Reorderable items in New Tab Page => e.g. "Stories" last

[Ag48]

I am happy to be returning to Firefox after a few years away in Google Chrome wasteland. Happy to see that the firefox new tab page has options such as number of lines of shortcuts etc. Somewhat happy to see the Pocket stories on the new tab page - my not being aware that Mozilla Corporation had acquired Pocket gives an idea of how long I had been away.

But I was unhappy to see how much space was "wasted" by the Pocket "Thought-Provoking Stories"... don't get me wrong, I know how to disable the Pocket stories. But I don't necessarily want to disable the Pocket stories. And I imagine that Mozilla  would prefer that I not disable the Pocket stories, because there is at least some possibility of Mozilla earning some money from sponsored stories, etc..

However, the Pocket stories occupied one heck of a lot of space between my shortcuts and the recent activity items. And I need to access both shortcuts and recent activity a lot more often than I need to access the Pocket stories. Ultimately I ended up disabling the Pocket stories. But if there were no option to place the Pocket stories at the end of the list of New Tab Page items, I would have used that. I suspect that would have been better for me, and probably also for Mozilla cash flow.

In more detail:

as described in https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customize-your-new-tab-page

and edited via about:preferences#home - Firefox Home Content

the new tab page or firefox homepage has several items that can be enabled or disabled

1. Web Search
2. Shortcuts
3. Weather
4. Recommended stories
5. Recent activity

These can be enabled or disabled individually. The number of rows dedicated to shortcuts and recent activity can be changed.

But the order of these items is fixed and not changeable (unless there's an extension that I haven't found yet that does that).

I would like to be able to change the order to

1. Web Search
2. Recent activity (1 row)
3. Shortcuts (2 rows)
4. Recommended stories
5. Weather <-- for me, probably disabled

Because, while I don't find the Pocket recommended stories excessively obnoxious or offensive, and I would like to give Mozilla the benefit of me clicking on sponsored links since once in a while I find them interesting, they do get in the way of me being efficient. Lacking this, at the moment I have just disabled them. Too bad,  a possible loss of income for Mozilla from sponsored links.

I agree that you probably don't want to allow arbitrary reordering: if somebody accidentally moved the Web Search to the bottom, you would probably get tech support requests. But reordering the others is probably reasonable.

Note also: myself I prefer to have Recent activity closer to the top than Shortcuts. That's another reordering. Emphasizing that just putting the stories at the end is the sort of stupid thing that Google Chrome A/B testing might end up providing.

BTW: I am adding the "Accessibility" idea label this, because I am a user of accessibility software (speech recognition Dragon or WSR), which might very well be 1 of the reasons why I want the ability to do this sort of reordering. If I were typing or mousing it would be literally painful (yes, literally, causing pain to my bad hand/shoulder) to have to scroll past the Pocket stories to the recent activity.  And while speech recognition helps - essentially I cannot use Firefox without it - it is nevertheless slower to have to skip past a lot stuff. Overall I find that accessibility users are even more interested in an efficient user interface, with stuff arranged in an efficient way, because accessibility software almost in that variably reduces speed.

[Jon]

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