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Mozilla winding down sponsored tiles in Firefox to counter bad publicity

Mozilla has been doing a lot to annoy its users in recent years, one such action was its intent to include sponsored tiles in its Firefox browser. In a new post on the Mozilla blog, the company has made the decision to end the practice and to "focus on core experiences for our users."

Sponsored tiles were controversial, many users perceived Firefox to be compromising their privacy, but this was not the case as the appropriate tiles were to be picked by the browser locally, without involving a third party.

The move seems like a response to the declining usage of Firefox, as people move towards alternatives such as Chrome and Edge. Moreover, ex-Opera developers will also soon be launching the 1.0 release of their Vivaldi web browser, which will chip away at Firefox's user base.

Mozilla plans to go further than removing sponsored tiles to regain trust, according to a bug report over at Mozilla's bug tracking site; the Pocket plugin will be fully stripped from people's browser if they do not want it, although it will be installed by default. In current versions of Firefox, Pocket can only be disabled in the about: config tab.

Source: Mozilla Blog

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