Hi All, This is just a heads up that the core work to support our site suggestions functionality in Top Sites has landed and the initial set of sites should be visible in Nightly very soon.
What are site suggestions? Firefox for Android displays thumbnails in it's Top Sites section. Normally, those thumbnails display screenshots (except when the site hints that we shouldn't) of your most frequently visited sites. After a fresh install and on first-run, the Top Sites thumbnails were mostly empty. The few thumbnails we show by default were displayed as "favicons centered in a color picked from the dominant color of the favicon" and are not very aesthetically pleasing. See: http://people.mozilla.org/~mfinkle/fennec/screenshots/topsites-old.png With site suggestions, these thumbnails are much nicer and give Firefox a much more appealing experience. We feel that the new approach is also more useful to people getting started with Firefox. We want Firefox to feel more engaging and appealing to new users. We don't intend to fill all the empty spaces, but we want to give users something to start browsing. Yes, we'd like to get feedback on the current level of functionality and ideas for other types of sites we could add to the list. Yes, you can turn off the feature as well. See: http://people.mozilla.org/~mfinkle/fennec/screenshots/topsites-suggestedsites.png The initial set of sites are all Mozilla properties. This was the simplest approach and gives us a baseline to start to get feedback. The work to land the initial set of sites was done here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=997765 Like search engine functionality, each locale shipped with Firefox for Android can create it's own set of site suggestions. After we get feedback from people and fix any issues that get filed, we'd like to move forward with picking some non-Mozilla sites to add to the list of suggestions. We have some ideas internally, but we're interested to hear what other people think are good site suggestions for new users. We'd like to consider sites that have solid value for new users, but also sites that share some of Mozilla's values too. What kind of types of sites would you like to see? News, Videos, Shopping, Social? We are also considering an add-on API that would allow add-ons to also create site suggestions too. Some notes: 1. If a site hints that it does not want a screenshot taken and used in the Top Sites section, Firefox will first look to see if a site suggestion image exists. If one does, it will be used as the site's thumbnail. If one does not exist, the previous "favicon centered in the dominant color" approach will be used. 2. Technically, each locale shipped with Firefox for Android can define a set of site suggestions. 3. People can turn off the feature using "Settings > Customize > Home" and unchecking "Show site suggestions" Thanks, Finkle
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