Mozilla announced today that it’s adding recommendations to the URL bar in Firefox through a replacement feature called “Firefox Suggest.” Now, additionally, to the autocomplete suggestions that show whenever you start typing something, you’ll see suggestions from Mozilla itself. It also seems like Mozilla will use Firefox Suggest to serve ads, though users will have a point of control over the recommendations they see.
In a blog post to its website today, Mozilla explains that Firefox Suggests was born of the very fact that “people got to work too hard to seek out what they need online,” lately, and since “navigation on the web has become increasingly centralized and optimized for clicks and scrolling, not for getting people to where they need to travel or what they’re trying to find quickly.”
Firefox Suggest is that the answer to those issues. Some Firefox users may already be conversant in Suggest because it has been in testing to a point within the initiate to today. Still, now the feature appears to be rolling bent everyone.
In any case, when users type something into Firefox’s URL bar, they’ll see suggestions for pages associated with their search. For example, typing “Costa Rica” into the URL bar, as Firefox shows, will suggest the Costa Rica Wikipedia page. additionally, to Wikipedia, Firefox Suggest also will surface suggestions that include “Pocket articles, reviews and credible content from sponsored, vetted partners and trusted organizations.”
In addition to the present, Mozilla says that it’s developing contextual suggestions to consider specific data from users. “To deliver contextual suggestions, Firefox will got to send Mozilla new data, specifically, what you type into the search bar, city-level location data to understand what’s nearby and relevant, also as whether you click on a suggestion and which suggestion you click on,” Mozilla wrote.
We must wonder if Mozilla will get some pushback from Firefox users here because injecting ads into autocomplete suggestions might not sit well with many of them. The great news is that those more brilliant suggestions are opt-in, and users can close up Firefox Suggest entirely by going into the Search tab of their browser settings then deselecting Firefox Suggest under the “Search Suggestions” heading. You’ll read more about Firefox Suggest within the blog post linked above and over on the Firefox support site.
