The nonprofit organization loses its taste for ads, saying, "That's not who we are at Mozilla" and indicating reconciliation with the advertising industry won't be easy.

 

Mozilla has scrapped a plan to put ads on the windows that show when Firefox users launch a new browser tab.

Mozilla announced the Firefox new-tab page advertisements idea in February but on Friday night announced an end to the "experiment."

 

"A lot of our community found the language hard to decipher, and worried that we were going to turnFirefox into a mess of logos sold to the highest bidder; without user control, without user benefit,"said Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla's vice president of Firefox, in a blog post. "That's not going to happen. That's not who we are at Mozilla."

 

The new-tab page has been a source of revenue for browser rival Opera Software. Partners have paid it for years for access to the "speed dial" page that grants quick access to Web pages. Getting people to discover new services and apps is always tough, as seen by the existence of the search-engine optimization industry and the jockeying to get good placement on app stores, and money can help bring things to consumers' attention.

 

Mozilla is interested in the discovery idea -- just not in the monetization part.

 

"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," Nightingale said. "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."

 

Full Article