1097232 - Re-introduce about:home to existing Firefox users

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Chris More [:cmore]]

This bug may be slightly controversial, but I am going to file it to start the conversation and see what we can do. This is just a proposal and it needs discussion.

==What's the story?==

We have recently found that only a minority Firefox users have their homepage as about:home. The vast majority of users have their homepage set to something else. "Something else" could be anything from about:blank to another website. There is currently no supporting data to understand how users use their homepage and how Firefox could do a better job at serving them.

There are a few possible reasons for why only a minority of users don't use about:home:

* Purposely changed their homepage to a bookmark or other website.

* Adjusted the setting to use a blank page when Firefox starts or changed their homepage to about:blank.

* Installed a piece of software that overrode their homepage setting.

* Malware changed their homepage.

* User changed their settings to "Show my windows and tabs from last time" when Firefox starts and thus never see about:home unless all tabs are closed before re-opening Firefox.

* Some other reason.

Note: Given that we know that the majority of users customize their browser very little, it is odd that only a minority of users ever see about:home. Something must be happening with the majority of users and their homepage settings. It is also possible that a change/issue was made long ago in their profile and this continues to carry forward each updated release.

==Why is about:home important?==

On top of about:home providing a default search engine as the primary CTA, it also includes the snippets channel that is the primary method that we have to talk to our existing users by language, location, and Firefox channel. If only a minority of users see about:home and snippets are our primary user channel, snippets are currently being vastly underused. Also, about:home contains other common browser settings and features (bookmarks, sync, history, etc.) at the bottom to help the user make Firefox their own.

==What is the proposal?==

TL;DR: Given that Firefox can have 1 or more homepages and we don't want to destroy any data, append about:home to the list of Firefox homepages if it doesn't exist.

While it would most ideal to append about:home to only those users who didn't purposely change their homepage to something else, it would be difficult to accurately know when that has happened.

Use cases:

* about:home is currently their homepage

Action: do nothing

* about:blank is their homepage

Action: do nothing

* about:home is not their homepage

Action: append about:home to the list of their homepages. First or last is yet to be determined and each has pros/cons. This check and append should only be done once per user and should *not* happen on each upgrade.

User segment:

* Firefox desktop
* All locales
* All platforms
* Release channel (since it is more likely that non-release users would customize their homepage on purpose and know how to change it -- still an assumption)

==Thoughts==

* Some users may have removed about:home and added another website and they will get about:home back, but will continue to have their custom homepage.

* Some users may have their homepage set to a search engine (google, yahoo, bing) and don't know improvements made to about:home over the years.

* Some users may have no idea that about:home exists and may think it is a new custom feature of Firefox.

* Some users may take about:home back out of their homepage list and that we don't want to put it back in later if we know they have made that decision. We need some way to noting when a user has made a decision and to respect that decision.

* If about:home and about:newtab were to be combined in the future or if about:newtab were to include snippets, does that negate this bug?

* How can we re-introduce about:home to users if this bug was implemented?

* Would we consider re-introducing about:home in on /whatsnew/ and give a one-click option to allow the user to opt-in to about:home?

* Given that about:home is in Firefox by default and you can change it to something else, about:home is opt-out for new users. Would we consider this still an opt-out for existing users if we put it back in?

==Next steps==

* Discuss this idea and see if it something we should pursue further.

* Decide if we want to to some user testing to gauge qualitative feedback.

* Consider doing an experiment to anonymously count the most common domain+top level domains (TLD) combinations in homepage settings? Domain = google, yahoo, cnn, etc. and TLD = com, org, edu, uk, etc. We would not record anything other than the domain and TLD. No directories or query parameters would be included. This will help to understand the situation.

Comment 1

[Chris More [:cmore]]

Instead of making any changes to Firefox preferences, what about if we had a communications channel on about:newtab?

We should also define:

* user value of about:home
* mozilla value of about:home

Comment 2

[Chris More [:cmore]]

It is also possible re-introducing about:home to users provides little benefit to them and thus doing a change like this could not be helpful to the users.

Comment 3

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Chris More [:cmore] from comment #0)
> We have recently found that only a minority Firefox users have their
> homepage as about:home. The vast majority of users have their homepage set
> to something else.

What data did you use for this? Telemetry? FHR? Something else? What does "vast majority" mean? 60%, 95%, ...?

I'm worried that the sample here is skewed. It'd also be interesting to distinguish about:blank from "random other URL", and to re-evaluate after the google.com / start.m.o reset work is done.

Comment 4

[Chris More [:cmore]]

Agree that it should be interesting to re-evaluate the percentages after bug 1077740 is resolved.

Comment 5

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Seems like this has the potential to irritate users who deliberately changed it.

What if, as part of some future upgrade, we open about:home in a new tab and have some messaging (UITour? Snippet? Overlay panel?) trying to sell the user on why they might want it as their home page, with a  button to make about:home the default again?

We could run this as a trial/experiment on a fraction of users, to gauge interest/reaction/conversion.

Comment 6

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Justin Dolske [:Dolske] from comment #5)
> Seems like this has the potential to irritate users who deliberately changed
> it.
> 
> What if, as part of some future upgrade, we open about:home in a new tab and
> have some messaging (UITour? Snippet? Overlay panel?) trying to sell the
> user on why they might want it as their home page, with a  button to make
> about:home the default again?
> 
> We could run this as a trial/experiment on a fraction of users, to gauge
> interest/reaction/conversion.

I like this. It'd also give us an idea of how many people look at the page/snippet/thing and how many act on it thinking, yes, I'd want that - and then what actual conversion is a week or so later, which gives some clue as to how much of this is (persistent) hijacking... although to be fair, we could maybe implement other means of doing that, eg. bug 1051082.

Comment 7

[Chris More [:cmore]]

I agree that this could irritate some users and that's not good. Also, there is some data to show that the reason that people don't see about:home often is because of session restore or they don't close their browser often. I do agree that doing it as part of the whatsnew/tour UI is possible. We would have to give them a value proposition and then have the webpage be able to reset the homepage *if* the user makes that decision.

Comment 8

[Chris More [:cmore]]

There is no easy way to determine if the homepage being changed is because of a user making that decision, software installed that updated it, or malware that changed it without the user's consent. Any way we look at the rest, some users will not like it. By asking the users, we eliminate that possibility and put the choice in control of the users regardless of how it got changed in the first place.

Comment 9

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

(In reply to Chris More [:cmore] from comment #8)
> There is no easy way to determine if the homepage being changed is because
> of a user making that decision, software installed that updated it, or
> malware that changed it without the user's consent.

Yeah. :( It would be really interesting to know what homepages people have set and if they really wanted them (eg, to look for patterns of 3rd party switcheraoos, and just auto-revert any known-egregious ones). But I don't know how to obtain such data without grossly violating user privacy.

Related: I don't recall if we've done any anti-hijacking stuff for the user's homepage (similar to what we did for default search-engine hijacking). We should probably consider doing so if we're going to make a push to get people back to about:home, otherwise we'll find ourselves back in the same spot before too long.