When building features for hundreds of millions of Firefox users worldwide, it’s important to get them right. To help figure out which features should ship and how they should work, we created the new Test Pilot program. Test Pilot is a way for you to try out experimental features and let us know what you think. You can turn them on and off at any time, and you’ll always know what information you’re sharing to help us understand how these features are used. Of course, you can also use Test Pilot to provide feedback and suggestions to the teams behind each new feature.
As you’re experimenting with new features, you might experience some bugs or lose some of the polish from the general Firefox release, so Test Pilot allows you to easily enable or disable features at any time.
Feedback and data from Test Pilot will help determine which features ultimately end up in a Firefox release for all to enjoy.
What New Experimental Features Can You Test?
Activity Stream: This experiment will make it easier to navigate through browsing history to find important websites and content faster. Activity stream helps you rediscover the things you love the most on the web. Each time you open a new tab, you’ll see your top sites along with highlights from your bookmarks and history. Simply browse the visual timeline to find what you want.
Tab Center: Display tabs vertically along the side of the screen instead of horizontally along the top of the browser to give you a new way to experience tabbed browsing.
Universal search: Combines the Awesome Bar history with the Firefox Search drop down menu to give you the best recommendations so you can spend less time sifting through search results and more time enjoying the web. You’ll notice that search suggestions look different. If you have been to a site before, you will see it clearly highlighted as a search suggestion. Recommended results will include more information about the site suggestion, like top stories on the news page or featured content.
How do I get started?
Test Pilot experiments are currently available in English only and we will add more languages later this year. To download Test Pilot and help us build the future of Firefox, visit https://testpilot.firefox.com/