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

Posted by timothy on from the now-how-much-would-you-pay? dept.

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.

3 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Well... by mystikkman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Mozilla is the only hope left in the browser market. The rest are controlled by mega corps. Witness the recent ramrodding of video DRM into W3C standards by Google, Microsoft and Apple, all of which have their own DRM implementations.

    Not to mention Firefox being forced to support H.264 playback, after Google promised and backtracked on removing support from Chrome. Based on the above two cases, I guess it's already too late, corporate control has taken over the web.

  2. R.I.P. Mozilla by nimbius · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    --
    Good people go to bed earlier.
  3. Mozilla tiles too complicated? by lippydude · · Score: 5, Informative

    "When you first launch Firefox, a message on the new tab page informs you of the following .. It's quite a lot to take in all at once"

    It seems fairly straight forward to me: a) a promise that the feature abides by the Mozilla Privacy Policy, b) a reminder that you can turn tiles off completely ..