1985394 - Enable important dates suggestions by default and decouple them from the nonsponsored pref

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Address Bar, task, P1)

Description

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Nive says important dates should be enabled by default starting in 143.

Comment 1

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Just realized we should make important dates independent of suggest.quicksuggest.nonsponsored too, since they're considered utility suggestions and not Suggest suggestions, even though they're implemented as Suggest suggestions. Should do that as part of this bug.

Comment 2

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Attachment: Bug 1985394 - Enable important dates suggestions by default and decouple them from the nonsponsored pref.

This enables important dates only in the current Suggest region-locale pairs:

• en locales in the US
• en locales in the UK
• fr locale in France
• de locale in Germany
• it locale in Italy

Nive says we do want to enable these suggestions for en locales in the EU too,
but it can be a follow-up. It shouldn't be hard to do, but we need to be careful
since it means we'd be enabling Suggest for new region-locale pairs, e.g., en
locales in Germany. We'd need to decide whether Suggest The Brand should be
visible to those users and if so make sure they get the right suggestions (AMP,
Wikipedia, etc.), or if it should not be visible and instead only used as an
implementation detail to deliver important dates and other "utility"
suggestions. Either way, it wouldn't be wise to uplift that kind of change.

Comment 3

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/9fa9a55ad48c
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/1c5c374c6f76
Enable important dates suggestions by default and decouple them from the nonsponsored pref. r=mbeier,urlbar-reviewers,jteow

Comment 4

[Cosmin Sabou [:CosminS]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/1c5c374c6f76

Comment 5

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Attachment: Bug 1985394 - Enable important dates suggestions by default and decouple them from the nonsponsored pref.

This enables important dates only in the current Suggest region-locale pairs:

• en locales in the US
• en locales in the UK
• fr locale in France
• de locale in Germany
• it locale in Italy

Nive says we do want to enable these suggestions for en locales in the EU too,
but it can be a follow-up. It shouldn't be hard to do, but we need to be careful
since it means we'd be enabling Suggest for new region-locale pairs, e.g., en
locales in Germany. We'd need to decide whether Suggest The Brand should be
visible to those users and if so make sure they get the right suggestions (AMP,
Wikipedia, etc.), or if it should not be visible and instead only used as an
implementation detail to deliver important dates and other "utility"
suggestions. Either way, it wouldn't be wise to uplift that kind of change.

Original Revision: https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D262746

Comment 6

[Phabricator Automation]

firefox-beta Uplift Approval Request

• User impact if declined: Product has asked us to enable the new important-dates suggestions feature in 143.
• Code covered by automated testing: yes
• Fix verified in Nightly: no
• Needs manual QE test: yes
• Steps to reproduce for manual QE testing: I'll post some STR in the bug
• Risk associated with taking this patch: low
• Explanation of risk level: This only enables a new type of suggestion for users where Firefox Suggest is already enabled (US, UK, IT, FR, DE).
• String changes made/needed: none
• Is Android affected?: no

Comment 7

[Pulsebot]

https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/ad9afd0fda34
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-beta/rev/cbf7d3ecf4ff

Comment 8

[Adrian Florinescu [:aflorinescu]]

Can you please point us to what environment we should test this on? We've tried on prod, dev and stage with both 143.b07 and 144.0a1 .
Currently, also the general tests for Important Dates are done on dev RS environment, but this might not be correct either (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1982011#c3).

Comment 9

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

You should be able to test on prod now. I just copied over the data to prod and stage. The current data on dev was uploaded on 28 Aug 2025 09:29:57 GMT, so that hasn't changed since then. The data is the same on all three so it shouldn't actually matter which one you test, but of course prod would be best since that's what real users will use.

I'll comment in the other bug too, thanks!

Comment 10

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Also in case it didn't come up before, to enable important dates you now need to set browser.urlbar.importantDates.featureGate to true. You do not need to set browser.urlbar.quicksuggest.dynamicSuggestionTypes anymore. (Changed in bug 1983376 last month)

Comment 11

[Adrian Florinescu [:aflorinescu]]

Verified with 143.0b7 and 144.0a1 (2025-09-03) on Windows 11, Mac 14 and Ubuntu 22.

The verification consisted into verifying that the RS collections match the specified locales/region combinations:

• en-US/en-GB/en-CA + region US
• en-US/en-GB/en-CA + region UK
• fr + region FR
• de + region DE
• it + region IT

We've also testing with both stage and prod RS collections.

Drew only one NIT, from stage env.locale in ['en-CA', 'en-GB', 'en-US', 'en-ZA'] && env.country == 'US' . We didn't know what exactly en-ZA is, so we didn't cover that.

Comment 12

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Thanks! No problem, it's not necessary to cover all of them IMO. en-ZA is South African English, which is one of Firefox's supported en locales. We always include every Firefox en locale for Suggest features since the differences between them are minimal.