Firefox has a little side project going that could change how you shop online, or at least that’s the idea. Buried inside Firefox Nightly, the browser’s testing channel, is a hidden page called about:smartwindowtasks that lets you point the browser at a webpage, tell it what you’re waiting for, and then walk away.

A price drop, a restock, tickets finally going on sale, whatever. Firefox keeps checking in the background and pings you the moment it happens, so you’re not the one hitting refresh forty times a day.

This is an extension of Smart Window, Mozilla’s assistant-style spin on the address bar that already answers questions and pulls things from your history. If you’ve been following along, you’ll know Smart Window has been getting steady attention lately, and the last update even taught it to answer questions on its own using web search instead of dumping you on a results page. So this new feature is somewhat of an extension of that.

Setting one up is pretty straightforward, at least on paper. You open the alerts page, hit Create alert, give it a name, and type what you want it to look for, something like Price drop. Then you paste in the page you want watched (you can add up to five), pick how often Firefox should check, say daily, and set a time. That’s it. Firefox does the rounds on its own and keeps a little history of what it found and when.

Now for the part where I have to be honest with you. I tried to actually set one of these up and could not get past the finish line. I filled everything in, a Newegg page, a price drop alert, the whole deal, and clicked Create alert. Nothing. Clicked it again — still nothing. Restarted the browser, tried again, and it just refused to register the click, over and over. I’m on a Mac, and it wouldn’t budge for me, which is a good reminder that Nightly is called Nightly for a reason.

Mozilla is clearly still hammering out the rough edges here, the same way it’s been doing with other in-progress tools like the panel that shows you which tabs are eating your RAM.

That said, the folks at Windows Report spotted the feature first, and their Windows version fired off a desktop notification when a MacBook dropped below the price they set, so it clearly functions when the stars align.

Keep in mind that this is still in beta, so there’s a chance that it won’t make it to the stable release if the developers decide that it’s not worth the effort.

If you run Nightly and you’re the patient type, it’s worth poking at. Just don’t be shocked if the button ignores you too. And if managing all of Firefox’s new AI bits starts feeling like a lot, there’s now a handy Manage AI shortcut right in the search bar to keep it all in check.

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