Honestly, Mozilla has been peddling adware for a long time now. The writing has been on the wall. It started with putting sponsored links to Amazon on the Firefox home screen, then the shitty Pocket acquisition and the stupid featured stories/recommendations garbage, then the full screen Mozilla VPN ads…Firefox has been adware for a while. Use a fork that removes the bullshit. Switch to LibreWolf.
I wish Mozilla had been really clear about their intentions and end goals with this acquisition. On the face of it, it looks terrible. Especially when you look at their jettisoning of Servo.
What the hell are they up to if making a browser engine isn’t a core competency, but buying an ad company is considered a wise move?
Well that’s cool if they want to become an ad company, but last I checked they are known for making a browser. I’m sure they’ll do so much better than Oracle in the ad business. /s
They are known for making a browser that constantly puts them into a financial deficit. Mozilla is still looking for a way to pay their bills in the long run.
Servo wasn’t going anywhere and even today the absolute best they are trying to do is to be a tiny embedded engine. They took parts of projects that were worth shit and added it into their core ecosystem and stopped the vanity dream of making a whole new browser core.
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Looking at it most favorably, if they ever want to not be dependent on Google, they need revenue to replace what they get from Google and like it or not much of the money online comes from advertising. If they can find a way to get that money without being totally invasive on privacy, that’s still better than their current position.
I think the important thing is consent to use data. If I can control what data I share with them, it isn’t the end of the world. If I choose to not, and it’s honoured, then this is a good thing. I’d prefer this approach funding development to Mozilla not being able to compete.
It’s definitely making their job harder on the face of it, but it also differentiates them from other ad companies, so I guess they’re betting on that being a draw for potential clients.
As Jamie Zawinski put it, it’s like a non-profit animal shelter setting up a sideline selling kitten meat to satisfy demands for hockey-stick growth. If somebody castigates them for it, they can point out that the demand for kitten deli slices didn’t going to go away, and if they didn’t sell them, someone else would step in and do it less humanely.
There’s actually a real world example of this. Some cats that are disected in schools are euthanized cats from shelters, because the alternative is cat farms that breed cats just to be killed and disected
That’s what I always say. Targeted advertising should be illegal. Contextual advertising is acceptable.
If I’m on the star trek wiki, serve me ads for star trek, sci-fi, and whatever. You don’t need to know anything about me specifically.
We’d still need to do something about like ads that take up too much space, hurt page performance, or introduce malware, but removing the stalking would be an improvement
When everyone start using adblockers then it will go away and companies will have to come with new business models. I have been using adblockers since the first adblock was released and I don’t see ads so it’s up to the people. Better invest in/support ways to block ads.
Same, but surely you realize that ads have only gotten worse in the intervening time. I also don’t truly believe that we’ll ever reach critical mass on adblocker users. You’re asking people who don’t care, who don’t use the internet the same way we do, to suddenly care enough to take manual action outside of their knowledgebase amd comfort zone.
The only way the adblocker user numbers get pumped up to critical mass for a change is if a popular default browser makes adblocking an opt-out default.
You’re asking people who don’t care, who don’t use the internet the same way we do, to suddenly care enough to take manual action outside of their knowledgebase amd comfort zone
If they don’t care about ads then they won’t care if those ads are private or not.
I will say that we’re definitely getting to a level of adblockers that the sites actively care about blocking content or warning about people using adblockers. It’s starting to affect their bottom lines.
Why? Does 95% of digital advertisement even serve a single valuable purpose?
I get that websites need funding and that legitimate business require some way communicate their services exist. We need to solve the problem for the former and create specialized accessible safe spaces for the later.
When is the last time anyone here saw an ad for a local business, when is the last time anyone recall willfully clicking one? Was there actually anything useful there?
From what i recall ads almost always are one of the following:
sex, barely legal drugs and predatory video games. (Lumped together to make a bad pun)
real product/fake price: oh this item isnt in stock plz look at catalog
politics, buy our guide to get rich, actual illegal scam operation.
None of them are honest or respectful to the customer. People aren’t prey, stop baiting.
Admittedly, for me this is personal. Autism means i experience the extra noise as painful. Plastering it on useful websites feels like a hostile attack to keep me out and unwelcome. I downright refuse to look at watch nor will i support them through ad free subscriptions to the point of it having become a digital disability.
But come on, can we smart online people really not figure out something else that isn’t based on literal brainwashing.
I think a long time ago a vicious cycle began in the advertising space where predatory ads had more incentive to pay for ad space, so sensible people start to perceive ads in general as predatory. Now no sensible advertiser that’s trying to promote a legitimate product for legitimate reasons will do so by buying ad space, thus reinforcing the increasingly accurate perception that all ads are predatory.
As well as predatory/not, there’s also a trend with attention grabbing/not.
There was a period of time where Google AdWords ruled the online ad space, and most ads were pure text in a box with a border making the border between content and ads visually distinct.
Kind of like having small portions of the newspaper classified section cut out and slapped around the webpage.
I still disliked them, but they were fairly easy to look past, and you didn’t have to worry about the ad itself carrying a malware payload (just whatever they linked to).
Companies found that those style ads get less clickthrough than flashier ones, and that there’s no quantifiable incentive to not make their ads as obnoxious as possible. So they optimized for the wrong metric: clickthrough vs sales by ad.
More recently, companies have stepped up their tracking game so they can target sales by ad more effectively, but old habits die hard, and predatory ads that just want you to click have no incentive to care and “de-escalate” the obnoxiousness.
Well this is a tremendous step in the wrong direction. The economic problem is the ad supported model in the first place, no matter how it’s run. This is the same thing Google does, they keep user data to themselves and sell the ad placement. So now Mozilla has the same economic incentives as Google. Unfathomably bad move.
An argument I frequently make about using an ad blocker is that I’d be more comfortable with ads if they weren’t so thirsty for personal information. I still stand by that, and I’m not completely convinced this satisfies that concern. Personal data is still getting slurped up, but now we have the privilege of trusting it’s completely anonymized.
Mozilla is going to absolute shit lately. Partnering with a fucking ad network? You’ve got to be kidding me. Firefox is still the better browser, but it’s time to abandon Firefox proper for forks that get rid of Mozilla’s bullshit. I have been using Librewolf for a while and unlike Firefox, it’s not adware.
While there are a lot of critics of this, ask yourself: for how many services and apps you use (e.g. messenger, cloud storage, email, operating system, web browser…) are you willing to pay recurrently? If that answer is not for every single one of them, then this move is the answer.
The internet desperately needs a way to fund things and advertising seems to be the only viable solution on a bigger scale. And I don’t think that there is anyone better suited than mozilla for the job of pushing a privacy respecting way of doing so. Sure this needs to be done the right way, but they should be given the benefit of the doubt.
And this doesn’t mean that everything needs to be cluttered with ads. You could still pay a bit to remove them.
Even if the answer to the question above was yes, consider the masses. Other people might not care enough/have the same awareness about privacy to pay, but they could gain a lot with this. Consider people in less fortunate circumstances monetary wise. Don’t they deserve privacy if they can’t afford to pay for services?
There are radio stations, financed through ads. And they check if people are listening by calling random persons to ask them what station they are listening to.
So this is a viable business model and nobody is stopping anybody from putting plain pictures and links on sites and just estimate the page visits, but online advertisers want to know more. They always want more.
At the same time, a browser is the essential software to browse the web. So this is as if your TV was like:
Yo, many people mute their TV during commercials and don’t pay attention, which kills the poor networks. So I made a deal with advertisers and will check what your doing, while I provide unmutable ads , but don’t worry, your privacy is very important to us and we only care about providing to you the best TV experience possible.
So do i understand it correctly, that ads are ok for you, but not targeted ads, because the advertisers always want to know more? Then that seems to be what mozilla is trying to achieve here: to limit what advertisers can know about you.
The technology for targeted ads are already in place, this could be an alternative that preserves more privacy than current ad networks.
It is a bullshit false dichotomy to claim that the only options for business models are charging fees or showing ads. Knock it off with the misinformation.
Thats why i said “seems“ to be and „on a bigger scale“ to allow for other options. But those other options like through donations(=paying them) are often not enough. Apparently you don’t see opensource developers struggling and choose to just ignore the reality. You also fail to point out other options that scale as well as advertising does. As you seem to have the solution that many people struggle to find, feel free to actually tell us about it. I only expressed my opinion not „misinformation“. Your comment on the other hand failed to provide any arguments to further the discussion. So yeah “knock it off“
Do you have any fucking clue at all just how much money projects like Wikipedia make through donations? Do you realize that Jellyfin has even gone so far as to ask people to ?
Your claim that advertising “scales” and donations don’t is a straight-up Iie.
Jellyfin is not even in the ballpark of what Firefox is. A web browser is a giant OS at this point.
Blame the ones who need to be blamed - “leftist” women CEO capitalists who took over Mozilla once Brendan Eich stepped down. They ate Mozilla from the inside out. Their overwhelming focus on politics over software has helped cause this. And it shows, because they have been focusing on things like deplatforming, AI, Pocket, for years now. Bikini photo ops as malicious heads of Mozilla are cool for women I guess.
The truth is, the combination of relying on political wings (left or right) for development and opting to use Chrome based browsers has caused this. Donations would have been sucked away by those CEO leeches.
Again you ignore words like “often”. There certainly are projects that are doing extremely well, and I am happy for them, i am one of those donating.
Yet you ignore the funding problem that exists in open source. You can’t make it go away by naming a few that have done well for themselves. Even those that are doing well enough, what could they achieve, if they had comparable funding to bigger players that are advertising? I am not saying that it’s the option that everybody should go for, but if one chooses to, i would like it to be privacy respecting, and thats where hopefully mozilla will come in. And outside of opensource, on a “normal” persons phone, how many apps are funded via ads? Wouldn’t it be great if those were privacy preserving instead? It’s a step in the right direction.
I will stop replying to you, as you don’t seem mature enough to hold a respectful discussion, without trying to frame my opinions as trying to be manipulative.
Go ask Wikipedia about their business model. Or the Linux kernel. Or any number of other Free Software projects that neither charge users a fee nor show ads.
Those are not businesses. They are free projects which a dedicated person (or group of people) donate their time and energy to produce.
Wikipedia has their semi-annual donation drives and many (not most, but enough worth mentioning) FOSS devs are salaried by companies like Google and Microsoft and are allowed to work on patches to out-of-scope projects on company time provided they’re still fulfilling their main roles. There are also Liberapay, Open Collective, Ko-fi and such but for the majority of FOSS devs not funded by large corps, just developing a large and widely-used program because they want to, donations rarely ever cover as much as they would make at a 9-5. There are also nonprofits that distribute donations to FOSS devs. For most it is a money pit, but to them the passion is worth more. They do it for the love, not the money.
Data anonymization is a good thing. If websites start using this solution instead of Google ads that’d be quite good. Well better than Google at least. But people seem to be afraid of ads getting added into Firefox. If it happens it will be a ticking bomb because the hunger for data and profit will rise every day.
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