Mozilla has introduced a new Firefox Suggest recommendation system that displays additional suggestions as you type in the address bar. From recommendations based on local data and access to a search engine, the new feature differs in the ability to provide information from third-party partners, which can be both non-profit projects such as Wikipedia, and paid sponsors.
For example, when you start typing a city name in the address bar, you will be offered a link to the description of the most suitable city in Wikipedia, and when you enter a product, you will be offered a link to purchase from an eBay online store. Offers may also include sponsored links obtained through an affiliate program with adMarketplace. You can enable or disable additional recommendations in the "Search Suggestions" section of the "Search" settings section.
If Firefox Suggest is enabled, the data entered in the address bar, as well as information about clicks on recommendations, is transmitted to the Mozilla server, which through itself broadcasts the request to the partner's server in order to block the possibility of data binding to a specific user by IP address. In order to provide recommendations based on events occurring nearby, information about the user's location is also sent to partners, which is limited to information about the city and is calculated based on the IP address.
At first, the Firefox Suggest feature will only be enabled for a limited number of US users. Before turning on Firefox Suggest, the user is presented with a special window asking them to confirm the activation of the new feature. It is noteworthy that the consent button with the inclusion is clearly visible in a prominent place, next to which there is a button for going to the settings, but there is no explicit button for rejecting the offer. It seems that the function is imposed and it is impossible to refuse the offer - only a close examination of the content allows you to understand that in the upper right corner the text “Not now” is indicated in small print with a link to refuse inclusion.
In addition, we can note the start of testing the new interface of the Firefox Focus browser for Android. The new interface will be offered in the Firefox Focus 93 release. The Firefox Focus sources are distributed under the MPL 2.0 license. The browser is focused on ensuring privacy and giving the user full control over their data. Firefox Focus has built-in tools to block inappropriate content, including ads, social media widgets, and external JavaScript to track movement. Blocking third-party code significantly reduces the amount of downloaded materials and has a positive effect on page loading speed. For example, compared to the mobile version of Firefox for Android, pages in Focus load 20% faster on average. The browser also has a button to quickly close a tab, clearing all associated logs, cache entries, and cookies. Of the shortcomings, the lack of support for add-ons, tabs and bookmarks stands out.
Firefox Focus is enabled by default to send telemetry with depersonalized statistics about user behavior. Information about collecting statistics is explicitly indicated in the settings and can be disabled by the user. In addition to telemetry, after installing the browser, information is sent about the source of the application (ad campaign ID, IP address, country, locale, OS). In the future, if you do not disable the mode of sending statistics, information about the frequency of application use is periodically sent. The data includes information about the activity of the application call, the settings used, the frequency of opening pages from the address bar, the frequency of sending search requests (information about which sites are opened is not transmitted). The statistics are sent to the servers of a third-party company, Adjust GmbH, which also has data on the IP address of the device.
In addition to a complete redesign of the interface in Firefox Focus 93, settings related to blocking the code to track user movements have been moved from the menu to a separate panel. The panel appears when you tap the shield symbol in the address bar and contains information about the site, a switch to manage blocking trackers in relation to the site, and statistics about blocked trackers. Instead of the missing bookmarking system, a system of shortcuts has been proposed that allows you to add it to a separate list when you visit the site frequently (menu “…”, button “Add to shortcuts”).
Source: opennet.ru