News - Mozilla will introduce sponsored tiles on Firefox start page

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The company plans to sell tile placement on the new-tab page of its popular browser.

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Read more.

Personally I hope they do an option to pay a small donation and not see the ads. I understand that very little 'freeware' is actually free - they have to make money (at least running costs) from somewhere, but 'sponsored tiles' is only a whisker away from the start of a slippery slope.

and they wonder why they keep losing marketshare....I know they need money to develop the program but a 'forced advertising' page is not the way to go imo.

Obviously I don't want firefox to go anywhere but the dev's have seemingly lost the plot, they just are not listening to what the users want anymore, the amount of people trying to convert ff29 back to the old ui is pretty high on forums I visit.

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Originally Posted by Tpyo

Personally I hope they do an option to pay a small donation and not see the ads. I understand that very little 'freeware' is actually free - they have to make money (at least running costs) from somewhere, but 'sponsored tiles' is only a whisker away from the start of a slippery slope.

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Like google!

Oh sponsored results in search, fair enough, you have to pay the bills, sometimes it's useful.

Oh you store my entire history, websites I've visited, emails I've exchanged, and target the adds, erm I guess that is kinda still useful.

Oh you are selling my information, how I react to brands, how often they are involved in emails..... ERGH.

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Originally Posted by LSG501

...the amount of people trying to convert ff29 back to the old ui is pretty high on forums I visit.

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That's where classic theme restorer comes in handy - although not perfect.
I really dislike the default ff29 theme, when I first saw it I thought it was an addon playing up.

I only see the 'new tab' page for a few moments while I'm typing an address or search so that doesn't really bother me, however it does seem to be a slipperly slope!

Seems they have to make money somehow, i can't see the problem with this.
After all once you discover add-ons FF can be setup to show whatever page you like in the new tab.

As with the new theme, removed as soon as it installed, i hope add-ons will be available to remove this as soon as they try and roll it out

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Originally Posted by HMS_Victory

As with the new theme, removed as soon as it installed, i hope add-ons will be available to remove this as soon as they try and roll it out

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Ditto on the new theme. I junked it in about 5 minutes.

And ditto on ad tiles, too. Either I remove them or I remove FF. It's been increasingly bugging me with the direction of travel anyway. It isn't anything like as appealing as it was. But adverts? The hell with that. I'd quite cheerfully pay to buy a decent browser (and have, in the past, before 'free' ones). But ad tiles? Hell will free over first, on my machines.

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Originally Posted by Odeas

I only see the 'new tab' page for a few moments while I'm typing an address or search so that doesn't really bother me, however it does seem to be a slipperly slope!

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Same here - although these days I tend to use Chrome more, which is surely even worse from the privacy angle/adverts angle!

Quite like Tpyo's idea that you can buy ad-free status. Do it often enough for Android apps, that it'd be no big deal for Firefox, especially if that's a per-user, not per-system license. Still prefer it to any version of IE I've tried.

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Originally Posted by HMS_Victory

As with the new theme, removed as soon as it installed, i hope add-ons will be available to remove this as soon as they try and roll it out

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Add-ons are already available to remove it, Tab Mix plus lets you choose what to show in new tabs.

Pale Moon laughs at this foolery! FF users do yourself a favour and use that instead

Again, this is the reason that where possible, I stick to using IE, out of all the companies offering browsers they have the least interest in selling my data or pushing adverts.

I'd also not be surprised if these "new tab" adverts didn't push their own tracking cookie each time the tab was opened to harvest data.

My curiosity piqued I powered up the Windows PC last night and made sure Firefox updated itself. After the relaunch I couldn't actually see any difference other than the Mozilla "product tour" page - which AdBlockPlus neatly prevented from doing anything.

I've got the V-for-Vendetta theme applied, so basically my "new" copy of Firefox looked and behaved pretty much like the old one. Launched a new-tab and actually looked at it this time - which shows how much I use the tiles/speed-dial feature in Firefox. So all in all, if Mozilla want to put "paid for" tiles in there then I don't think I'll even notice.

Advertising is not a victimless crime. Someone ends up paying for the bandwidth, the electricity and end up wasting a small amount of that most precious resource, the minutes of their life. 25% or more of the time spent watching commercial TV is wasted on advertisements, I hear there are some who even pay a subscription to services and still end up watching 15 minutes of adverts every hour. Personally, I don't believe this, no one would be that stupid.

With all that said, I'm not a fan of this move but so long as it remains mostly unobtrusive, I can live with it.

After they've unleashed the blight that is Australis on the (somewhat) unsuspecting public Mozilla really can't surprise/shock me any longer. Although to be fair, this is a reasonably unobtrusive way to raise some cash.

I personally use the 'New Tab Plus' addon that replaces the new tab screen so I should be safe from ads