Firefox plans to send more data than you think to Mozilla, like it will send your keystrokes, your location and more to the Mozilla servers.
This change comes as part of the introduction of Firefox Suggest on Firefox 93, released on October 5, 2021, although it is currently only active in the United States.
As part of Firefox Suggest, Firefox is introducing ads into its search bar, but that’s not the only thing that will be new to Firefox users.
eBay ad among suggestions
According to Mozilla, “Firefox Suggest acts as a trusted guide to a better web, displaying relevant information and websites to help people achieve their goals.”
What this really means is that when you start typing in the address bar, you won’t just see the default search suggestions from Google or your current search engine by default. You’ll also see “Firefox Suggestion” results that point to web pages. Some of them are sponsored ads, but you can disable ads.
Firefox Suggest is enabled by default. Mozilla’s blog post on the subject says Firefox Suggest is an “optional experiment,” but it is now enabled by default in Firefox 93, at least in the US.
For many years, Firefox and other web browsers have had search suggestions in their address bar. So when you type “win” in the address bar, you can see suggestions for “Windows 11” and “Winrar”. This is done by sending your keystrokes to the default search engine as you type in the search bar.
Firefox Suggest is more than that. In addition to sending your keystrokes to Google or your default search engine, Firefox will also send them to Mozilla. Both the search engine of your choice and Mozilla will return suggestions.
Mozilla also offers contextual suggestions for which you need more data, such as what city you are in and if you click on the suggestions.
To provide contextual suggestions, Firefox will need to send new data to Mozilla, ie what you type into the search bar, city-level location data to find out what’s next and what’s relevant, as well as whether you click on a suggestion and which suggestion you click.
