A few months ago, Mozilla’s VP for content services, created quite a havoc when he announced pre-packaged content (read it as sponsored content ) for first-time users on Firefox’s new tab page. Well, Firefox’s VP has clarified those plans in a new blog post.
Johnathan Nightingale, Vice-President, Firefox, in a blog post, has clarified that Mozilla is not shutting down the firefox project, and is not going to turn Firefox into a mess of logos sold to the highest bidder; without user control, without user benefit.
Although Firefox is going ahead with its plans to put sponsored tiles on the new tab page, it is not shutting down the project.
Earlier this year, Mozilla created quite a stir in the developer community, when they announced that they would be putting sponsored content on the new tab page. The developer communitysharply criticised this move, with some even going to the extent of saying that Mozilla is shutting down Firefox. Well, that’s not the case.
Johnathan clarified that
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
While the VP has clearly mentioned the intentions, it still doesn’t go with what Firefox and largely Mozilla is. Mozilla and Firefox have always been independent. Firefox has been free of ads, developing secured browsers, and making it available open-source, for free. This image may now become extremely difficult to maintain.
Image cropped to fit page size, under CC2.0 License, credit : Johnathan Nightingale, Flickr
