STR:

1. Open Firefox Options ( about:preferences )
2. Open "General" tab ( about:preferences#general )
3. In "Browsing" section disable "Recommend extensions as you browse"
4. Open "Privacy & Security" tab ( about:preferences#privacy )
5. In "Nightly Data Collection and Use" section disable "Allow Firefox/Nightly to make personalized extension recommendations"
6. Open Add-ons Manager (about:addons )

and see that Recommended Extensions is still visible in Extension tab, same as Recommended Themes is visible in Themes tab.

I don't want to see any bloaty spammy adware, nagware, annoyware there like before.

"Recommend extensions as you browse" covers context-specific recommendations that appear when you visit specific websites, whereas recommendations at about:addons are not specific to any website. Disabling "Recommend extensions as you browse" will prevent personalized recommendations from appearing at about:addons, and cause generic recommendations to be shown instead (at about:addons). This might be surprising.

Currently, the only way to hide recommendations at about:addons is by visiting about:config and setting extensions.htmlaboutaddons.recommendations.enabled to false.

(In reply to Rob Wu [:robwu] from comment #1)

"Recommend extensions as you browse" covers context-specific recommendations that appear when you visit specific websites, whereas recommendations at about:addons are not specific to any website. Disabling "Recommend extensions as you browse" will prevent personalized recommendations from appearing at about:addons, and cause generic recommendations to be shown instead (at about:addons). This might be surprising.

Currently, the only way to hide recommendations at about:addons is by visiting about:config and setting extensions.htmlaboutaddons.recommendations.enabled to false.

I have 'extensions.htmlaboutaddons.recommendations.enabled` set to 'false' and the Recommendations are still shown in the tab.

What's more, hiding preferences in about:config doesn't seem like good idea, as how user will know about this that some hidden preference control this.

(In reply to Jim Jeffery not reading bug-mail 1/2/11 from comment #2)

I have 'extensions.htmlaboutaddons.recommendations.enabled` set to 'false' and the Recommendations are still shown in the tab.

That is normal. This preference only controls whether recommendations are seen in the extension/themes list.
"Recommendations" was previously called "Get Add-ons", which has been around for a while.

(In reply to Virtual_ManPL [:Virtual] - (please needinfo? me - so I will see your comment/reply/question/etc.) from comment #3)

What's more, hiding preferences in about:config doesn't seem like good idea, as how user will know about this that some hidden preference control this.

That's why this bug is kept open, to see if we need to change anything here.

@ Mark Striemer [:mstriemer] - When you will get back from PTO please look at this bug. Thank you very much in advance!

Duplicate of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1559586

Let's mark it inversely, per activity and what's more having GUI user control is not "invalid" in any way, especially with extensions and themes "advertising".

This seems to be a misunderstanding of what this preference does, which isn't entirely clear. We've discussed this and will be making the preference more clear in bug 1580958.

This is not misunderstanding - we just don't want any recommendations at all!

Quoting description:

I don't want to see any bloaty spammy adware, nagware, annoyware there like before.

They already closed this one. And already decided to push with recommendations (personalized or not). I just think there is no use to have separate Recommendations menu then. At least remove redundant elements. Although i would vote to keep recommendations in the actual Recommendations menu and keep Installed add-ons page clean. For now i have disabled them via about:config, until this option is available.

We're looking at the preferences in bug 1583600

(In reply to Mark Striemer [:mstriemer] from comment #10)

This seems to be a misunderstanding of what this preference does, which isn't entirely clear. We've discussed this and will be making the preference more clear in bug 1580958.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1580958 ***

This could be looked here in this bug, instead of creating another one duplicated bug about same topic, but whatever, it will be nice when this will be finally fixed either way.