Telemetry-Aware Add-on Recommendation for Web Browser Customization

Abstract

Web Extensions (add-ons) allow clients to customize their Web browsing experience through the addition of auxiliary features to their browsers. The add-on ecosystem is a market differentiator for the Firefox browser, offering contributions from both commercial entities and community developers. In this paper, we present the Telemetry-Aware Add-on Recommender (TAAR), a system for recommending add-ons to Firefox users by leveraging separate models trained to three main sources of user data: the set of add-ons a user already has installed; usage and interaction data (browser Telemetry); and the language setting of the user's browser (locale). We build individual recommendation models for each of these data sources, and combine the recommendations they generate using a linear stacking ensemble method. Our method employs a novel penalty function for tuning weight parameters, which is adapted from the log likelihood ratio cost function, allowing us to scale the penalty of both correct and incorrect recommendations using the confidence weights associated with the individual component model recommendations. This modular approach provides a way to offer relevant personalized recommendations while respecting Firefox's granular privacy preferences and adhering to Mozilla's lean data collection policy. To evaluate our recommender system, we ran a large-scale randomized experiment that was deployed to 350,000 Firefox users and localized to 11 languages. We found that, overall, users were 4.4% more likely to install add-ons recommended by our ensemble method compared to a curated list. Furthermore, the magnitude of the increase varies significantly across locales, achieving over 8% improvement among German-language users.