Bugzilla

Engineering spoke with UX about this today. We are going to add a preference to about:preferences#search to control whether Top Sites are shown when the address bar is focused. If the preference is disabled, we will not show any list of favourite/frecent sites in the address bar. 

We won't be bringing back the old dropmarker/frecent sites list. This is to reduce confusion: since the Top Sites can be quite similar (even identical in some cases!) it could be frustrating to some users who disable a pref to show Top Sites on focus, but then who see a very similar list of sites instead. It might not be clear what the distinction is, or how to control the new behaviour. We considered other behaviour to show frecent sites, like showing them after the user clicks an already-expanded address bar or presses the down arrow, like we do on the New Tab Page, but we decided against it. We want to keep this behaviour as straightforward as possible. Users who really want to see their frecent sites list can type `^` in the address bar.

Since there's considerable interest in this bug, I'll add that we have a number of other bugs on file to improve Top Sites behaviour: bug 1631845, bug 1631844, and bug 1631848. Final behaviour is pending a design specification from UX.

Engineering spoke with UX about this today. We are going to add a preference to about:preferences#search to control whether Top Sites are shown when the address bar is focused. If the preference is disabled, we will not show any list of favourite/frecent sites in the address bar. We will link to this preference from the address bar results panel in bug 1631845.

We won't be bringing back the old dropmarker/frecent sites list. This is to reduce confusion: since the Top Sites can be quite similar (even identical in some cases!) it could be frustrating to some users who disable a pref to show Top Sites on focus, but then who see a very similar list of sites instead. It might not be clear what the distinction is, or how to control the new behaviour. We considered other behaviour to show frecent sites, like showing them after the user clicks an already-expanded address bar or presses the down arrow, like we do on the New Tab Page, but we decided against it. We want to keep this behaviour as straightforward as possible. Users who really want to see their frecent sites list can type `^` in the address bar.

Since there's considerable interest in this bug, I'll add that we have a number of other bugs on file to improve Top Sites behaviour: bug 1631845, bug 1631844, and bug 1631848. Final behaviour is pending a design specification from UX.

Engineering spoke with UX about this today. We are going to add a preference to about:preferences#search to control whether Top Sites are shown when the address bar is focused. If the preference is disabled, we will not show any list of favourite/frecent sites in the address bar. We will link to this preference from the address bar results panel in bug 1631845.

We won't be bringing back the old dropmarker/frecent sites list. This is to reduce confusion: since Top Sites can be quite similar to the old list (even identical in some cases!) it could be frustrating to some users who disable a pref to show Top Sites on focus, but then who see a very similar list of sites instead. It might not be clear what the distinction is, or how to control the new behaviour. We considered other behaviour to show frecent sites like showing them after the user clicks an already-expanded address bar or presses the down arrow, like we do on the New Tab Page, but we decided against it. We want to keep this behaviour as straightforward as possible. Users who really want to see their frecent sites list can type `^` in the address bar.

Since there's considerable interest in this bug, I'll add that we have a number of other bugs on file to improve Top Sites behaviour: bug 1631845, bug 1631844, and bug 1631848. Final behaviour is pending a design specification from UX.