Contain the damage of any one breach

Think about how often you give out your personal email address – for an online purchase, RSVPing to an event, or signing up to a new app. Each time, you trust the site owner will protect your information, but, spam piles up and breaches can still happen – even when you think you’re being careful.

Firefox Relay gives you a smarter way to share. Instead of handing out your real email address, this feature provides secure, random email masks to use any time a website, store, or app asks you for your information. It forwards messages to your real email, while keeping your identity hidden to senders. This means if one service gets compromised, your other accounts stay safe.

You can also use Relay in the U.S. and Canada to shield your phone number, so you can receive calls and texts through masks and reply without exposing your real number.

The best part? To make protecting your privacy even easier, Firefox increased its limit to 50 free email masks earlier this year, allowing you to shield dozens of logins at no cost.

Browse freely: Firefox protects you by default

Even if you sometimes forget to use Firefox protection tools like password manager, VPN, and Relay, there are multiple always-on features operating within the browser to help keep your session secure and private. These include enhanced tracking protection to block hidden scripts and known trackers that follow you across the web, browser fingerprinting protection to prevent sites from building a unique profile of your device, and warnings about deceptive or malicious websites.

Together, Firefox’s individual and always-on security features work to help keep your browsing safe and your data private. So, this Cybersecurity Awareness Month, take a moment to build new habits, try out our free cybersecurity tools, and make life more difficult for cybercriminals. Small steps add up, and we are here to help. Stay safe, stay smart, and keep exploring the web with confidence on Firefox. 

The post Strengthen your online security for free with Firefox appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Following the rollout of Firefox’s Shake to Summarize feature to Android devices this May, we wanted to take a closer look at the modeling work behind the feature. In a previous blog post, we discussed our model selection process. Now that Shake to Summarize has been available on both iOS and Android for a few months, we wanted to take it a step further and outline our approach to prompt development. 

This is the story of a Shake to Summarize use case that required a little extra prompt tuning: online recipes.

Framing the Problem

The first step in developing a useful prompt is clearly describing what you want the LLM to do. LLMs thrive on specificity, so the more sharply you can define your task, the better your results are likely to be. 

This is especially important when using smaller LLMs (like we are here), since these little models are not as good at reading between the lines and intuiting unstated intentions as their more powerful cousins are. 

For this application, we were looking to create summaries. On the face of it, this seems pretty straightforward. However, as we iterated on prompts, we quickly discovered that what constitutes a “good” summary depends largely on what one is summarizing. 

For example, a useful summary of a novel should provide us with a quick overview of the plot without getting into too many specific details; we wouldn’t expect the summary to contain anything from the text verbatim. 

In contrast, a summary of a recipe website should include the recipe essentially as written. If the recipe says “cook lovingly” we might be OK with shortening it to “cook,” but if it calls for 4 cups of vegetable broth, a Tbsp of oregano and a tsp of thyme, we want these details relayed to us exactly. Merely stating, “this recipe calls for some broth and some spices” would not be adequate. 

Forming the Prompt

From here, it became clear that we wanted not just one “summarize” instruction, but a whole set of instructions — one for each category of webpage that we wished to summarize. We worked with the product team to compile a list of article types that we were targeting for this feature. For each article type, we then gave a brief description of what a good summary would look like: 

Recipe – Ingredients as written, along with the key steps, time required, and any tips given by the author or commenters

News – Only the important details: what happened, when, and what would be the likely consequences to the reader

How-to – Start with the required materials, skills, tools, etc.,  along with the main steps and any specific warnings called out by the author

Review – Highlight the bottom line rating. If it is a product review, include the pros and cons, the price, and who the target audience is.

Research – Key finding and level of confidence the researchers have in their results as well as the projected real-world impact.

Opinion – The main argument, along with any key evidence cited in support

We then wrapped this list in some general instructions to ground the model in the task and came up with our initial prompt (formatted for readability) [source]:

You are a Content Summarizer. You create mobile-optimized summaries by first understanding what users actually need from each type of content. 

Process: 

   Step 1: Identify and Adapt.

   Step 2: Based on content type, prioritize: 

Recipe – Servings, Total time, Ingredients list, Key steps, Tips.

News – What happened, when, where. 

How-to – Total time, Materials, Key steps, Warnings. 

Review – Bottom line rating, price.

Opinion – Main arguments, Key evidence.

Personal Blog – Author, main points. 

Fiction – Author, summary of plot.

All other content types – Provide a brief summary of no more than 6 sentences.

   Step 3: Format for mobile using concise language and paragraphs with 3 sentences maximum.

Bold critical details (numbers, warnings, key terms).

We Foxfooded the above prompt and found that it mostly worked pretty well. The summaries the model produced were concise, accurate, and informative. 

The only exception was recipes. 

We found that, when the prompt above was used for recipes, the model tended to summarize too much — often leaving out key ingredients, or in some cases, leaving out the recipe entirely.

For example, when asked to summarize a lentil soup recipe the model returned:

The webpage provides a detailed recipe for a vegan lentil soup, which the author claims is the best they’ve ever made. The soup is made with pantry staples like lentils, diced tomatoes, vegetable broth, and spices (cumin, curry powder, thyme), along with fresh vegetables (onion, carrots, garlic) and greens (kale or collard greens). A key step is blending a portion of the soup to create a creamy texture without dairy.

The summary is accurate, so far as it goes, but it isn’t exactly useful. If our goal is to have the summary be a quick way to access the recipe itself, without having to read through the narrative preamble, this wouldn’t cut it.  

Focusing the Prompt

To address this problem, we needed to be more explicit with the instructions we gave the model when summarizing recipes: we needed to tell it which information we were interested in and which it could safely discard. 

Although we could have added this extra guidance directly to the prompt above, doing so risked causing the model to over-index on the recipe formatting and ignore the other article types. Instead, we developed a separate prompt which contained only the recipe instructions and directed recipe summarization requests to use it, rather than the general one [source].

To perform this routing, we used the structured data embedded in each webpage. While this categorization could have been handled by another model pass, metadata from the webpage itself allowed us to quickly and deterministically identify the page categories without additional inference overhead. To capture cases where this data is either missing or inaccurate, we also maintain some lightweight recipe guidance in the general prompt. 

After this change, the summary returned by the model for the above recipe became much more usable (shortened for brevity):

Servings: 6

Total Time: 50 minutes

Prep Time: 10 minutes

Cook Time: 40 minutes

Ingredients

• ¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1 medium yellow or white onion, chopped
• 2 carrots, peeled and chopped
• …

Instructions

1. Warm the olive oil in a large Dutch oven or pot over medium heat.
2. Add the chopped onion and carrot, cooking until the onion softens and turns translucent, about 5 minutes.
3. …

Tips

• Use an immersion blender for easier blending without transferring soup.
• …

Nutrition

• Calories: 320
• …

With this change in place, we ran a quick test over a curated set of recipe sites and found that the new system was more than twice as likely to return a complete and accurate summary than our previous one. Success!

The system was now working as expected: summaries were useful and recipes were complete.

Reflections

From this experience we learned that the model produced the best results when it was told explicitly what we wanted it to do. When the instructions were vague or left too much up to the model, performance suffered. 

To this end, we found that framing this problem as a routing problem — where the specific kinds of articles are routed to specific prompts — worked well. Since the task of summarization is not monolithic, our summarization pipeline should not be either.

Even though our current approach has only a single category-specific prompt, we hypothesize that the system would see further gains by using dedicated prompts for other page types as well. 

More broadly, this experience reinforced an important lesson for us: improving AI systems is not solely about building larger or more capable models. Some of the biggest gains come from reducing ambiguity, narrowing the task, and designing systems that help the model succeed. Within the right harness, smaller, open source models can deliver great value.

While building more capable models continues to advance the field, our experience shows that thoughtful system design and solid engineering still matter.

The post Under the Hood: Prompt tuning Shake to Summarize for recipes appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

What comes to mind when you think of Firefox? Is it our best-in-class privacy features and ad blocking capabilities? Our partnerships with Wrexham, NVIDIA or Mistral? Or maybe our adorable mascot Kit?

If you’ve been following Firefox this year, you’ve seen us add new ways to get things done while giving you more choice over how you browse. That includes browsing two pages side by side, adding an extra layer of privacy with built-in VPN, blocking trackers for smoother scrolling and faster load times, and deciding how AI shows up in Firefox. 

For the past few months, many of you have also been trying out our new Firefox design in Nightly and sharing your thoughts with us as we continued to refine the experience.

Today, we’re rolling out that design with FX 157 to everyone using Firefox across desktop and mobile devices. Firefox has done a lot of growing over the last year; now it looks the part. 

A more modern Firefox

When we first shared our plans to design Firefox for the future, we said we wanted Firefox to feel “current, but not generic. Warm, but still precise.” 

That design ethos now carries across all of Firefox. We’ve refreshed the colors, icons and themes throughout the browser, from the tabs and toolbars you use every day to your New Tab page, Private Browsing experience and more, with no cost to your browser performance.

This shared design language across desktop and mobile gives Firefox a consistent foundation for new features and experiences, while keeping the personality that makes Firefox unique. 

Make Firefox yours

We’ve added more choices for how Firefox looks and works, including the return of a feature many of you asked for:

Compact Mode is back. As people started trying the new design, we heard from many of you who wanted to fit more into your browser window. Compact Mode reduces the size of your tabs and toolbar to give more of your screen to the web, with an auto-compact option for smaller screens.

Find your look. A new theme picker makes it easier to explore different looks for Firefox, with new themes and wallpapers to choose from.

Set up New Tab your way. Choose what you want to see on your homepage. Now, you have a dedicated space to pin and organize shortcuts so sites you use all the time stay put.

Refined, not reinvented

Themes and wallpapers may change over time, but the things that made people choose Firefox in the first place are still the same. We’re still independent and open source, with privacy protections built into the browser and controls that put you in charge of how Firefox works for you.

This carries through everything we build, from the height of your toolbars and what belongs on your New Tab page to which AI features show up in your browser, which model you choose and what context you want it to have.

Today’s Firefox is a renewal, grounded in the same principles that have shaped it from the beginning, with a new design built to carry Firefox forward. 

For those who have come with us on this journey, thank you for helping us shape the future of Firefox. 

If you’ve been away on hiatus, welcome back. Try the latest Firefox and let us know what you think.

The post More modern. More flexible. Still Firefox. appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

We spend a lot of time browsing online. Whether you are researching for work, planning a trip, paying your bills, or scrolling through social media, your browser is there for it all.

While all these tasks are very different in nature, a lot of people still tend to stick to the same window type for all their use cases. But what if there was a different way to browse?
You may have noticed Firefox now has three window options for desktop. On top of the Classic and Private windows you’ve known for years, a third choice has been rolling out in beta: Smart Window. This optional AI-powered browsing experience is built to move your work forward and help finish what you started online.

Following the recent addition of several new Smart Window capabilities, we thought now would be the perfect time for a breakdown of what each of our three window options actually does, and when to use them.

Classic: Timeless and tailored to you

Classic Window is still the most customizable option of the three. While Private and Smart windows share many of the same features and capabilities as Classic, a Classic Window offers the widest range of Firefox’s standard personalization options. It gives you the broadest canvas for tailoring Firefox to the way you browse.

What makes it Classic:

• Full oversight over controls, buttons, and toolbars.
• Access to the entire Firefox add-ons library.
• Advanced customization and configuration options. 
• The ability to sync your history, bookmarks, and open tabs across your signed-in devices.

When to use it:

Classic is your home base. It’s the best place to start customizing around your browsing needs, whether that means an extension setup specifically tailored to your workflow, a special theme that matches your style, or just the familiar Firefox experience you created over years of tweaking to your personal taste. While many customizations are also available on Private and Smart window, Classic offers the most extensive line-up of optional browser features, extensions, and aesthetics to personalize your setup.

Classic is the right move for general browsing like scrolling through social media, conducting a quick Google search, or reading online articles. It’s also the best place to start if you are looking to build your browser around you.

Private Window: Browse with greater peace of mind

Private Window stays true to its name and number one priority: it’s designed to limit the information associated with your browser session. When a Private Window is closed, Firefox doesn’t retain session information, such as what you searched for, the sites you visited, or the cookies they set.

What makes it Private:

• Pages visited from a Private Window will not be added to the list of sites in Firefox’s History menu, the Library window’s history list, nor the address bar drop-down list.
• Nothing entered into text boxes on web pages and Search bar will be saved for Form autocomplete.
• Cookies set in a Private Window are kept only temporarily in memory, separate from your regular cookies, and are discarded after your last Private Window is closed.
• Extensions are off by default in a Private Window, unless you explicitly grant them permission.

When to use it:

A Private Window is recommended when you don’t want activity from a browsing session sitting in your history, such as shopping for a gift. It’s also helpful when browsing on a shared device, ensuring your history, logins, and cookies will not be saved for the next person.

You may not need a Private Window every time you open your browser, but it’s always there for you when you do.

Smart Window: Firefox’s privacy-first, AI-powered browsing experience to help get stuff done

Smart Windowis Firefox’s newest window type, currently rolling out in Beta to users in the U.S., Canada, and France. Think of it as a Classic Firefox window with a built-in AI assistant layered on top – one that you can choose to have utilize your open tabs, recent browsing, and the page in front of you, so it can help you do more without switching contexts – all with the privacy and security you expect from Firefox.

What makes it Smart:

• A built-in assistant that can summarize pages, generate recommendations, compare information, and plan tasks using your open tabs.
• The ability to retrieve current web information and display the sources behind its response without taking you to a separate search results page, supported by Firefox’s new partnership with Exa.
• Suggested groups for related tabs. 
• Visual previews of pages from your browsing history, so you can surface the page you’re looking for more easily among similar results without opening each one.
• The choice of three AI models to power the assistant, as well as the option to bring your own model.
• Optional “memories,” built from either your Smart Window chats or your browsing activity in both Smart and Classic windows, or both. Memories help the assistant give you more helpful, personalized answers over time. They are stored locally on your device and can be deleted at any time.

When to use it:

Smart Window shines when you need a little extra help finishing what you started. Its ability to work with the context you choose to share can help you make progress on ongoing tasks that may require more than one session, like trip or event planning, comparison price shopping, or conducting research for work or personal reasons.

And with Smart Window’s optional memories, which learn your patterns and preferences over time (with your permission), Smart Window gets more useful the more you use it, keeping you from having to spell everything out from scratch each time.  

Selecting the right window for the job

None of these windows is “better” than the others, they’re built for different moments.

The good news is you are never locked into one. Firefox lets you move between all three depending on what you’re doing, so you can choose the window that fits each task.

You can access Classic and Private windows at any time from the Firefox menu. As for Smart Window, it remains in beta, with current availability to people in the U.S., Canada, and France.

To try Smart Window, visit https://www.firefox.com/smart-window. Or, if it’s not available in your region yet, you can sign up to be notified when it is.

The post Classic, Private, or Smart? Choose the right Firefox window for every task appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

When it’s Monday morning and you’re on the subway, in a coffee shop, or squeezing in a few email replies after your morning workout, your phone becomes your digital office. But every time you open your browser, you risk getting struck with any combination of distracting ads, auto-playing videos, and open tabs from the previous week competing for your attention.

For many remote and on-the-go workers, your mobile browser can become a minefield of interruptions and distractions, slowing you down when you need to focus most.

Luckily, there are multiple Firefox features that can help ensure your mobile browser is a focused, productive workspace.

Reduce distractions and clutter with Ad Blocker for Firefox on iOS

Opening a link shared via text or email can save time and keep things moving when a client or coworker needs a fast response. However, once it’s actually opened, there is a lot of opportunity for various pop-ups, overlays, and ads to get in between you and what you came in to do.

Ad Blocker for Firefox on iOS was built to reduce distractions and screen clutter while you browse, so you can stay focused on the task at hand. It’s a built-in, optional feature that blocks many intrusive ad formats, third-party ad networks, and ad-related trackers. That means no separate extension required, and you decide if and when to use it. 

Because Firefox’s strong line-up of ad-blocking and privacy extensions on desktop and Android are not available in the same way on iOS, we built Ad Blocker for Firefox directly into the browser. To decide what gets blocked, Ad Blocker uses the EasyList filter and Apple’s WebKit Content Blocker technology. It won’t impact every ad or sponsored content on a new tab, as those presented directly by host sites and displayed in search results will still be visible.

To try Ad Blocker on iOS, go to Settings > Browsing > Ad Blocker and turn it on to enjoy a cleaner browsing experience.

Get the gist faster with Shake to Summarize

When you’re on a deadline, scanning through heavy text, ads, and filler content can turn a quick scan into an infinite scroll session.

Firefox’s Shake to Summarize feature helps people get the gist in seconds on both iOS and Android. To use it, simply shake your phone on any web page under 5,000 words, and a clean summary of the page’s content will instantly appear. It can also be activated by tapping the “Summarize Page” option under “More” in the three-dot menu.

Like all Firefox features, we built Shake to Summarize with your privacy and protection in mind. This means using device-specific technology to keep your data secure. You can learn more about the AI powering this feature here.   

The feature launched on iOS last September, received a strong response from users, and earned a special mention in TIME’s Best Inventions of 2025. It is now available on iOS and Android in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Japanese.

Keep your tabs tidy with Tab Groups on Android

Just like us, our smartphones tend to live multiple lives: work, personal, and everything in between. While it can be incredibly convenient to have everything you need for all parts of your life on one device, things can get cluttered fast.

One minute you are knee-deep in a client proposal and the next you’re flicking through the countless Google searches from over the weekend. “How old is Harry Styles?” and “Movie times near me” – while pertinent when you were off the clock 24 hours ago – have absolutely nothing to do with the work you are trying to get done now.

To help make sure your prep for Thursday’s client meeting doesn’t get lost in your pop music deep dive from the weekend, you can group related tabs in Firefox for Android. Each group can be labeled and assigned a color, appearing as a single, searchable card in the tab tray rather than separate tabs, so it’s easy to locate when needed. You can open, rename, recolor, and delete these cards whenever you want.
To use Tab Groups on Android, simply drag one tab onto another, or select a few and tap “Add to group.” Label the group, choose a color, and you’re all set. To try it out, download the latest version of Firefox for Android. iOS support for this feature is on the way.

Pick up where you left off across devices with Firefox Sync

Sometimes we start a task on one device and finish it on another. Maybe you found an article on your computer that you want to read on the subway on your phone. Or, perhaps you want to pull out your laptop and finish filling out that lease application you started on your tablet.

Enable Firefox Sync and you can resume tasks you paused in your browser when switching across your mobile phone, tablet, and laptop. The feature lets you access your open tabs, bookmarks, and passwords across all the devices you access Firefox on.

The best part? We put your data privacy first. Firefox Sync uses end-to-end encryption so your synced data is encrypted before it reaches Mozilla’s servers.

To take your browsing experience with you wherever you go, connect your iOS or Android phone to your Mozilla account and start syncing with your other devices.

Take back control of your focus with Firefox

For remote and on-the-go workers, focus is everything.

With Firefox features like built-in ad blocking on iOS, Shake to Summarize for instant insights, and Tab Groups on Android to keep your work and personal digital spaces organized, you can transform your phone from a distraction hub into a productive workspace.

Download the latest version of Firefox for Android or Firefox for iOS today to test out any of the above features available on your device – and take back control of your attention.

The post Stay focused wherever you work with Firefox mobile browsers appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Today at ALL IN, Canada’s largest AI and technology event, Mozilla and Mila announced a new initiative and fresh investment to build an open source AI foundation layer that enables organizations and institutions to own and operate advanced AI systems locally, ensuring full control over their technology and data. 

Doubling down on its commitment to open source AI, the Government of Canada announced its support for the initiative. Mila will lead the technical delivery and coordination of the project, while Mozilla contributes technical expertise. It also provided the initial $5 million investment to kick off the project. Hypertec is committing an additional $1 million in first-year funding to accelerate initial Canadian deployments of the open source AI foundation layer on Hypertec hardware. 

“Canada has a choice: depend on technologies developed elsewhere, or build more of what we need here at home,” said The Honourable Evan Solomon, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation and Minister responsible for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario. “Open source AI gives Canadian businesses and institutions greater control over their technology and data, while making powerful tools more affordable, accessible, and easier to adapt. By supporting this work, we are strengthening Canada’s capacity to build and adopt AI on our own terms.” 

Mila and Mozilla will lead the work together: Mila drawing on a world-class community of close to 2,000 researchers and professionals, Mozilla as technical partner from industry, bringing 25 years of experience stewarding open infrastructure others build on. Mila and Mozilla are actively engaging new partners, inviting companies, research institutions, funders, governments, and developers to join and support this work. 

What’s being built

The goal is simple: make owning your AI as easy as renting it. Using open source models was never the hard part. Turning a raw open source model into something a small business, a hospital, a local charity, or a government can run in production — secure, reliable, plugged into everything else — takes an engineering team most organizations and institutions do not have and months they can’t spare. 

The goal is to offer businesses and organizations a ready-to-use AI package that they can run privately and keep under their own control, rather than having to build a complex system themselves or rely entirely on expensive, pay-per-use proprietary AI services.

For example, a small manufacturer could use the system as a private AI assistant for its employees. It could search the company’s manuals, procedures, and past project files; help staff draft reports or answer technical questions; and help its software team write and improve code. Because the system is designed to be able to run locally, the company could do this while keeping its proprietary information and data within its own environment.

That also means lower costs. For the vast majority of everyday business tasks, companies will be able to use open source AI running on open source tools instead of paying a commercial provider every time an employee makes a request. But this requires reducing the technical work and expense involved in putting open source AI into practice.

This initiative was founded to solve that problem, building the free layer that makes owning open source AI easy — the same kind of layer the web was built on. It has two halves: An open standard, published as interface contracts, so any part of the stack can be swapped for a better one. And a working “reference implementation” any organization can install on its own machines or the ones it chooses, running the models and controls it chooses against its own data, with governance and access control built in from the start. The ambition is that with the standards and foundation in place, open source AI can be built anywhere, by anyone. 

“Six months ago, we announced our partnership with Mozilla to advance open source and sovereign AI. Today, we are bringing that work to a whole new level,” said Valérie Pisano, President and CEO of Mila. “By delivering an open, secure AI foundation layer, we empower organizations, from small businesses to non-profits to governments, to own their technological future so they can run, control, and maintain AI models themselves. At Mila, our research community has always believed that for AI to be trustworthy and accessible, it must be built on open standards that keep control in local hands.”

The work already underway

Over the last six months, Mila and Mozilla have been designing the architecture, deciding which open source components belong at each layer, and testing that the whole system works end to end. This investment builds on that progress. 

Working alongside Mila and Mozilla, Hypertec will help move the initiative from research and reference implementation to real-world adoption by Canadian businesses and institutions, providing a practical, private, and cost-effective path to deploy AI while maintaining greater control over their data and technology.

“AI is advancing at an extraordinary pace and has the potential to transform our economy and society for the better. Canada has an important role to play in ensuring that AI is developed and adopted responsibly, said Simon Ahdoot, CEO of Hypertec Group. “Hypertec is proud to help turn open source innovation into AI that Canadian organizations can deploy securely and under their own control. This is exactly the kind of partnership between government, research, and Canadian industry needed to realize the full potential of AI.”

Why now

Mozilla’s State of Open Source AI report found that while 79% of developers adding AI functionality use open models, only 53% of teams ever reach production, stopped by cost, security, integration, and maintenance. This work aims to change that.

“AI today is at a crossroads, where it could be closed and owned by a few, or open and available to every coder, developer, enterprise, and nation,” said Mark Surman, President of Mozilla. That’s what we’re building — an open source AI ecosystem that fits together as seamlessly as the web, and that anyone, anywhere can build on.  We’re so grateful to Canada for scaling this work, and call on partners across sectors — from enterprises and governments to coders and startups — to join us in building this future.” 

Within six months, Mozilla and Mila expect to publish working reference implementations for enterprise, government and public-interest use cases. The two-year ambition is bigger: to have solved this problem outright, so that open source AI can be adopted fully and easily, anywhere, by anyone.

The post Mila and Mozilla announce new initiative to build trustworthy open source AI for everyone, with Canadian government support appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

The AI race is shifting. Again. Practically overnight, competition has expanded from “which AI model is best?” to a new high-stakes battle over which models people can access, through which products, and whether people have meaningful choice about AI at all.

In response, Mozilla and Mistral today announced a partnership built on a shared idea: a new, open-source AI model alternative to Big Tech-default browser ecosystems. The intent: a model deliberately designed to keep the web open to technological diversity, competition, and choice.

And we’re putting this idea into practice in Firefox. 

Mistral Small 4 is coming to Firefox Smart Window beta (learn more about Firefox Smart Window here), becoming a new AI model for Smart Window users in the US and Canada, while expanding Smart Window beta access and French-language support to Firefox users in France. Across all markets where Smart Window beta is available, Firefox users can still choose from a multitude of other AI models. 

“AI is becoming part of how people experience the web every day. We want to make sure that doesn’t mean people are chained to one company’s self-serving pipeline. With the browser sitting at the heart of the web and online experience, it should be a place where different AI providers can compete and open source has a seat at the table.

This isn’t just a product partnership. A browser shouldn’t be a one-way funnel. It should preserve what made the internet powerful to begin with: the freedom to explore, discover different ideas and tech, and decide for ourselves where to go next,” said Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, CEO of Mozilla Corporation.

Choice and competition are worth protecting

As AI integration becomes increasingly concentrated, we are in jeopardy of a handful of closed-model companies controlling the browser, the search engine, the AI model, and the surrounding services that connect them. Mozilla and Mistral are betting that independent and interoperable models can offer an alternative to global tech monopolies controlling the next digital era. 

“This partnership represents two open source advocates working together to bring Mistral’s scientific innovations to Mozilla’s consumers around the world. Together, we are bringing privacy, control, and choice to AI-powered web browsing,” said Arthur Mensch, Co-founder and CEO of Mistral.

Meaningful choice isn’t confined to personal preference for one AI model over another. Web products need to be able to work with different AI providers, and people deserve the option of switching without being locked into a single company’s ecosystem. When a tech layer as far-reaching and influential as AI is controlled by a small handful of players, it risks creating closed systems and closed doors, making it harder for new ideas and better technologies to grow, reach users, and compete on merits. 

Mozilla and Mistral aim to keep that door open. The combination of an independent browser with a frontier European AI company gives people and institutions greater access to useful, responsible AI, the opposite of locking them into one company’s singular technology ecosystem. 

Selecting Mistral, and expanding to France

Mozilla selected Mistral Small 4 after evaluating its performance for Smart Window Beta, including multilingual performance, an important part of the fit. The companies approached multilingual and multicultural tuning as a core model feature, rather than simply adapting an English-first experience for a new market. 

For Firefox users, Mistral access starts with Smart Window Beta, a browsing experience designed to turn AI into a useful assistant for the things we do online: making sense of complex search trails, finding something valuable you clicked away from, presenting data sources, and generally picking up where day-to-day internet use got left off. 

France is the first new market for Smart Window with official French-language support. Mozilla is planning additional European expansion later this year.

A different kind of AI competition

Our Mistral partnership puts an ambitious new AI model approach into practice: a multilingual, globally competitive European AI company reaching people through an independent browser, leveraging openness to create more room for new technologies to compete and succeed. Mistral can reach Firefox users without owning the browser, and Mozilla can integrate and recommend Mistral without removing user choice.

It is a natural extension of the principles that have shaped Firefox and the open web, and the kind of AI ecosystem we intend to continue building.

The post Mozilla and Mistral: Partnering to expand AI competition and preserve user choice appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.