Back in February, Mozilla announced that it was going to trial promotional tiles in its ‘new tab’ page. Now, the company has revealed that the idea “didn’t go over well” with users — but it will try again anyway.
In a blog post, Mozilla VP Jonathan Nightingale says “A lot of our community found the language [them] 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.” He added that “That’s not going to happen. That’s not who we are at Mozilla.”
All that said, though, Mozilla will continue to “experiment” with “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.” Those links won’t feature paid-for content just yet — but Nightingale did write that “sponsorship would be the next stage once we are confident that we can deliver user value.”
In other words: you didn’t like these ads first time round, but dammit if they aren’t going to try and find a way to shove them down your throats if they can. [Mozilla via The Register]