Mozilla made an announcement yesterday for a new feature under testing in the Firefox Beta channel. The company has introduced “Suggested Tiles” for the New Tab page. The Suggested Tiles provide advertisement slots for Mozilla to fill based on your browsing history. If you have visited a page on a certain topic more than 5 times, the Suggested Tile may be populated with a related advertisement.
Suggested Tiles follows Mozilla’s roll-out of Directory Tiles and Enhanced Tiles. Mozilla wants to introduce Suggested Tiles transparently and respecting user privacy, so they are not selling user information to the marketers but instead act as that middle man. To start with, beta testers will see tiles promoting Firefox for Android, Firefox Marketplace, and other Mozilla announcements.
For users with certain top sites in their new tab page, Firefox may suggest a new tile for users to visit. The suggestion will explain why it’s being shown, e.g., “Suggested for wiki.mozilla.org visitors.” These suggestions will only be shown a fixed number of times before they’re automatically removed.
The announcement made on the Mozilla Blog states that you may “effectively and easily” opt out of Tiles entirely. The Mozilla Wiki explains the various forms of tiles, how to control the New Tab page, and how tiles work.