Mozilla has started to show advertisements in the Firefox browser. The browser developer has found advertisers for tiles in the "Enhanced Tiles View". Mozilla has gone in an agreement with the American CVS Health and the media bureau of that company. Another advertiser will be Booking.com which will show advertisements to users in 25 countries.
Every time a user opens up a new tab in Firefox, the browser displays a number of boxes, or Tiles. Frequent Firefox users see screenshots of the websites they visit most often in their Tiles. Some of these tiles will now be filled by advertisers of Mozilla.
Mozilla promises to not use tracking in the tiles and to not collect any personal data or pass data to third parties. Advertisements on medication, gambling or alcohol will also not shown. The company does admit that through the tiles some anonymized data is collected on users of the browser like their geographical location and the used language. For users that don't want to see the advertisements it's possible to disable the Directory Tiles by switching to classic view.
The advertisements should be an additional review stream for the Mozilla corporation. The company is currently mainly dependent on Google for its income although the contract for the default search engine in Firefox is negotiated every so many years, which means also other third parties can bid for that position. Currently Google and Mozilla are negotiating about an extension of Google remaining the default search engine in Firefox. The current contract with Google ends later this year.
