Apparently, some users not happy they’re receiving add-on recommendations in Firefox 65 despite the fact that Mozilla has limited the recommended extensions to three to curtail criticism.
For the uninitiated, Mozilla built Contextual Feature Recommender (CFR) system to recommend Firefox features and extensions when they think they will be useful to users. The company doesn’t get any money from add-on developers for showing these.
After testing CFR on Nightly, Mozilla announced they’ll ship CFR experiment to US users first with Firefox 64, but the recommendations not triggered due a bug and users now getting them in Firefox 65.
As we said above, to avoid annoying users, the company has prepared to show only three extension recommendation –Facebook Container, youtube Enhance, and Google Translate — which users see when they visit respective websites in the browser.
A user regarding this in Firefox subreddit says Firefox is becoming adware. “I’m glad there is a way to opt-out, but it feels like I shouldn’t have to. The original release of Firefox Quantum was excellent. It feels like Firefox has slowly become adware since then.”
Since Mozilla already clarified they don’t get any compensation from extension developers for showing these and extensions are selected manually by Mozilla editorial team, users still consider them as advertisements.
Another Redditor feels these should be opt-in. “This kind of annoying shit should be opt in. As usual, they’ve a hard time understanding their audience”.
One Redditor along with some, appreciates thing saying ” I want to understand things that I’m having hard time dealing with. If these popups are easy to disable, non-intrusive, legitimately useful and are picked on usefulness instead of profit, I see no problem with them and current implementation fits pretty well”
For those interested, here is how CFR recommendations work.
When a user visits Facebook, Facebook Container extension recommendation will be shown and the popup will be minimized by default, users to need to click CFR icon to see the recommendation. Then they can install or visit settings from option ‘Manage extension recommendations’ offered in the dialog to disable reocmmendations.
Here is how to turn off extension recommendations if you don’t want to see them in Firefox browser:
Click on hamburger menu > Options > General > Browsing,
Uncheck ‘Recommend extensions as you browse’.
Done.
Related articles:
Firefox 64 adds UI option to block Extension Recommendations
