Slashdot Mirror
Ads Based On Browsing History Are Coming To All Firefox Users
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla has announced plans to launch a feature called "Suggested Tiles," which will provide sponsored recommendations to visit certain websites when other websites show up in the user's new tab page. The tiles will begin to show up for beta channel users next week, and the company is asking for feedback. For testing purposes, users will only see Suggested Tiles "promoting Firefox for Android, Firefox Marketplace, and other Mozilla causes." It's not yet known what websites will show up on the tiles when the feature launches later this summer. The company says, "With Suggested Tiles, we want to show the world that it is possible to do relevant advertising and content recommendations while still respecting users’ privacy and giving them control over their data."
Why? Why do you rape us with this kind of shit? Is fucking with the UI (making the goddamn options menu a ugly mess of a webpage) and adding DRM codecs not enough?
Jesus christ on a stick. You can't find a way to suicide your market share faster.
* Note: if you set DNT=1, it is possible that you may not be receiving Suggested Tiles. You can very simply enable them on the new tab page with the cogwheel. We made the decision to opt users out of all sponsored Tiles experiences if they have DNT=1 quite early on, as we believe that most DNT early adopters are seeking to opt out of all advertising experiences. However, it’s important to understand that no tracking is involved in delivering Tiles.
As a Firefox Nightly user, I've already had to deal with the spam tiles. The fix is to install a 3rd party speed dial.
I use Super Start. It's nothing fancy, but it's clean and gets the job done.
How about you better give a mechanism to disable this crap?
Click on the "gear" icon (top right of the new tab page)
Clear the "Include suggested sites" box
Well, if they choose to make it opt-in, then awesome, no harm no foul, and only people who turn it on will have it.
But when it is made opt-out, it says "fuck you, we'll track you unless you know enough to stop us".
And it's that kind of behavior which really pisses us off. It shouldn't be up to the average user to have to know where to disable this crap.
Just like they backed down on 3rd party cookies to keep the ad companies happy -- it's a sign that increasingly they're driven by money, instead of writing a good browser which doesn't have all of this shit in it.
If they make this crap opt in, nobody will bitch at them. But they haven't. And we're pissed off.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
a little harsh when all you need to do is change preference in about:config:
browser.newtab.url to about:blank
done and done. the whole 'smart' newtab page is gone for good. that is one of the very nice things about firefox....... configurability..