Mozilla Rolls Out Sponsored Tiles To Firefox Nightly's New Tab Page

An anonymous reader writes Mozilla has rolled out directory tiles, the company's advertising experiment for its browser's new tab page, to the Firefox Nightly channel. We installed the latest browser build to give the sponsored ads a test drive. When you first launch Firefox, a message on the new tab page informs you of the following: what tiles are (with a link to a support page about how sponsored tiles work), a promise that the feature abides by the Mozilla Privacy Policy, and a reminder that you can turn tiles off completely and choose to have a blank new tab page. It's quite a lot to take in all at once.

Comments

Turn tiles off... but for how long?

[QuietLagoon]

...a reminder that you can turn tiles off completely ...

How long will it be before Mozilla decides that the users no longer need the ability to turn off the sponsored tiles?

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not really sure that Opera counts... at all!

R.I.P. Mozilla

[nimbius]

one of the core values of the Mozilla manifesto is this:

use the Mozilla assets (intellectual property such as copyrights and trademarks, infrastructure, funds, and reputation) to keep the Internet an open platform;

How does mozilla expect sponsored advertisement to exist without a conflict of interest? It can't. Mozilla is now beholden to and will become ever increasingly dependent upon ad revenue, which in turn will ensure mozilla projects and opinions will be screened before release to meet the advertisers approval.

personally? im switching because i still want a free internet. check out icecat or midori.

Re:R.I.P. Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla has been paid and supported for as long as Firefox has pretty much been around thanks to Google.
Your whole post: nope.

Mozilla hasn't changed at all. It is just whiny babies that cry because the instant they hear "ads", they cry like the entitled kiddies they all are.
You can disable the feature as well. It's not like they are forcing it on you period.
It is like you blame Mozilla for supporting images on websites that are adverts.

God damned Mozilla, trying to survive and expand! EVIL!
Never mind the fact they are trying to become independent from Google pressures, which would be a Good Thing.

Also, your internet has never been free. In both views.
Everyone has to pay at some point. You pay by having companies die off because they, and a typical view of ad-haters at that, "can't support it out of their own pockets".
Face facts, the web would never be possible as it is now without advertising. PERIOD. It isn't even an opinion.
Pretty much NOBODY is willing to pay for every website they visit. Large websites and companies NEED advertising.

Re:R.I.P. Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

> Mozilla is now beholden to and will become ever increasingly dependent upon ad revenue,

Uh yeah. Perhaps you haven't noticed that they have been nearly entirely funded by google kickbacks from the search-bar for like a decade.
If anything this makes the relationship with advertisements more explicit so there is a reduced opportunity for a conflict interest to manifest.

donate

[ssam]

If every Firefox user donated $1 they would not need to do this.https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/

Re:Well...

[QuietLagoon]

...What, exactly, do you hate about it?...

For starters, I do not 'hate" software. It's not an emotional thing for me. I look at software as something that helps me do what I need and/or want to do.

.
To that end, Firefox's Australis is a degradation of Firefox. It has significantly reduced my ability to customize the user interface of Firefox to suit my needs.

Mozilla's attempt to find a "one size fits all operating systems" approach to Firefox has resulted in a significant dumbing down of the user interface.

I do not want Firefox to look the same across all the OS's I use. I want Firefox to exploit each OS to the greatest extent while staying within the conventions of that OS. That's where Mozilla went astray....