New Directory Tiles (sponsored ads) in Mozilla Firefox didn’t go over well
Posted by: Timothy Tibbetts on 05/12/2014 07:09 AM
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Mozilla recently added in some “Directory Tiles” and people hated it. Really hated it. The concern is that Mozilla was heading towards bloating Firefox with advertisements. But, in reality, the attempt is to use sponsored tiles on the first install when Mozilla has no history to show you. Personally, I use a custom home page so I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Of course the hater’s voices always tend to be loudest.
Here is what Johnathon Nightingale had to say in their blog post:
” A few months ago Darren posted about some experiments we wanted to do with the new tab page. It didn’t go over well. A lot of our community found the language hard to decipher, and worried that we were going to turn Firefox into a mess of logos sold to the highest bidder; without user control, without user benefit.
That’s not going to happen. That’s not who we are at Mozilla.
But we will experiment. In the coming weeks, we’ll be landing tests on our pre-release channels to see whether we can make things like the new tab page more useful, particularly for fresh installs of Firefox, where we don’t yet have any recommendations to make from your history. We’ll test a mix of our own sites and other useful sites on the Web. We’ll mess with the layout. These tests are purely to understand what our users find helpful and what our users ignore or disable – these tests are not about revenue and none will be collected. Sponsorship would be the next stage once we are confident that we can deliver user value.
We’ll experiment on Firefox across platforms, and we’ll talk about what we learn before anything ships to our release users. And we’ll keep listening for feedback and suggestions to make this work better for you. Because that’s who we are at Mozilla.
Johnathan Nightingale
VP Firefox“
Here is what Johnathon Nightingale had to say in their blog post:
” A few months ago Darren posted about some experiments we wanted to do with the new tab page. It didn’t go over well. A lot of our community found the language hard to decipher, and worried that we were going to turn Firefox into a mess of logos sold to the highest bidder; without user control, without user benefit.
That’s not going to happen. That’s not who we are at Mozilla.
But we will experiment. In the coming weeks, we’ll be landing tests on our pre-release channels to see whether we can make things like the new tab page more useful, particularly for fresh installs of Firefox, where we don’t yet have any recommendations to make from your history. We’ll test a mix of our own sites and other useful sites on the Web. We’ll mess with the layout. These tests are purely to understand what our users find helpful and what our users ignore or disable – these tests are not about revenue and none will be collected. Sponsorship would be the next stage once we are confident that we can deliver user value.
We’ll experiment on Firefox across platforms, and we’ll talk about what we learn before anything ships to our release users. And we’ll keep listening for feedback and suggestions to make this work better for you. Because that’s who we are at Mozilla.
Johnathan Nightingale
VP Firefox“
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