[Tip] Disable “Please Help Make Firefox Better by Taking This Short Survey” Notification

Recently while using Mozilla Firefox browser, I received a promotional survey message from Mozilla team in form of a banner or notification bar at the top. The banner text was as following:

There was a heartbeat icon displaying on the notification bar and a Close button to dismiss the survey prompt.

Following screenshot shows the survey notification banner displaying in Firefox browser:

These promotional messages are part of Heartbeat feature in Firefox which occasionally sends promotional messages such as participate in surveys, rate your Firefox experience, old version, etc to the users. It helps Mozilla team in getting feedback from users and improving Firefox browser.

Following are the types of messages which are shown by Heartbeat feature in Firefox:

• Take short survey to make Firefox better.
• Please rate Firefox experience (star rating)
• Your Firefox is critically out of date. An update is required to stay secure.

If you get annoyed by these types of promotional messages, you can easily get rid of them. Fortunately, Mozilla team provides a hidden preference/flag which can be modified to opt out of the Heartbeat program and disable or remove these banners and notifications.

Once you turn off Heartbeat feature, Firefox will no longer display any survey or rating experience banners to you. Also you’ll never receive Firefox out of date notification in your browser.

Following steps will help you in permanently disabling or removing all kind of banners, promotional surveys and out of date version notifications in Firefox:

1. Open Mozilla Firefox and type about:config in the addressbar and press Enter. It’ll show you a warning message, click on “Accept the Risk and Continue” button. It’ll open Firefox’s hidden secret advanced configuration page i.e. about:config page.

2. Now type normandy.enabled in Search filter box and look for following preference in the window:

The preference value is set to true by default, which means the Heartbeat feature is enabled in Firefox.

3. To permanently disable surveys and rating banners and notifications in Firefox, double-click on app.normandy.enabled preference and set it to false. Alternatively, you can click on the Toggle icon given next to the preference name.

That’s it. It’ll immediately turn off the irritating surveys and banners and Firefox will stop showing them.

PS: In future, if you decide to re-enable surveys and notifications, set the above mentioned preference to True again.

Also Check:

[Tip] Disable Telemetry and Data Collection in Mozilla Firefox Web Browser