Mozilla to trial sponsored links on Firefox

Firefox will not be turned into "a mess of logos sold to the highest bidder", claims Firefox VP

Mozilla is to trial sponsored links on its popular web browser Firefox, it has announced.

Mozilla is a free software community which is supported by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation and its tax-paying subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation.

On the Firefox web browser, which is what the community is most well-known for, every time a user opens up a new tab in Firefox, the browser displays nine boxes or tiles with screenshots of the websites they visit most frequently.

But Johnathan Nightingale, vice president of Firefox, said that the company is now looking at making the ‘new tab' page more useful, particularly for new users who have no history to base recommendations on.

"We will experiment. In the coming weeks, we'll be landing tests on our pre-release channels...," he said in a blog post.

"We'll test a mix of our own sites and other useful sites on the web. We'll mess with the layout. These tests are purely to understand what our users find helpful and what our users ignore or disable - these tests are not about revenue and none will be collected," he added.

Sponsorship would be the next stage, once the team is confident that it can deliver user value, he claimed.

When the idea was first mooted earlier this year, users responded with dismay. To allay their fears, Mozilla said that sponsored content would be clearly labelled, and that no user data other than location would be collected or considered.

Nightingale admitted that when the organisation first announced the experiment, the community "found the language hard to decipher".

He emphasised that Firefox would not be turned into "a mess of logos sold to the highest bidder; without user control, without user benefit", like many had feared.