1484545 - "@google" pinned to top sites after updating firefox beta

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, defect)

Description

[u310142]

Attachment: ggl.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:62.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/62.0
Build ID: 20180816151750

Steps to reproduce:

Update 62.0b16 to b18.


Actual results:

"@google" got added and pinned to top sites.


Expected results:

Nothing added or pinned to top sites without user consent.

Comment 1

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

A regression from bug 1482398 perhaps? That seems like a large change that landed extremely late in the beta cycle.

Comment 2

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

Yes, this did land late in beta cycle, and it's an intended product change to help people search. It can be removed with the (...) menu to dismiss or unpin that top search tile.

Comment 3

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

Also, this is on by default in beta for extra testing due to its late-in-beta landing. It is off by default in release, and there will be a shield experiment to turn it on.

Comment 4

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

>"@google" got added and pinned to top sites.
>Nothing added or pinned to top sites without user consent.

According to the original bug from the feature, "Google" would already have been within your top site tiles in order for the pin to happen. So nothing got added (but the default search engine got pinned).

See:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1480508

Does it sound reasonable that "Google" (search?) might've been one of your top sites?

Comment 5

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

Either way, the user is either getting a google url top site replaced by a top search tile (bug 1480508) or a brand new pinned google tile will be added (bug 1480509). Some users will consider this a loss of user control as something in the top sites got replaced during a Firefox update.

Maria/tspurway: is there desired communications to help explain to users (probably more than just a release note)?

Comment 6

[u310142]

(In reply to Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp] from comment #4)
> >"@google" got added and pinned to top sites.
> >Nothing added or pinned to top sites without user consent.
> 
> According to the original bug from the feature, "Google" would already have
> been within your top site tiles in order for the pin to happen. So nothing
> got added (but the default search engine got pinned).
> 
> See:
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1480508
> 
> Does it sound reasonable that "Google" (search?) might've been one of your
> top sites?

No, I've never used google search. I only use bing.

Comment 7

[Tim Spurway [:tspurway]]

This feature is meant to help the user fast access to Google, Amazon (and Bing, DDG, etc.) search providers from the awesome bar. The Top Site tiles for @amazon and @google are meant to be educational and to give users easy access to this search feature.  The feature will only replace unpinned frecent tiles and can be dismissed, which will return the user's top sites to it's original form.

We are aware that this might be a jarring experience for some users and that's why we are rolling it out as an experiment in 62 (see bug 1483396).  We are preparing a survey to be part of this study to get qualitative sentiment data, which will be combined with engagement analysis to determine if this feature is worth rolling out to 100% of release.