Mozilla has rolled out directory tiles, the company’s advertising experiment for its browser’s new tab page, to the Firefox Nightly channel. We installed the latest browser build to give the sponsored ads a test drive. When you first launch Firefox, a message on the new tab page informs you of the following: what tiles are, a promise that the feature abides by the Mozilla Privacy Policy, and a reminder that you can turn tiles off completely and choose to have a blank new tab page. It’s quite a lot to take in all at once.
Mozilla just rolled out the latest feature for its Firefox nightly build. The new-browser tab now sports sponsored tiles, which act as a quick way to access a combination of ads and popular content. In fact, as you browse more sites in this build, you will see a more varied selection of tiles appear in the browser tab upon first opening Firefox. So you might see site suggestions for those you’ve visited before (and visited often) and tiles for sites that have paid to have their companies appear there. You can remove sites from the tab and additional sponsored tiles will pop into view. The idea here is to provide browser users with suggested content right away, even if they’ve never used Firefox before. So instead of seeing blank tiles before they build up enough browser history for content to be displayed, content is shown automatically, and much of that content is sponsored. When the Directory Tiles program was first announced back in February, it was pitched as a way to provide value for first-time users and as a way to generate revenue. The ads don’t include tracking technology, but stats such as views and click-throughs will be provided to companies that sign up for the program.