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I just recognised the Firefox folder AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[profile]\personality-provider containing a bunch of JSON files which all have categories/topics in their names like "travel", "real_estate", "arts_and_environment" and "people_and_society".

If I take a glance in the file with for example the latter topic, I find hundreds of keywords with values associated. They look something like this:

"unique": [1111, 2.655829522]
"opportunity": [750, 3.69274818]
"able": [55, 2.993240598]

(I figured out that the first value is just the number of the specific keyword, but not sure how the second value is calculated.)

I found some bugs on Bugzilla talking about personality provider but cannot infer what it is used for, only have a clue that this is generated locally from the browsing history.

I would be grateful if someone had an answer to any of these questions:

  1. What is the data here used for?
  2. What Firefox setting controls if this data is being produced and extracted here into these files?
  3. What do the fractional numbers next to the keywords mean?

Thanks a lot!

florien
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1 Answers1

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I was wondering this too because while watching Sysinternals' Process Monitor I saw some writes to this folder when nothing should be happening.

I did some searching and found this question, then searched some more and found the article that Reddy commented above, about Firefox Containers (contains "personality" keywords but may not relate). Then I found a german forum asking the same question [here]. I translated the page to english, and one of the comments linked to an explanation in a different thread [here], about Firefox release 80 in August 2020 (translated from german. bold added by me):

Since the Firefox update there is a directory called "personality-provider" in the cache folder. There is little enlightening information on the web about this part. Is there any information about this?

According to the code changes, the directory has basically existed since Firefox 76. However, I have not checked whether there was a gradual roll-out and whether it is possible that this only arrived in Firefox 80. This is a cache for the default Firefox home page. Specifically, it is about the pocket recommendations, which have a kind of personalization.

I cannot verify the accuracy of this information, especially since I've disabled pocket recommendations on my new tab page, but it looks like the most likely explanation we have right now.

I'm not sure if it will make a difference but it seems you can disable Pocket by following these instructions and these instructions (I'm not going to quote the instructions because there's a lot, and it's not an answer to your question).

gamingexpert13
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