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Mozilla To Show Sponsored Links To First-Time Firefox Users
Mozilla has announced a new initiative to show sponsored content within the Firefox browser. Currently, opening a new tab in Firefox will display a set of nine tiles showing your most commonly visited websites. When a user installs Firefox and opens it for the first time, they see these tiles, but eight of them are blank (one links to a Firefox tutorial). As the user browses the web, those tiles gradually fill in with visited sites. But Mozilla is going to fill out those blank eight tiles for new users. They say, "Some of these tile placements will be from the Mozilla ecosystem, some will be popular websites in a given geographic location, and some will be sponsored content from hand-picked partners to help support Mozilla’s pursuit of our mission. The sponsored tiles will be clearly labeled as such, while still leading to content we think users will enjoy." Existing users shouldn't see any difference, and the tiles will be replaced with commonly-visited sites like they do now.
That's a pretty intense over-reaction to Mozilla filling in some previously blank tiles with some temporary filler. That filler disappears as you accumulate visited site and only appears when you actually use the "new" tab.
SeaMonkey is still going strong too, with a slightly smoothed version of the old Communicator interface - http://www.seamonkey-project.o...