On Tuesday, Mozilla began its tests on a new Firefox extension that will show you its best speculations for what you’d want to view on the web. An experiment distributed via Mozilla’s Test Pilot program has so far been aimed at letting interested individuals to try out new features and help Mozilla in refining them before they finally release them. Advance is however tricky on Mozilla’s part as they try to figure out how to make Firefox competitive again. In this case Mozilla aims to be more competitive by keeping their users more informed, educated, diverted and entertained.
Though Google’s Chrome controls the largest share of web usage today, Mozilla hopes to use Advance to get you off your usual internet rut and embrace Firefox. In its blog post, Mozilla says that they intend to take their users back to the Firefox roots with the experience that got everyone surfing the web. A separate and broader recommendation channel is already available on Firefox new-tab page. The websites proposed to the user are gotten from Mozilla’s pocket service used for bookmarking websites for reference in the future.
The now more focused Advance web extension presents the user a side bar with suggested websites based on the content of the webpage that is already loaded. It utilizes machine-learning content recommendation software developed by start-up Laserlike and Mozilla has no intention to monetize the feature. Although it is easy to recommend new content for users, it is however much more difficult to recommend content that will supply better information without annoying let alone alienating the user. Even recommendations that seem well aligned with the user’s taste run a risk of being repetitive or stale.
There are also privacy concerns that Firefox will share potentially personal information about their users to Laserlike. Mozilla is however trying to clear up the issue and give the users control over the situation. This is essentially why they are rolling out the experiment to try and tackle the issue head-on. According to Mozilla, they have also included controls for the user to view the browser history that Laserlike has on them and can at any point pause the experiment. Mozilla added that they are interested to see the users’ response as they have an active role in helping them improve the efficiency of the Firefox browser.
