Firefox’s New Tab Page Will Show Ads & Gather Your Browsing Habits
It looks like Firefox just set itself on fire.
When your market share keeps decreasing month over month, what can you do in order to win back at least some of the lost users? Useful new features? Performance improvements? User interface tweaks? If you have answered to any of these questions “yes” then you are wrong, at least according to Mozilla’s management.
We are not exactly sure what are they thinking but for some reason they have decided that the best way to improve Firefox users experience (or try to squeeze as much money as possible before the browser’s market share drops to single digits (which is already at 11.70% compared to 17.26% a year ago) is to show you ads!
Firefox “New Ads” Page
But wait, there is more! Not only will Firefox show ads on your new tab page but the browser will also gather your browsing history and use that info to improve targeting.
Now to be fair, it is still possible to disable this feature, at least for now. As last year Mozilla has tested suggested sites as well and after a backlash from the community, they have decided to keep these ads to themselves. Well, few quarters later and ads are back and this time it is not in a Beta or Alpha form, expect to see them in your latest stable build of Firefox later this summer.
Good game, Mozilla.
[Via: Mozilla]
About (Author Profile)
Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism career back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.
Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
Firefox is open source.
It will ALWAYS be possible to disable any feature you don’t like, even if you need to use an extension.
Why? Because Firefox is the only browser that supports proper extensions and not simply add-ins or widgets or whatever the hell Google calls Chrome’s “extensions”. Extensions? Yeah right, they are about as powerful as Greasemonkey’s scripts…
Long time reader of the blog and Mozilla staff member. A couple of clarifications: every browser stores browsing history and the controls the user has over that history have not changed at all. And no browsing history is shared – Firefox does all the decisioning.
I believe that for some people, this will be an enhancement of their experience – it is down to us to make sure that the content that we promote (not all of it advertising) is interesting, relevant and useful. For those that want no promoted content, we believe it should be trivial to switch off (as you note).
Does that mean firefox will become an ad company as well then?
For those dumb enough to like having their browser, media player and ISP all record where they visit and be available for malicious government prosecution or unscrupulous use by others, they should like it a lot. They will probably think it was just what they were needing all along.
Time to dump Firefox! Mozilla these days is a lame Chrome UI clone company and removes features which advanced users use in favor of simple user’s social networking and chat features. Not to forget the mentioned ads.
Never before it was so clear that Mozilla is just a bunch of clueless followers. And they really believe they can be market share leaders? Get lost!