Mozilla\’s In-Browser Ads Are Now Live in Firefox Nightly

Mozilla has rolled out a new feature for its Firefox Nightly channel, namely the much-awaited advertising experiment that the company has been talking about for a long time.

Along with the latest update, when you launch Firefox, a message appears on a new tab giving you details about the new tiles. “When you open a new tab, you’ll see tiles from the sites you frequently visit, along with tiles that we think might be of interest to you. Some of these tiles may be sponsored by Mozilla partners,” the company writes, mentioning that users will be notified when this type of content is displayed.

If you don’t want to see these new tiles, then you can simply choose to blank out the page, leaving you with the original format. Of course, those who have tried out different browsers along the years will already be familiar with the tiled interface that holds many frequently visited sites.

The sponsored content, however, is all new and has been discussed quite a bit in the past few months.

The company is looking to attract some money to be able to continue the project. Introducing ads in the web browser seems to be their best plan at this point.

While users feared that they would have no control over the type of content they see, Mozilla has made it so that anyone can delete the content in any of the boxes with a simple button push. Furthermore, the ads aren’t as intrusive as you’d have imagined when you first heard of them, and the pages aren’t plastered with logos.

All in all, this seems like a decent way for Mozilla to make some money and it shouldn’t be too bothering for users. Furthermore, the presence of the “blank” feature is also quite useful for those who really don’t want to deal with this new feature that Firefox sports.

There is still work to be done with the tiles, but then again, this is Firefox Nightly we’re talking about, a browser version for developers. For instance, not all sponsored pages are flagged accordingly. The Amazon page has never been accessed on Firefox since this is a fresh install and there’s no imported history, so it couldn’t have come from there. However, its URL gives it away since it mentions “partner=Mozilla” in it.

If the company wants to make sure these tiles aren’t hated by everyone and that users don’t feel deceived, they need to sort out this issue before it hits more popular and more stable Firefox versions.