[Meta] Top Sites

[vesta0]

User Stories

• Access top visited sites on homepage #6757 As a user, I want to easily access my top visited sites on my homepage, so I can get to the information I need faster.
• Add a favorite sites to the homescreen #6758 As a user, I want to be able to explicitly add one of my favorite sites to the home screen
• Remove a top site #6759 As a user, I would like to be able to remove a top site I no longer want to see
• Default Top Sites #8126 Default Top Sites

See feature brief for more details

Dependencies

• [Meta] Optimize homescreen #6602 Optimize homescreen should be done first
  (if choose to go the auto-top sites route) Add AS query for most frequently visited sites Add an API to fetch history pages for top sites mozilla/application-services#2163
• Migration piece to get pinned sites Pinned sites migration android-components#5126
• Create a Top Site Storage component Create a Top Sites Storage component android-components#5315

Acceptance criteria

• I see Pocket Top Articles on the homescreen
• I see default Top Sites on the homescreen
• I can add a top site
• I can remove a top site
• I can open a top sites in regular browsing mode
• I can open a top sites in private mode
• [Telemetry] Top Sites [Telemetry] Top Sites #7525
• [Telemetry] Default top sites [Telemetry] Default top sites #8125

UX flow

https://share.goabstract.com/f9ae2c95-4a95-4b0e-917c-d87b9854a600?mode=design&sha=2fac94ac7fd2676633043e1967dc696c5071a8da

┆Issue is synchronized with this Jira Task

[vesta0]

A-S ticket filed here but may not be required if we go with the minimum initial version of this.

[liuche]

Next steps here: we'll break out into a user-story filing (@boek and @topotropic)

[liuche]

Chatted with @linacambridge and @grigoryk about what it would take to pull frequent sites from history (AS query), and pinned sites (from migration) (and updated comment 0).

If we want to generate a static top sites, once, and then use that everywhere later, the complexity probably is in knowing "when to pull from top/pinned sites" based on a combination of migration, signing into fxa, starting to sync a history engine.

[Cheap-Skate]

Minor comment re the UX flow in Comment 0

It's not clear to me what "add to Firefox home" means i.e. I don't really recognise the current "tabs tray" as a home page. I think I (and perhaps others) have the opposed view to some of you Mozilla guys, I live my life in tabs and think of the tabs tray as merely a route to a new tab, not a destination or home page. I'm sure we'll change our views in time but I think you might use clearer wording for us Luddites....

So my simple suggestion would be change the wording away from "Add to Firefox home" for example re-use the plus sign and "pin site" wording that's used on the Home screen itself

e.g.

On the Home screen "Pin site +"

On the 3 dot menu "+ Pin site on Home screen"
or "+ Add to Top Sites"
or ... something ??

[Cheap-Skate]

Is there a plan to have Fenix auto-add frequently visited sites to Top Sites?

I think that's really important, I know casual users who rely on the browser identifying and presenting Top Sites i.e. they don't bother pinning them themselves, they just use what the browser suggests.

[Cheap-Skate]

Final comment:- I really like the idea that I can have as many rows of Top Sites as I like!

(Which makes me think.... folders on the Top Sites page? Tap a folder to open it, see Top Sites inside? Then it replicates the Android Home screen where I can place a folder on the Home screen and put apps in it) Mmmmmm

[cadeyrn]

Is there a plan to have Fenix auto-add frequently visited sites to Top Sites?

It's the first checkbox in comment 0:

#6757 As a user, I want to easily access my top visited sites on my homepage, so I can get to the information I need faster.

This one is not about manually adding top sites because the next one is about manually adding sites:

#6758 As a user, I want to be able to explicitly add one of my favorite sites to the home screen

[madb1lly]

First time I've seen that UX mobkup. I agree with @Cheap-Skate that I wouldn't necessarily know what "Firefox Home" means, coming from Fennec. I personally struggle to see what is wrong with the Fennec Awesome-page, that hasn't been well explained yet AFAICT.

And what on earth is a snackbar?! :D

Cheers 🙂

[cadeyrn]

And what on earth is a snackbar?! :D

https://material.io/components/snackbars/

[vesta0]

@djc @Cheap-Skate FYI we are also making changes to the tab tray and the back button that aligns better with this approach.

@topotropic I think it may be a good idea to use something like "pin site to home screen" instead of "add to Firefox home" what do you think?

[djc]

@vesta0 sounds good! Are those changes being tracked in some issue or Bugzilla bug that I could follow?

[topotropic]

@topotropic I think it may be a good idea to use something like "pin site to home screen" instead of "add to Firefox home" what do you think?

I find "home screen" problematic, because we also use it to refer to the device's home screen ("Add to Home screen" in the menu). "Firefox new tab" or "Firefox new window" could be an alternative. I originally choose the "Firefox home" terminology because we also use it on Firefox on desktop.

@mheubusch can you chime in here? Thanks!

[Cheap-Skate]

Yeah on Desktop it's clear, the app (Firefox) has a Home page; the OS (Windows/Mac/Linux) has no Home screen, typically it's a Desktop.

On Android I think many users understand that Home is the Android Home screen/launcher. So what is Fenix's Top Sites & tab switcher page called? IMHO "Home" is too confusing. How about "Firefox Central" :)

[madb1lly]

In Fennec the new tab page is called "Homepage" in settings, but in terms of pinning sites it's not called that AFAICT. I think the new page is unofficially called the "Awesome Page" isn't it? Similar to how the combined search and address bar is the "Awesome Bar".

Slightly off-topic, but can someone please give me the reference/link to the discussion/explanation of why the new tab page from Fennec isn't being retained for use in Fenix, and why in Fenix we are trying to cram tabs and new tab page stuff into a single screen?

Cheers :)

[Cheap-Skate]

Slightly off-topic, but can someone please give me the reference/link to the discussion/explanation of why the new tab page from Fennec isn't being retained for use in Fenix, and why in Fenix we are trying to cram tabs and new tab page stuff into a single screen?

I think this has been the plan from Day 1, idea is to make Fenix Home screen centric. I dislike it, I want it to be tab centric like Fennec. I filed #570 now closed. There are various howls of dismay at the loss of the Fennec Awesomescreen (some from me) but Mozilla wants to try something new, fair enough. There is a redesign of the Home screen coming #1063 and #6602 and https://mozilla.invisionapp.com/share/7PSR7KCSW6Z#/screens/372749649_Latest. But it's still different to what we're used to. Somewhere I read that the Awesomescreen was not well liked by (casual?) users.

I am currently concerned that tapping a Top Site will always open it in a new tab which I think will be a PITA, my morning skim of a dozen news sites will result in an overload of tabs all of which will need to be killed or reloaded the next time I skim. But we shall see.

[mheubusch]

@topotropic Your explanation as to why "Firefox home" is correct. We are avoiding confusion with Android's home screen. I think if we observe that users can't complete the task or don't discover it at all because of the label we should consider a new phrase and test that for task completion and discovery before rolling it out.

[yoasif]

I saw a post about this on reddit today and I found it really hard to find the feature. There are no top sites by default, so even though I knew the feature existed, I actually went to the build info to see if my build had it.

[andreicristianpetcu]

I am tracking this feature and I also found out from Reddit :)

[sblatz]

Can this meta be closed? :)

[vesta0]

@sblatz I am just waiting for the telemetry ticket #8125 to be closed.

[djc]

I'm confused. I understood Top Sites to be about a list of sites collected from frecency data from the user's profile. At least, that's what I get on desktop Firefox and what I used to use in Fennec. As far as I see, currently there's only Pocket/Wikipedia/YouTube. How could this issue be closed?

[Dunexus]

Also, they are not synced with desktop top sites.

[gabrielluong]

I'm confused. I understood Top Sites to be about a list of sites collected from frecency data from the user's profile. At least, that's what I get on desktop Firefox and what I used to use in Fennec. As far as I see, currently there's only Pocket/Wikipedia/YouTube. How could this issue be closed?

Also, they are not synced with desktop top sites.

This is totally understandable. These items are on my list of things to do. We don't necessarily have to cover these features in this meta since we can just as easily refer to these features with the Feature:TopSites label.

[vesta0]

All the issues sited here are now closed :)

[madb1lly]

Hi @vesta0,

By "My top sites" I had understood my most frequently visited sites, just like in Fennec and Desktop. Isn't this part of this scope of this meta issue? Or is there another issue for this?

Thanks 🙂

[boek]

Hey @madb1lly,

Yes that feature is being tracked here: #10342