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Firefox to Show Ads in Empty New Tab Page Tiles

posted by janrinok on Monday March 24 2014, @04:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the gotta-pay-for-it-somehow dept.

Magic Oddball writes:

"Mozilla's new VP of Content posted an announcement to his blog stating that sometime in the presumably-near future, "sponsored content" will begin appearing in the unused tiles on Firefox's New Tab Page. It will be rolled out first to desktop Firefox, then mobile and FirefoxOS. AdAge: "Mozilla hasn't made a final decision on how to treat third-party tracking technologies, but Mr. Herman said it is investigating solutions such as unique identifiers from Apple and Google as well as other third parties."

DigitalTrends pointed out, "if the scheme proves lucrative, it may be hard to resist rolling them out to all users in some shape or form" and TechCrunch feels it's a trial 'to see how users react before pushing promoted tiles to all users in their new tab pages.'"

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Tork on Monday March 24 2014, @04:14PM

    by Tork (3914) on Monday March 24 2014, @04:14PM (#20497)
    Isn't this a terrible exploit just waiting to happen?
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    Slashdolt logic: 1600 x 1200 > 1920 x 1200
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @05:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @05:04PM (#20549)

    For some reason, these tiles appear to fetch pages with javascript enabled even if it's disabled in browser prefs. That's already a problem.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Tork on Monday March 24 2014, @05:29PM

      by Tork (3914) on Monday March 24 2014, @05:29PM (#20572)
      Oh boy. And to think... stupid security practices (ActiveX, for example...) are what pushed me from IE to FF. Somebody has lost the plot.
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      Slashdolt logic: 1600 x 1200 > 1920 x 1200

    • (Score: 1) by cockroach on Monday March 24 2014, @06:18PM

      by cockroach (2266) on Monday March 24 2014, @06:18PM (#20607) Homepage

      Well that's dumb. Any idea whether noscript helps?

  • (Score: 1) by zosden on Monday March 24 2014, @05:30PM

    by zosden (3067) on Monday March 24 2014, @05:30PM (#20575)

    I would assume you would pay money to Mozilla to get your ad up there and it would go through a review process

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    When I'm walking I worry a lot about the efficiency of my path ~ Randall