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Firefox experiment helps you get the best shopping deals
The Firefox Test Pilot team has rolled out a couple of new experimental features, one of which can help make this year's holiday shopping a bit easier on your wallet. It's called Price Wise, and it's an online shopping comparison tool that lets you add items from across several retailers to a Price Watcher list. Anytime one of your items gets a price drop, it'll send you a desktop notification -- just click on that item from within the tool itself to visit the retailer's product page.
Firefox experiment suggests articles based on your web history
You can already save articles for later viewing in Firefox thanks to Pocket integration. That's not going to help you find articles, however, and it's all too tempting to stick to the same old sites for your reading habits. Mozilla wants you to be a little more adventurous. It's introducing a new Test Pilot experiment, Advance, that recommends stories based on both your current page and recent web history. The extension uses machine learning technology from Laserlike to identify common traits in the trusted sites you visit and offer new pieces in a sidebar. If you've been reading many football articles, for instance, Firefox may suggest a piece about a recent player trade.
Mozilla tests a password manager for Firefox on iOS
Test Pilot for Firefox is a program that allows users who have downloaded stable build browsers to try out experimental features without having to take the risks of using a beta version. Today, the team at Mozilla announced that Test Pilot is now coming to mobile, and there are two new features that users can try out.
Firefox adds the ability to snooze tabs on Test Pilot
It probably happens quite often: you come across an interesting piece, but you're too busy to actually read it. While you can always bookmark a web page, Firefox's latest Test Pilot experiment can help make sure you'll see it again when you do have time for it. The experimental feature called SnoozeTabs dismisses any tab you want and asks you to set the time when you want it to reappear on your browser.
Firefox users can try experimental features with Test Pilot
Firefox already has several builds made to test out experimental features, but now you can take some of them for a spin even if you only have the stable browser. Mozilla has re-launched Test Pilot for Firefox, an add-on it first released in 2009 to study how people interacted with their browser. This one comes with three features the team is still in the midst of developing. First is Activity Stream, which turns every new tab into a home-page-slash-news-feed that displays the newest posts from your top websites. It also highlights some of the pages you've bookmarked.
Pioneering astronaut Neil Armstrong dies at 82
It's a story that we hoped we'd never have to report. Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on Earth's Moon, has died at the age of 82 after complications from heart surgery three weeks earlier. His greatest accomplishment very nearly speaks for itself -- along with help from fellow NASA astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, he changed the landscape of space exploration through a set of footprints. It's still important to stress his accomplishments both before and after the historic Apollo 11 flight, though. He was instrumental to the Gemini and X-series test programs in the years before Apollo, and followed his moonshot with roles in teaching aerospace engineering as well as investigating the Apollo 13 and Space Shuttle Challenger incidents. What more can we say? Although he only spent a very small portion of his life beyond Earth's atmosphere, he's still widely considered the greatest space hero in the US, if not the world, and inspired a whole generation of astronauts. We'll miss him. [Image credit: NASA Apollo Archive]
