972913 - Directory Tiles in New Tab

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tracking Graveyard :: Firefox Operations, defect)

Description

[Marco Mucci [:MarcoM]]

1.  Goal
* As a user, I want to have a set of useful suggestions on the new tab page the first time I open Firefox after downloading it so that I can jump right to sites that interest me.

2.  Acceptance Criteria (AC)
* In the New Tab page all 9 tiles display a Directory Tile before the user has any significant browsing history (Directory Tiles are replaced with History Tiles over time)
* Directory Tiles are available before the user opens the new tab page for the first time, there is no dependency to download the tiles as the page appears
* Each set of directory tiles are intended to target a specific locale (i.e. en-US tiles), tiles not for global Firefox usage
* There will be 9 en-US directory tiles for this Directory Tiles v1 release, other locales must continue to behave as they currently do without Directory Tiles.
* Directory Tiles will be replaced by User History Tiles as the user browses

3.  Notes/Supporting Documentation
* Useful directory tiles is a mix of both sponsored tiles (like Amazon, ESPN, etc) and organic top site tiles which are not sponsored (like YouTube, Facebook, etc) but are also useful for the locale.
* For this Directory Tiles v1 release “directory tiles” will not be available for non en-US installations.
* If there are no Sponsored Tiles available for a release the “directory tiles” will be comprised solely of Top Sites tiles
* For this Directory Tiles v1 release we will be keeping the current tile replace algorithm which will treat directory tiles as if they were blank tiles.  This will mean that our directory tiles are only visible on the New Tab page for a very short period.
** Simple approach for Directory Tiles v1 is treat Directory Tiles as frecency 1000 (above random page visits including "Welcome to Firefox" with frecency 100, and below pages the user typed in which starts at frecency 2000). This will make Directory Tiles persist a little longer than being pushed off by any User History Tile while not showing "Welcome to Firefox". We can easily set the default Directory Tiles equivalent frecency to say.. 150 to bump out the welcome page, but pages with 2 visits should start pushing out Directory Tiles - Ed Lee

Comment 1

[David Tenser [:djst]]

Hi, this bug describes a reasonable behavior for Directory Tiles (they appear in a fresh profile, and they are replaced with user-visited sites after an explicit visit to a website). However, our Advancing Content blog describes a very different behavior:

"How long will a user see Directory Tiles after they start using Firefox?

Our frecency algorithm takes about 30 days of normal browsing behavior to update Tiles. At that point the user will start seeing content that reflects the sites they’ve recently and frequently visited."

https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/13/more-details-on-directory-tiles/

Is there a bug that tracks the implementation of that behavior, and better yet, is there a place where that behavior is discussed?

Thanks!

Comment 2

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

(In reply to David Tenser [:djst] from comment #1)
> Is there a bug that tracks the implementation of that behavior
Bug 975228 comment 2 also asks this same question and that bug is to implement the behavior.

Comment 3

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

clarkbw, bug 975235 and bug 995262 implement the client sending and server processing of clicks/impressions. Do we have a separate bug to track the privacy policy changes to allow for that?

Comment 4

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

(In reply to Ed Lee :Mardak from comment #3)
> clarkbw, bug 975235 and bug 995262 implement the client sending and server
> processing of clicks/impressions. Do we have a separate bug to track the
> privacy policy changes to allow for that?

Let me add you to that bug.

Comment 5

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

Directory Tiles launched with 33.1