It looks like they are already monetizing it. A few of the articles have a "Sponsored by X" below them. I don't love that, but at least they set it up in a way where they aren't collecting data on users to show them. They have to pay the bills somehow.

The $500M per year they get from Google isn't enough to pay the bills?

Having other sources of revenue outside of a benefactor whose interesting in you relies on having a relevance in the browser market with them also actively engaged in implicitly or explicitly undermining that with a product of their own doesn't seem like too bad of an idea.

How does this relate to the original claim I was responding to which was "they have to pay their bills somehow"?

It's dangerous to depend on a single company (that also happens to have a competing product).

What happens if the money stops coming?

> that also happens to have a competing product

Firefox is a "feature" for Google Chrome.

The day Google stops paying mozilla and mozilla close shop, they will get the same treatment Google itself set up in courts against Microsoft for IE6. It's pretty much protection money for their past selfs.

Google doesn't actually need Mozilla to increase their search market share. When Mozilla switched to Yahoo in the U.S., many users switched back to Google [1], and those who care about privacy switch to things such as DuckDuckGo anyways.

[1] https://searchengineland.com/report-yahoo-search-losing-fire...

That's my theory as well.

It's cheaper to keep mozilla barely alive than to pay lawyers and governments for anti-trust lawsuits around the globe.

And they get to harvest search data from firefox users as a bonus.

Developing more than one revenue stream is likely to be a more resilient strategy than hoping that Google is happy to keep paying a competitor browser to stay in business

Ads this way is not a sustainable revenue strategy, it's pocket money at best.

Pocket money is better than no money.

Maybe, but that does not mean that they should put all their eggs into one basket.

Not when you're up against billion-dollar budgets.

I'm sure it will be able to be disabled but it's so frustrating seeing more advertising being baked into the browser. I really don't want web browsers to subtly (or not so subtly) influence what people are reading.

edit: Like many others have noted before this everything is "free" model of the Internet seems completely broken to me and I feel a bit sad/hopeless about it.

Call them what they are: ads. They are ads, and they were added by default to the home page of Firefox.

I disagree. The main recommendations are not ads, they are recommendations. Formerly known as clickbait, but without the full negative connotations that the term has gathered. But still clickbait in that it's a source of distraction, a mechanism for derailing your train of thought.

In small doses, I rather like them. Back when Firefox only displayed 3 or 4 on the new tab page, I even left them enabled. Now that it has the huge grid of options, with a row peeking out above the fold in the classic dark pattern that demands discovery, I have turned them off.

As for ads, yeah, you'll get those by default too. (But there's a checkbox still where you can turn off the sponsored content.)

I just think it's useful to distinguish true ads from stuff that's intended to provide value. (Sure, ads theoretically can occasionally provide value, but the difference is huge.)

Yes, I starting to dislike more and more when random tech companies try to push their political views on their users. Leave us alone.

They own Pocket, so that's probably related.