Mozilla kills off Suggested Tiles ads after three months

After being birthed in September, Mozilla's Suggested Tiles feature that showed users advertised destinations when opening a new tab has not yet seen its first Christmas, but its usage is already winding down.

Mozilla vice president of Content Services Darren Herman said in a blog post that the browser maker would be ending advertising through its Tiles experiment, and would see out its current commitments as the feature is killed off over the next few months.

While Suggested Tiles will end, Mozilla is not taking itself out of the advertising game completely.

"Advertising in Firefox could be a great business, but it isn't the right business for us at this time because we want to focus on core experiences for our users," Herman said. "We want to reimagine content experiences and content discovery in our products. We will do this work as a fully integrated part of the Firefox team."

"Mozilla will continue to explore ways to bring a better balance to the advertising ecosystem for everyone's benefit, and to build successful products that respect user privacy and deliver experiences based upon transparency, choice and control."

Mozilla recently backed down from its long-standing objections over Apple's control and lack of flexibility related to third-party web browser choice on its mobile devices, and launched an iOS version of the browser last month.

Earlier in the year, Mozilla was awarded a three-year, $3.2 million US government grant to further the research, development, and adoption of gigabit internet technologies.

The browser maker has been paring back the feature set of its Firefox browser, as the organisation looks to move away from its XML User Interface Language.