Firefox has started showing “Recommended by Pocket” articles in the new tab area. This is currently available in a selected few countries like India and Brazil but it will be rolled out in other countries, sooner or later.
Now, I don’t like an algorithm to tell me which articles I should be reading. I use feed readers and read articles from the sources I choose to follow.
If you don’t like these article recommendations and you prefer not to see it in your new tab area, there is an easy way to disable it. Let me show it to you.
Disable article recommendations in Firefox
Open a new tab in Firefox browser. You’ll notice a Personalize button in the top right corner. Click on it.
You’ll see a few options here. One of them is “Recommended by Pocket”. Toggle this button off. You’ll notice that the recommended articles disappear immediately.
And that’s all you need to do here. Pretty simple, isn’t it?
Why does Firefox show these recommended articles?
Pocket, previously known as Read It Later, is a bookmarking tool owned by Mozilla, the parent company of Firefox.
If you do not know already, Mozilla is financially dependent on Google. It earns a few hundred millions for keeping Google as the default search engine in the Firefox web browser.
Mozilla is trying to reduce its economic dependency on Google. In this effort, Mozilla is offering a few premium services like Pocket and Mozilla VPN to generate additional revenue.
Now, Pocket was initially a bookmarking tool with option to save the article offline, Mozilla is experimenting by recommending articles from various websites. For this, Mozilla has agreement with selected web publishers. It is likely that it brings Mozilla some much-needed revenue, though I am not sure about it at this moment.
So now you know why there are article recommendations in Firefox and how to disable it if you don’t like them. I hope you liked this quick Firefox tip.
