Back in April, Mozilla decided to know which web browser Firefox users use as their default on Windows and included a scheduled task called Firefox Browser Agent in Firefox to know about the same. Now, the company is testing a notification in Nightly where it will appear when you open the first new tab in a session and asks you to set Firefox as your default browser.
While the test is targeted for Firefox 81, right now, you can see the prompt in Firefox 82 Nightly.
To get started,
- Launch Nightly
- Open a new tab,
- You’ll receive a notification with a message asking to “Set Firefox as your default browser? Get fast, safe, and Private browsing whenever you use the web.”
Set Nightly as your default browser notification on Firefox new tab - If you don’t take any action, it will appear once in the next four sessions whenever you open a new tab.
Disabling Firefox’s default browser notification bar on New Tab Page
- Clicking on ‘x’ icon will close and disable the notification bar forever
- Or you can visit about:config and change the following pref value to false
browser.defaultbrowser. notificationbar
If you click on “Set as default”, the Settings App opens on Windows 10 and allows you to choose and set Firefox as the default web browser
The notification bar appears only to users who don’t use Firefox as the default browser.
Firefox 81 getting lots of new features
In other news related to Firefox 81, Mozilla has readied new Print Preview dialog, Media Control feature, Pioneer v2 study, added support for form filling for PDFs and Credit Card autofill and included a new and colorful Alpenglow theme in about:addons page.
So, when compared with Firefox 80, Firefox 81 is a major release with a lot of new features.
Firefox already has a setting enabled to always check if it is the default browser, this additional prompt may annoy users even more, what do you say?
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Firefox for Android adds External Download Managers Support
How to disable Firefox’s “An Extension is hiding some of your tabs” Alert
I only use FF for certain tasks like banking which aren’t supported on my default browser which is Waterfox Classic.
I have version 80 installed at the moment, but even when accessing about:config browser.defaultbrowser.notificationbar is already set to false.
In Windows 8.1 Task Scheduler there’s no sign of the Firefox Browser Agent anywhere. Presumably that’s because I’ve elected not to send telemetry to Mozilla.