Mozilla has announced that it is to begin testing sponsored ads on its Firefox web browser.
Firefox’s vice president, Johnathan Nightingale, wrote in a blog post that the company is to begin experimenting with adverts and sponsored content in the coming weeks, which will appear on the boxes that appear when Firefox users launch a new tab on the browser.
“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,” said Nightingale.
“These tests are purely to understand what our users find helpful and what our users ignore or disable.”
Currently, when a Firefox user launches a new tab, a new page appears with nine boxes of the user’s most-visited websites.
Nightingale added that the tests are not about generating revenue and none will be collected at this stage, and that sponsorship would be the next step once Firefox is confident that it can deliver “user value”.
A few months ago Firefox announced that it would be experimenting with the tab page but the news was not well-received from users.
Nightingale said that the Firefox community found the language hard to decipher, and was worried that Mozilla was going to turn Firefox into a “mess of logos sold to the highest bidder; without user control, without user benefit.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Nightingale said. “That’s not who we are at Mozilla. But we will experiment.”
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