They could have at least put in an option in the settings to disable this.
Didn't the implementation actually do it without tracking you, by downloading all the possible tiles and making the choice locally, thus preventing any privacy leak or tracking?
But my post was about the perception of the ads. Even if mozilla isn't tracking, there's certainly no way for a user to know that, and no reason for a user to believe this particular ad is different from other ads the user sees day to day.
IMO, Mozilla has a huge problem, and it's not how to generate more revenue (which they already have $300m/year of). Their marketshare is sliding -- they're near a low point in their marketshare. And as a response, Mozilla pushes ads -- ads that make their software feel like adware; and that negatively impacts the goodwill the user has toward mozilla. This is not going to reverse their marketshare problem.
But isn't this menu a bit deceptive? This is a setting menu with 2 options: disable suggested tiles, and show blank page.
Show blank page can be set from the regular options page.. while the 'disable suggested tiles' option is not in the regular options. So the only unique feature of this menu is disabling suggested tiles.
It's as if, this menu was created entirely to hide disabling suggested tiles.
They force these so called features on their users, but they don't get enough crap for it for doing so simply because they can be disabled. Most people miss the point that majority of people who use Firefox probably don't even know what tiles were to begin with. (same goes to Pocket, Hello etc.)