Today, people have to work too hard to find what they want online, sifting through and steering clear of content, clutter and click-bait not worthy of their time. Over time, navigation on the internet has become increasingly centralized and optimized for clicks and scrolling, not for getting people to where they want to go or what they are looking for quickly.
We’d like to help change this, and we think Firefox is a good place to start.
Today we’re announcing our first step towards doing that with a new feature called Firefox Suggest.
Firefox Suggest is a new discovery feature that is built directly into the browser. Firefox Suggest acts as a trustworthy guide to the better web, surfacing relevant information and sites to help people accomplish their goals. Check it out here:
Relevant, reliable answers:
Firefox already helps people search their browsing history and tabs and use their preferred search engine directly from Firefox’s Awesome Bar.
Firefox Suggest will enhance this by including other sources of information such as Wikipedia, Pocket articles, reviews and credible content from sponsored, vetted partners and trusted organizations.
For instance, suppose someone types “Costa Rica” into the Awesome Bar, they might see a result from Wikipedia:
Firefox Suggest also contains sponsored suggestions from vetted partners. For instance, if someone types in “vans”, we might show a sponsored result for Vans shoes on eBay:
We are also developing smarter contextual suggestions. These aim to enhance and speed up your searching experience. To deliver smarter contextual suggestions, Firefox will need to send Mozilla new data, specifically, what you type into the search bar, city-level location data to know what’s nearby and relevant, as well as whether you click on a suggestion and which suggestion you click on.
In your control:
As always, we believe people should be in control of their web experience, so Firefox Suggest will be a customizable feature.
We’ll begin offering smarter contextual suggestions to a percentage of people in the U.S. as an opt-in experience.
Find out more about the ways you can customize this experience here.
Unmatched privacy:
We believe online ads can work without advertisers needing to know everything about you. So when people choose to enable smarter suggestions, we will collect only the data that we need to operate, update and improve the functionality of Firefox Suggest and the overall user experience based on our Lean Data and Data Privacy Principles. We will also continue to be transparent about our data and data collection practices as we develop this new feature.
A better web.
The internet has so much to offer, and we want to help people get the best out of it faster and easier than ever before.
Firefox is the choice for people who want to experience the web as a purpose driven and independent company envisions it. We create software for people that provides real privacy, transparency and valuable help with navigating today’s internet. This is another step in our journey to build a better internet.
