Backend (code-driven) activity is being picked up and contaminating Browsing history if Firefox Suggest list

Could you add some images? (Also ideally try to capture whether the line, if you hover it, has a (•••) contextual menu, and what options it lists?)

Thanks for the response.

I can't capture images right now because it has dropped off the list for now. (I completely cleared every reference 2 days ago which made it go away. Then yesterday it was back after visiting the co.uk site. I went back to the history listing and cleared everything again, which made it disappear again.)

But to the most important point, there is no contextual menu.

Actually, I figured I would give it an attempt. After that last message, I browsed around the Amazon uk site a bit, and hey presto. .com is back on the list. Attached the screenshot of the address bar dropdown and the state of today's history with the search showing zero activity.

Weird.

If it was under "Firefox Suggest" heading it would have the menu button to remove from there.

This looks like genuine history entry. Interestingly, the .co.uk does not use the .com domain proper in any calls — they are either .dev, or are something like amazon-media if on .com … so I don't see any JS/XHR or other subresources loaded from that domain.

Which leaves contamination from the Suggestions from sponsors (despite that having been expressly unchecked), which timing-wise aligns with when it first appeared

Nope, that's in the "Suggest" code path. This is genuine history–based.

And guess what: (this profile never visited .com ever)

The mystery deepens… (even stranger with that screenshot as it is conflating .com and co.uk)

I think all amazon TLDs get somehow canonicalized, and then recommended as a whole. As the home tab tile also says UK title from the last visit, but the tile URL is .com there as well — so the address bar most likely pulls the .com from the shortcut tile. And tiles might have some canonicalization logic in place (folding various googles, wikipedias and yahoos into one tile etc.)

The canonical is somewhat disconcerting, especially in this case where it aggregates to the less appropriate option. But that's secondary in this instance.

It doesn't explain why a single visit to Amazon gets a couple orders of magnitude more weight than visits to other sites. (I have in the past attempted to navigate around other sites to outweigh amazon, just to get rid of it… to no avail)

Editing the home shortcut tile actually then shows the same title as you see in your results so it's most likely coming from this code path where shortcuts are deduped on home, and end up … with global domain? (What does your about:support say about App Locales, Regional Preferences, Default Locale or System Locales? all GB or there's some US in there?)

For "frecency" see support.mozilla.org/questions/1589122 — there's a bug linked you can consult and consider opening a similar one, if either all hits appear skewed, or if specifically amazon results seem off the usual math there.

For similar amazon placeholder placement that caused weird effect see support.mozilla.org/questions/1587776 and the linked threads.

For the amazon canonicalization if you want to file a bug, I have a clean profile saved for repro/attachment if you need.

Actually no, following this change bugzilla.mozilla.org/1628669 didn't lead to any regressions, however, there's now bugzilla.mozilla.org/2008359 so this is already tracked.

You can follow that bug for updates.

There is some us in the Localisation, but GB prominence. But I'm not overly worried about the canonical… it's the overweighting that is really getting under my skin. Will look at the bugs to see how I can emphasise shortly.

There are some internal avenues how to check for the "frecency" stored, and if the search/typeahead results can stem from that, some console commands are described e.g. in bugzilla.mozilla.org/1489539 that's not too different from this as well.