Ads are coming to Firefox, here’s what they’ll look like

Though you’ll be hard pressed to tell the difference between whatMozilla’s proposing and, say, regular old logos for sites that you’ve pinned yourself if you’ve been using Firefox for a while. It’s not quite the slap in the face to users that some bloggers aremaking it out to be. It’s easy for a critic to shout “ads!” and point an accusing finger at Mozilla, of course.

This is, after all, a company that’s repeatedly chosen as one of the most trusted in the world by its users. Firefox has never had ads… so why now? Right?

Except that’s not exactly right anyway. Firefox’s Google search default? That’s pretty much an ad, and it’s been there for years. It’s how Mozilla generates the bulk of its revenue, and without that search deal in place there’s no way that they’d be able to fund the development of their products.

And almost as long as that deal has been in place, Mozilla has been looking for ways to diversify revenue. They’re comfortable with the Google deal, sure, but relying on one source for up to 90% of your funding isn’t generally considered a great business practice.

Sponsored tiles are one way to pull in a few extra dollars. They’ll only appear on new users’ screens — where those tiles would have otherwise appeared blank. Mozilla is also being very selective about which sites get chosen.

Some tiles will be “organically sourced,” surfaced by Firefox’s millions of users and presented because Mozilla’s algorithms find them to be a good fit based on factors like your location. Others will indeed be paid for, and VP of content services Darren Herman says they’ll be “hand-picked partners to help support Mozilla’s pursuit of our mission.” That means sites like Facebook, for example, who helped Mozilla get the integrated social sharing features in that debuted in Firefox back in 2012.

Still don’t like the sound of ads in Firefox? What’s the alternative?

Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Safari are, at their core, ad platforms for Google, Microsoft, and Apple. They harvest usage data and feed it back into advertising systems to make sure you see “highly relevant ads” no matter where you browse on the web. They are made to promote their company’s own products — like Gmail, Google Apps, Bing, and iCloud.

Mozilla, on the other hand, is pretty much just making Firefox. They don’t really have other products of their own to push — unless you count Firefox OS now — and they can’t generate additional revenue by advertising those non-existent products.

As a longtime Firefox user, I’m certainly not opposed to the sponsored tiles if they help fund a product that I love using — and use every day. As for new Firefox users, well… chances are good that a lot of them may never even notice that they’re ads. Mozilla is charting their course very carefully here.

And this is Firefox we’re talking about. Mozilla has made it abundantly clear that we’re all free to tweak and modify as we please, and they’re happy to provide the tools and source code so we can do it.