Experimenting with improved awesomebar suggestions in Nightly 110

[Dave Townsend]

Way back in Firefox 3 we introduced the “Smart Location Bar”[1] (also known as the “awesomebar”), to suggest relevant items from the user’s browsing history as they type URLs or search queries. Under the hood, this makes use of some client-side models (primarily the “frecency” algorithm) that use locally-stored details about page visits, including the date, time, urls, and title.

In Firefox 110 nightlies we plan to start experimenting with improving on these local models by storing some additional information about a user’s visit to each webpage including:

• How long they spend viewing the page
• How much scrolling they do on the page
• How much typing they do on the page (only aggregate counts of keypresses, not recording specific keypresses)

The goal is to use these signals to provide better-quality suggestions. For example this would allow us to discount pages that the user spent little time viewing, such as login interstitials, or suggesting a page that the user only visited once but spent a lot of time editing.

This feature will remain in Nightly only for now while we experiment with it and will not currently be synced between devices. There is no plan to include any part of this in telemetry sent to Mozilla. This information is not gathered in private browsing mode and currently expires after 60 days.

Bug to enable in Nightly: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1804227

Preference: browser.places.interactions.enabled

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=444278

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