Mozilla Firefox has won ardent users since the days of Netscape. By offering consistent functionality throughout the browser wars, Firefox toppled Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the browser of choice setting place for open standards on the Web. Firefox is an open source project drawing a lot of its funds from user contributions. For a large project as this, sustainable contributions are required to support the work done by volunteers who make it successful. But these contributions may trickle out resulting in a situtation such as OpenBSD’s where the project could no longer pay its debts, this nearly ended up with OpenBSD being taken down.
For a long time, Google has been the default search engine on the Firefox browser. The search giant pays some good money to Mozilla for this. A recent announcement by Mozilla should soon bring in more funds via Directory Tiles. Newly installed Firefox browsers will have up to 9 Directory Tiles with at least 2 featuring sponsored websites. How’s this in keeping with Mozilla’s principle of growing the Web? The organization views it as bringing content to Web users, especially those new to the internet, in effect this is a move that will grow the Web.
Assurances have been thrown by members of the organization that the sponsored tiles will not be intrusive. Further, Mozilla Foundation feels responsible to create revenue for the project, as stated in this post, such decisions are cross-examined thoroughly before their implementation.
The gist of the Tiles idea is that we would include something like 9 Tiles on a page, and that 2 or 3 of them would be sponsored — aka “ads.” So to explicitly address the question of whether sponsored tiles (aka “ads”) could be included as part of a content offering, the answer is yes.
These sponsored results/ ads would not have tracking features.
– Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation
The launch hits the desktop browser first, Android version and Firefox OS will soon follow. Only new Firefox installations will be will include Directory Tiles. Users preferences are determined from browsing data collected over a month, after this period, Firefox browsers will gradually show less of the sponsored sites on their Directory Tiles.
