After ChatGPT Atlas and Comet, Firefox joins the AI browser race to take on Chrome

Mozilla Firefox is embracing AI to gain market share in an increasingly competitive browser market. The company is offering users the choice to use Firefox as they have been for years or switch to a private window called AI Window to bring the power of AI and personalise their browsing experience.

“While others are building AI experiences that keep you locked in a conversational loop, we see a different path — one where AI serves as a trusted companion, enhancing your browsing experience and guiding you outward to the broader web,” Mozilla said in a blogpost.

The company says its AI Window will let users chat with an AI assistant and get help while browsing the web. The new feature will be opt-in, and users can also choose to turn it off completely.

Mozilla says that it is building the new feature ‘in the open’ and users will have to be part of a waitlist to enjoy AI Window when the feature arrives. In a community post, Mozilla also confirmed that users will have the choice of selecting an AI model that best meets their needs and toggle on or off the AI Window feature at any time.

Notably, AI Window is the third AI feature that Mozilla has announced apart from the AI chatbot in the sidebar for desktop and the Shake to Summarize feature on iOS that allows users to get an AI generated summary of a webpage.

Google Chrome remains at top but competition is emerging:

For the first time in years, there has come a moment when Google Chrome’s dominance at the top of the browser chain has been threatened. The new-age AI browsers offer an enhanced experience with agentic AI capabilities, meaning the AI can take actions on behalf of users.

In the last few months, Perplexity has released its Comet AI browser to all users on desktop and is planning to bring the experience to mobile devices, while OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas has arrived on Mac and the company has said it will bring the experience to other platforms as well.

However, Firefox has an inherent advantage in the browser race since it has been among the oldest browsers on the market. Moreover, Mozilla does not use the Chromium codebase and instead uses its own Gecko engine, which makes it fundamentally different from Chromium-based browsers like Atlas, Comet, Opera, Samsung Internet and others.

In any case, Chrome has continued to lead the browser race by a long margin. As per Similar Web data, Chrome holds a 69.33% market share in the desktop browser market, followed by Microsoft Edge at 15.48%, Safari at 7.5% and Firefox at 4.84%.