Since Mozilla publicised in February its new program to add promotional tiles to the ‘new tab’ page, users have voiced their concerns.

In a blog post Jonathan Nightingale, Vice President at Firefox, reassures users:

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.

Mozilla in the coming weeks will be experimenting in the pre-release channels of its browser. The experiments will focus particularly on the fresh installs of Mozilla Firefox and how best to utilise the new tab page, where recommendations from a user’s browsing history cannot be made.

Jonathan also iterated in his blog:

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.

The next stage is for experimentation to take place on Firefox across platforms and for feedback from these experiments to be released to users and discussed before anything is added to a final release.

Published by Matilda Cowling