Mozilla has announced that it will finally be halting its experiment of offering adverts in its Firefox browser through the Tiles feature and will instead focus on "content discovery."
Why the decision to discontinue advertising in Firefox and focus on content discovery instead? Because Mozilla realizes that users would like content which is engaging, exciting and relevant. Therefore, it will look to share such content with its users.
That said, Mozilla has let on that it will continue its experiments in the field of content experiences in the tab pages in Firefox, as well as across its products. Only the advertising through Tiles will be halted per the new company strategy. Tiles as a program will continue.
"Advertising in Firefox could be a great business, but it isn't the right business for us at this time because we want to focus on core experiences for our users. We want to reimagine content experiences and content discovery in our products. We will do this work as a fully integrated part of the Firefox team," explains Mozilla.
Mozilla also revealed that it is of the opinion that its advertising experiments showed that the ecosystem can function better. Therefore, Mozilla will continue exploring different and novel ways through which it can bring more balance to the advertising ecosystem. This would benefit everyone, as well as create products that take regard into privacy and cater to experiences that have transparency, control and user choice as its foundation.
To surmise, the realization that it is useless to offer features such as tracking protection on Firefox has dawned on Mozilla. For the unfamiliar, the Tracking feature basically blocks the elements of a website that is able to track a user's moves when they are surfing online. The feature also pushed adverts. However, even though the adverts pushed by the feature did not track Firefox users, its purpose left users confused.
Now with the advertising aspect in the Tiles program set to wind down, Mozilla will have a clearer focus. The company, however, has not given an exact time window for its closure merely revealing "over the next few months." Mozilla will also fulfill its "current commitments" which were a part of the Tiles program and not leave its advertising partners hanging midway.
