Waterfox: v68: Disable "Recommend (extensions/features) as you browse"

[laniakea64]

Currently Waterfox 68 has the following prefs defaulted to true -

browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.asrouter.userprefs.cfr.addons
browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.asrouter.userprefs.cfr.features

These are the settings "Recommend extensions as you browse" and "Recommend features as you browse", respectively. I suspect these settings might not work in Waterfox, because I didn't notice this until I went through about:preferences for unrelated reasons, and the associated "Learn more" links do nothing. If however these settings actually are functional, and if some users want this, it should be opt-in: pushing extensions on people who didn't request such recommendations seems spammy and anti-user.

Both prefs should be defaulted to false. If they don't work they should be locked to false to avoid mis-impressions.

[grahamperrin]

opt-in

👍

Nit (for readers who may be unfamiliar with the behaviour):

pushing extensions

It's the appearance of recommendations, not extensions, that can feel pushy.

Particularly obtrusive where the URL area is not particularly wide; YMMV.

as you browse

Also wrong, IMHO, the default clutter in the Extensions area:

Is there a preference to suppress recommendations in this area?

The adjacent area, Recommendations, is not difficult to find.

[laniakea64]

Also wrong, IMHO, the default clutter in the Extensions area:

...

Is there a preference to suppress recommendations in this area?

That is totally broken in Waterfox 68.0a2, and thus has already been hard-disabled - https://github.com/MrAlex94/Waterfox/pull/1041

[grahamperrin]

Thanks, does #1041 prevent appearance of the Recommendations area?

[laniakea64]

Thanks, does #1041 prevent appearance of the Recommendations area?

It doesn't affect it. The Recommendations area is still there in both htmlaboutaddons and classic about:addons. But it doesn't actually show recommendations, and it didn't before that PR either.

[grahamperrin]

(Thanks … I'm still limited to the binary that shows _Get Add-ons_ (not _Recommendations_) – I guess, I should take a closer look after the next binary is distributed.)

[laniakea64]

It likely wouldn't be hard for me to do a pull request to resolve this issue, but as noted in the description I would need to know whether "Recommend extensions as you browse" and "Recommend features as you browse" actually work in Waterfox. I don't know how to check.

[laniakea64]

I wasn't looking at the right things when searching the Waterfox code in relation to this.

To answer my own question, Seems this was intentionally disabled in https://github.com/MrAlex94/Waterfox/commit/1983d09d4f35d6d9e58f8088b55018e40525feb4#diff-d7a0401e94f68887594ad1d1d9f9c28dR1307 .

So these prefs need to be locked to false, and the preferences UI should probably be removed to avoid confusion. I will try to look into creating the patches for this, but so far this is proving somewhat more involved than just a simple pref flip.