Skip to main content

Eight months of ads in Firefox are coming to an end

That was fast. Mozilla is pulling the ads from Firefox’s new tab page, saying that advertising “isn’t the right business for us at this time.” Ads will show up for a couple months, as previous sales are honored, and then the ads will just stop.

The new tab page in Firefox has long showed users the sites they visit most frequently — their Top Sites. In May of this year users started seeing “Suggested” sites in the prominent top-left position. These were paid advertisements benefiting the Mozilla Corporation (which is a subsidiary of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation). Mozilla made the feature easy to turn off, but that didn’t mean users liked the famously free and open source browser exploiting a previously-clean part of the interface.

Recommended Videos

After months of complaints, Mozilla put out a buzzword-laden blog post Friday announcing the end of the program, the gist of which is that paid tiles in the New Tab page are no more.

“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,” wrote Darren Herman, vice president of content services, in a blog post about the change.

Of course, there’s a broader context to the ads. For over a decade Firefox had one main revenue source: an agreement with Google. Firefox made Google the default search engine, and Google shared revenue with them in return. This agreement ended in 2014, at which point Mozilla penned agreements with different search engines in different parts of the world. In the US, this means Yahoo.

But it seems like these new arrangements aren’t producing the kind of income the one with Google did — possibly because users are switching their default browsers back to Google soon after installing Firefox, and possibly because Firefox is losing users to Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s new Edge browsers.

So Mozilla has been trying out other ways to raise the funds needed to pay developers. For example: the firm built the read-it-later/bookmarking service Pocket into the desktop version of the browser as part of a revenue-sharing agreement.

And if the blog post is anything to go by, it seems like advertising to users isn’t being completely ruled out in the long term.

“Mozilla will continue to explore ways to bring a better balance to the advertising ecosystem for everyone’s benefit, and to build successful products that respect user privacy and deliver experiences based upon transparency, choice, and control,” the post concludes. We’ll find out what that means in the months to come.

Justin Pot
Justin's always had a passion for trying out new software, asking questions, and explaining things – tech journalism is the…
A major era in Intel chip technology may be coming to an end
An Intel processor over a dark blue background.

Intel's next-generation Arrow Lake chips are said to be coming out later this year, but we don't know much about them just yet. However, a new leak shows us that two crucial features may be missing from the next-gen CPU lineup: hyperthreading and support for the AVX-512 extension. If Intel is ditching hyperthreading, it's not entirely unexpected, but it might make it trickier for even its best processors to beat AMD.

Hyperthreading allows physical cores in Intel processors to perform two tasks simultaneously, improving efficiency and performance in multi-threaded applications. Intel first introduced it in 2002, but it hasn't used the technology in every generation of its CPUs between then and now. The tech was all but gone from client processors for many years following its launch, although it was still present in certain models. Since then, Intel has selectively implemented HT across its product stack. In the last few years, it became a staple, especially in midrange and high-end chips.

Read more
AI-powered commentary is coming to next month’s Wimbledon
The grounds of the Wimbledon Tennis Championships.

Sports commentators who thought they were safe from the ever-expanding tentacles of generative AI should think again.

In a first for professional tennis, and possibly the entire sports world, this year’s Wimbledon Tennis Championships will deploy an AI-powered commentator for all of its video highlights.

Read more
Firefox just got a great new way to protect your privacy
Canva in Firefox on a MacBook.

If you’re fed up with signing up for new accounts online and then being perpetually spammed in the days and weeks after, Mozilla has an idea that could help. The company has just announced its Firefox Relay feature is being directly integrated into its Firefox web browser, and it could help guarantee your privacy without any extra hassle.

Firefox Relay works by letting you create email “masks” when you sign up for new accounts. Instead of entering your real credentials into the sign-up field, Firefox Relay provides you with a throwaway address and phone number to use. Any messages from the website -- such as purchase receipts -- are then forwarded to your real email address, with all the sender’s tracking information stripped out to protect your privacy.

Read more