Mozilla to stop Sponsored Tiles in Firefox
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
Good on them for backtracking on this, but it's a symptom of high level decisions taken without running them past anybody else. Pocket is another one of those symptoms.
There is no reason these things can get past development and the various betas without people yelling out "hey, we should not be doing this, it's damaging to our product". This happens in companies that have become too large to understand their own users.
And it's not limited to Firefox - Mozilla as a whole no longer understands its core mission. Its motto of "Freeing the web". Development on absolutely critical components of a free web such as Persona or a good email client stops, to make way for development on the completely unrealistic Firefox OS.
Not that the world doesn't need a free mobile OS, but Firefox OS is not it. Not only is it doomed to be awful (layers on top of layers on top of layers... browsers are not great for batteries), they're spending decades of manpower trying to match android 2.0, then selling that to users. I had the misfortune of trying out the Flame. What a disaster that was. I can't see myself ever trying out fxos again without a lot of changes and convincing, so go sell that to non-technical users...
I don't care about it by the way, I like Pocket and I use the functionality. But it was obvious that there would be drama.
Edit: In reply to the dead comment below, no I do not think Pocket should be preinstalled, and I really hope that's not the message that's getting through in my posts.
It's just painfully stupid in every way. If it was a built in extension that by-default talked to a Mozilla hosted open source Pocket clone, we might be having a different conversation.... but I'd still be annoyed.
Just as annoyed as I am that Chromium (yes, Chromium, not Chrome) comes with a god damn Google Docs extension.
Compromise is the name of the game, and if BSD development is any indicator, security/privacy focus users are not ones to jump in and help keep lights on in most circumstances
That said I'm not sure FF could have done better things, but in their situation I would be trying to find some revenue streams that weren't Google
In most cases, I'd agree.However, it's never a good idea to compromize on your mission statement. How does pre-bundled Pocket integration promote an open web? IMO, it goes against it.
While they are losing market-share, Mozilla are not running out of cash any time soon and they are not in a death spiral. They can afford to, and should think long and hard about how they diversify their revenue streams, rather than trying random decisions that alienate part of their userbase trying to find anything that sticks - which is the impression I'm getting.
If the declining trend continues, desktop Firefox would approximate zero market share in less than 4 years from now.
On mobile phones, the market share of Firefox is so small, it doesn't even show up on anyone's chart.[2]
Users wouldn't be fleeing in droves if they liked what Firefox has turned into.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#St...
[2] http://www.sitepoint.com/browser-trends-december-2015-fight-...
I remember using Firefox since I was in college in 2004 and I can tell you what happened when I first tried Firefox 4. The performance was horrible for a very simple reason: the system requirements were increased _tenfold_ and it was pretty much impossible to enjoy browsing using it on older hardware.
Extensions started breaking and the menu options would suddenly change place, function or disappear altogether without any prior warning or explanation. Meanwhile, Mozilla devs would either ignore the feedback or post snickering comments on their blogs.
The constant version change made it so things were rapidly falling apart - you could no longer rely on Firefox to stay one and the same for any period of time.
I saw that Firefox was going downhill, but it was still far superior to all browsers simply due to the wealth of extensions it had. And now, what is the most recent change to Firefox paradigm? Locking the extension ecosystem inside a walled garden.
I currently use Palemoon and I look forward to Edge, which promises a basically open-source environment, which will include extensions. Now that´s irony.
I think If people really cared that much about it, they would do something themselves, but alas its all to easy to moan and do nothing. /me shrugs
The probability of complaining, that actually solves any given problem in that moment, hovers around zero. Especially after all the BS people have been saying they have been seeing with Mozilla for some time now (enough time over the years to see hundreds of c/c++ code samples, walkthroughs, and to read their build instructions[0]) … its quite banal at this point. Too many people have worked too hard to share their knowledge on the internet for me to be satisfied with complaining about something that we all have a capacity to do ourselves to some degree if were commenting on hacker news.
But that's just how I feel, everyone else is free to feel differently.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...
There are like 50 build options, any random combination of which is likely to result in build failure, and your only option is to try a combination, wait 10-40 minutes for it to fail, try to diagnose what went wrong and fix it.
There's also the matter that Linux distro maintainers know more about building than you do, and include things like exploit mitigation, which you'll be missing out on.
And of course you need to monitor Firefox for security updates, and rebuild every time there's an update.
It gets boring pretty quickly. Even GNU barely manages to update their IceCat fork.
Nothing you mention isn't uncommon for any decent size project. It shouldn't act as a deterrent for expanding ones horizons, and implementing something you want done where there will be no chance in hell it will be added/removed upstream in any decent amount of time for free (10-40 min, but you don't have to compile the whole project while debugging… I made some mods in dom/base/ and netwerk/protocol/http as well as other places, and neither took more than 10-20 seconds to compile standalone while debugging). I tend to think security is mostly security theater anyways for what its worth. So many ways to get owned, and the user is usually the weakest link… and if you are targeted and don't know it, game over…
And if its boring for someone, they obviously don't have enough motivation, but maybe just enough to moan. Then again, the only user I have to support is myself for the things I want in the browser instead of a bunch of people who will probably never push a line of code with their complaints masquerading as requests… yeah, I can see how that can get boring.
If they think it's what "the majority" wants - let them just ignore the hater devs and leave it. See how far that gets them.
They are removing it because it's a poor idea that's poorly thought out. People won't bite the PR.
This idea could even be pushed further: they could have several alternative downloads that are simply pre-bundled extensions. Alongside their normal version they could have "minimalist", "dev tools", "max privacy", "social/chat helpers", and the like. Most people would still download the normal version, but this might introduce more people to extensions, who would normally never even know about addons.mozilla.org.
This is a real, non-rhetorical question: I started occasionally using the addon when pocket was still read-it-later and never changed usage patterns since.
http://www.wired.com/2015/12/mozilla-is-flailing-when-the-we...
Can you explain what the revenue sharing agreement is, especially after so many Mozilla employees have vehemently denied that Mozilla got money from Pocket for the tie-up?
While this might work for some (where leader is visionary and strong), I believe that the problem is here - companies that are seeing drop in growth are fixated on getting better numbers instead of increase engagement and user value. They will forsake their core functions, ignore users and make a "better" clone of existing competitor for short term bump in engagement. Every huge company did that before sliding downhill.
I understand them wanting to make it in mobile space but the bar to entry in the mobile market is so damn high not even Microsoft can do it.
See this thread (including my replies to it) the last time this came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10099816
I hold Mozilla to a higher standard, just as Mozilla ought to.
1. http://www.wired.com/2015/12/mozilla-is-flailing-when-the-we...
With double the market share, maybe Mozilla could have pushed back longer and harder, but unfortunately that's not the reality we live in anymore.
As much as I love and respect many of the people at Mozilla, and the project itself (I spent 5 years of my life volunteering in the early years), this has been a systemic problem all along, pretty much from day one. Certain types of decisions get made by a very small group of people who somehow acquire a tone-deafness when it comes to outside criticism. Then, when the decisions become public, the negative reaction is not only not understood, sometimes it's not believed, or not taken seriously, and simply serves to retrench the decision makers in their choice and they go radio silent. Then after a while, they may or may not reevaluate that without any form of communication as to what's going on inside. Then, a year or two later, it'll happen again.
I am NOT insulting people, there's no malice in that process, no lack of intelligence, no evil intents. I use the phrase "tone deafness" purposefully because I feel it conveys the idea that these bad decisions come simply from some acquired inability to perceive and understand. They're all god, smart people, but something happens in the Mozilla culture where communication with the outside world becomes difficult and of lessened importance. It's odd.
If anyone from Mozilla is reading this, what can be done to fix it?
Most developers and the community are great. But the management level incl. their new CEO and their UI designers have little clue about their products and what their community is all about. Mr Eich was part of Netscape and Mozilla from the very beginning and created the Javascript language in a few days - he understood the community definitely better.
The transition from Gecko to Servo in their products will be critical for Mozilla. It will give them a competitive advantage.
FirefoxOS runs highend Android smartphone just as fast as Android 5x. So it definitely has a future, like WebOS is nowadays in every LG SmartTV, and Bada/Tizen is in every Samsung SmartTV (they use a 4 or 8 core ARM board with 2+GB RAM). And ChromeOS works fine on lower end notebooks.
I hope new management can come on board and bring back life, energy and trust to mozilla
Their new CEO Chris Beard has been with Mozilla for a long time as well, with a break. I also expect it was his decision to pull the plug on sponsored tiles in order to focus 100% on making content discovery awesome for users (maybe with monetization as an afterthought). Saying he has little clue about the community just when he made a decision I imagine the majority of the community supports seems a bit odd. One could argue he should have done this earlier, but don't forget that Mozilla needs revenue to survive, and 90+% of the revenue coming from a single partner is a risk that will bite Mozilla sooner or later. So in order to diversify revenue, this was a reasonable experiment.
> FirefoxOS runs highend Android smartphone just as fast as Android 5x. So it definitely has a future, like WebOS is nowadays in every LG SmartTV, and Bada/Tizen is in every Samsung SmartTV (they use a 4 or 8 core ARM board with 2+GB RAM). And ChromeOS works fine on lower end notebooks.
And Firefox OS is on Panasonic smart TVs.
This kind of negativity is really common on HN and it makes me sad.
"This group of people did something I don't like, and then they changed their mind and stopped doing it. But rather than being happy about fixing their mistake, I'm going to keep criticizing them for making the mistake in the first place."
People (and groups of people) make mistakes. Spending your whole life holding grudges like this is a recipe for permanent grumpiness.
So tell me now, how did this happen? "Sponsored tiles", nobody batted an eye?
Will you try telling me the devs themselves did not see this as a potential source of problem? (I know for a fact that's not the case)
OK, let's assume this is a simple mistake. Now what happened with Pocket? We all know devs want to make it into an extension (and are working on it)... so why was Pocket pushed so hard and couldn't wait a couple of Fx versions before being released in a way that would obviously create drama?
If you step back and think about these issues you'll see they're systemic. God damn right I'm concerned about Mozilla, a company I respect a lot, becoming a shell of what it claims it stands for.
Was it?
All I saw was it being integrated into Firefox, and there being a lot of backlash. Against that backlash, there were a couple of people pushing hard to justify it, but they were either independent or Mozilla employees (often from a different team) posting independent opinions. I don't think Mozilla pushed Pocket a lot. Pushing features through the release cycle is pretty common.
Bear in mind that Mozilla integrated Pocket because it was the kind of feature it wanted to have in Sync (or Accounts, whatever it's called), but decided to use a third party service instead of making their own. From that POV it's much more reasonable. Not denying that it could have been done better with a pluggable open API and an open source equivalent (or whatever), but it's not that bad from that lens.
Sponsored tiles was an experiment, IIRC. Mozilla wanted to see if non-annoying, easy-to-disable ads could be used to fill otherwise blank space. It seems to have failed. But I would guess that a lot of the devs were hopeful about this experiment. I (not a Mozilla employee, but I do contribute a lot) was, at least.
...like most other features. Doesn't require pushing. That's how it works.
> obscure 3rd party service
Apparently it was a rather popular addon in Firefox?
> obscure 3rd party service Apparently it was a rather popular addon in Firefox? ==> What do you think the ratio of (# of pocket extension users / # of total firefox users) is? It's totally fine if FF had supported it as a pure "extension" (doesn't come preinstalled but required users to search and "pull" themselves if they wanted) but the criticism came from the fact that this 3rd party extension came preinstalled and was "pushed" to users.
No, I don't. They did with Pocket what they do with every nontrivial feature. Implemented it, and sherriffed it through the release trains. I don't think it was immediately plopped on a Firefox release, I recall seeing it on Developer/Aurora much earlier, which means it went through the release trains like everything else. The OP said, quote, "so why was Pocket pushed _so hard_ and couldn't wait a couple of Fx versions". How was it "pushed" "hard" if they did the _same thing_ they do for other features?
Yes, they made the decision to implement this feature. That doesn't count as pushing. I already illustrated why that decision made sense at the time.
Perhaps there was some backlash as it was on Aurora/Beta, I don't recall the exact timelines. IMO it's still okay to let the feature -- one which you still think makes sense and would benefit the userbase -- continue to ride the trains and hit a release while you try to understand the criticism and come up with a solution. It may be a better solution to disable it until a decision is made, but that depends on the perceived severity of the problem. Again, I don't see any hard pushing here, just a somewhat justifiable choice. I too would have preferred if they removed the feature when there was backlash, but I don't see anything wrong with the other solution. If you immediately backtracked every time there was criticism nothing would get done.
> but the criticism came from the fact that this 3rd party extension came preinstalled and was "pushed" to users.
Sure. But you gave the example of Instapaper (which you seem to be more okay with Firefox integrating with); I'm suggesting it was probably less popular than Pocket in FF or at least comparable popularity. I'm not disagreeing that integrating with a closed third party service is not good. I'm just pointing out a flaw in your Instapaper comment.
I feel that making the decision to make a feature (when there are good reasons behind it) is okay for Mozilla to do. Nothing wrong or malicious there. You evidently don't: we'll have to agree to disagree there. :)
I wasn't twisting definitions to fit my argument, I didn't feel there was anything wrong with deciding to implement something (when there are good reasons to) so I assumed you and the OP were troubled about something else.
Sorry about the pointless argument!
The Pocket tracking bug was filed in April 2015 [1] but the feature shipped with Firefox 38.0.5 in June 2015, just two months later.
On the bright side, that has lead to a more serious look at shipping parts of the browser as first-party extensions. I'm very much looking forward to that, even if I end up leaving all of them on.
https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/
38.0 was released on 2015-05-12. 38.0.5 then sat in the Beta channel for two weeks of testing and then it was released on 2015-06-02:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar#Past_branch_d...
I think I've seen this done for other features in the past, but yeah, this doesn't sit well with me.
(Still mostly okay with it though)
I am in the boat that wishes it was removable, perhaps as some kind of "default add-on", but it's not. I'm not removing FF because of it.
And as for ads: Were they tracking people with them? Were they sending back GUIDs of my browser every time I loaded a new tab? This is a legit question that would affect my opinion on the matter. The ads I see are brief, and cannot take more than a miniscule amount of data to serve. By those metrics, I have no problem with them.
It sure seems to me it was pushed hard.
Given the deep pockets that have risen to develop the Web to new lengths, Mozilla has needed more money and more developers. They are lacking in the chrome (the UI), in tooling, in platform presence (the iOS version came very late!), and little by little, in Web features. Not to mention musts like tab separation into processes, things that are now implemented in every browser but them.
(Edit: removed parallelism.)
Imagine you saw that issue, and need increased revenues. You don't want to impact existing users, as you know they would be mad. What do new users see that old users don't? Those empty tiles in about:newtab. Those tiles are useless anyway, and from a UX perspective, new users don't understand what they stand for. Having a few example websites would be a good indication. It fits marvellously in the constraints they had.
How about Pocket? As we discussed, their chrome is getting old. In particular, the bookmarks feature is both old, has a lot of old bugs that don't get fixed, and they have wanted to do an overhaul for a long time (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697359). But they lack development effort.
If only there was a company that did bookmarks better than we did, we wouldn't have to do the work! Oh, there is: Pocket.
One last thing that they can do to increase revenue is to make competition among search engines be felt. So they switched to Yahoo!. However, Yahoo!'s perspective was to show the world that Yahoo! Search had grown to be much better. Unfortunately, it is still behind as a product in terms of UI cluttering, quality of results, range of inputs... They still don't have a cartographic service! Let alone a worldwide routing engine and a GTFS crawler... So they may disappear.
It has become phenomenally hard to compete against Google. Their best shot at relevance is Servo now, but given the huge amount of work that is, they will still need deeper pockets.
No browser engine is particularly parallel. Gecko is not really more or less parallel than any other engine.
Now we know they got another search deal but that wasn't always a given.
This wasn't a one off mistake. It was calculated business decision that is a part of an industry trend.
Turning a blind eye to this is a recipe for getting perpetually reamed so others can turn a larger profit.
> "This group of people did something I don't like, and then they changed their mind and stopped doing it. But rather than being happy about fixing their mistake, I'm going to keep criticizing them for making the mistake in the first place."
You mistake negativity for the keeping of and referring to a tally sheet.
You would -no doubt- find little to object to in the following hypothetical statement:
"I'm still dreadfully concerned about my abusive spouse. My spouse has backtracked on the terribly bad policy of random bouts of unfocused rage followed by sporadic, intense emotional and physical violence directed toward my person. Good on my spouse for backtracking, but I still remember the long-standing pattern of similar behavior in our relationship. This pattern saddens and worries me. I'm still strongly considering walking out the door. I wish my spouse the best, but I'm fairly certain that I cannot trust my spouse and that my spouse does not have my best interests at heart."
Please note carefully that I'm not comparing poor corporate governance to spousal abuse.
I am -however- making the point that it pays to remember when people or companies fail to behave in a way that indicates that they even try to have your interests at heart. A momentary shift in strategy or behavior often fails to either turn into a lasting habit, or happens far too late to undo past harms.
If you allow yourself to get strung along by the latest olive branch, without considering the history of the entity making the offer in order to judge the offer's sincerity, you're gonna get played, time after time, after time.
Don't be disingenuous. That's a ridiculous and awful comparison and you know it. You should be ashamed.
I'm absolutely not being disingenuous. As I said, I am -in fact- not making a comparison between the situation with Mozilla and my hypothetical statement.
As I stated, I'm illustrating the general point that it often pays to keep track of when an entity has wronged you so you can weigh their current attempts at reconciliation against their history of wrongs.
Remember also that I was replying to the following statement:
> This kind of negativity is really common on HN and it makes me sad. ... "This group of people did something I don't like, and then they changed their mind and stopped doing it. But rather than being happy about fixing their mistake, I'm going to keep criticizing them for making the mistake in the first place."
I address the author's misconceptions in the first 'graph of my reply.
I pointed to and accounted for everything in my original comment and the follow-on comment.
When did I deny that anything I brought up in my original topic should be brought up? That's not what's going on here.
You appear to be claiming that -despite my repeated assertions to the contrary- I compared poor corporate governance to spousal abuse in my original comment.
I didn't.
I don't know how much clearer I can make this for you.
Edit: I remembered an old comment that I wrote a while back that explains how I feel about writing and how I try to structure my writing. [0] Maybe this might make things clearer for you.
To save you a click, I'll quote it inline:
"The world would be a far better place if fewer people would read between the lines of a given statement, and more people would make a habit of carefully parsing statements that others make.
When one writes words for general consumption, it's oh so tiresome to front-load one's writing with a bevy of disclaimers and preemptive clarifications. You will inevitably fail to include one clause or another, causing someone, somewhere to successfully misunderstand your words.
It's better to write exactly what you mean, as clearly as you are able, and -when writing for capable adults- trust that your audience is capable adults who know how to read what has been written and know not to infer meaning in inappropriate places."
Dropping Persona and preparing to lobotimize Firefox are my main annoyances.
Of course I was never much involved outside of using it sinve v1 and getting new users by installing it everywhere and talking about it since shortly after that
Most companies in the world couldn't dream of customers that care that deeply about the product. That doesn't mean you shouldn't take unpopular decisions when necessary, but it means you have to be deeply in contact with what your users care about.
Apparently Firefox users didn't care much for commercials in the browsers. Who knew?
Firefox is still really the only fully modern web browser that isn't the proprietary Safari or privacy eviscerating Chrome. It's a shame that it can't be a pure and neutral operating system for the web.
It seems like Mozilla could use its resources more wisely if this was the goal. They seem too much like a competitive startup looking to grow and not enough like a non-profit with a specific mission.
ಠ_ಠ
Without Chrome, Google's business is very dependent on a third-party (the browser developer) who has no loyalty to Google. Long term, it's in google's interest to eliminate such variables in their business.
Products don't need to explicitly produce revenue to be worth developing (and advertising). It's shocking to me how this incredibly basic concept is so far beyond the understanding of so many, particularly on HN. Chrome is a particularly easy case, given that, from its inception, it's pushed people towards Google searches. I've lost count of how many times people have pointed out that Android is a failure for Google because they don't make any money off of it (yes really), completely ignoring the fact that a world in which iOS controlled ~100% of the mobile market would be an uncomfortable position for Google (given that internet activity was moving so heavily towards mobile).
And I do doubt thats the only thing they profit from by people using chrome.
This comment would be fine if shortened to simply the first question.
http://www.insanitybit.com/2012/06/23/srware-iron-browser-a-...
Which only makes it sadder that it hasn't faded into complete obscurity by now. I always see it recommended by at least one person in any discussion about privacy in Chrome/ium.
It's a shame that a lot of people I've talked to aren't aware of the significance of how Mozilla designed the sponsored tiles.
Google and Facebook harvest mine all of your personal data in order to surface ads that are tailored to you. Mozilla, on the other hand, sent no data back to the server - all the decision-making was done client-side, which meant that Mozilla didn't have to collect any information about the user.
I'm not a fan of the advertising model in general for other reasons, but I wish more advertisers accomplished their goal without violating users' privacy and hoarding their data.
I won't cry over tiles going away, but if indeed all the magic happened client side, then that's a perfectly ethical way of going about advertising.
They aren't against ads because of how their personal data may be collected or used, especially when this happens without their knowledge.
They're against ads because ads are often visually disruptive, especially when they're unwanted and useless.
So Mozilla catered to a concern that most people don't have, without addressing the real problem that most people have with ads.
(I totally agree with the banality of my above point, but I don't see where else the conversation is going to go from here)
Im pretty sure nearly zero users hoped it would be there when it didnt exist yet.
This should have been made way more apparent! Even then, most people would hate it because of the visual clutter.
How sad.
I guess the experiment failed, but I hope they keep trying things in this space.
This doesn't sound like something that belongs in a browser any more than those damn tiles.
If I want said functionality, I should be able to install it using a browser extension. Unless I opt in like that, my computer's resources should not be wasted on something I don't even want in the first place.
Its clear they have no idea how to monetise anything to support the not-for-profit, so why bother and go back to the tried and true donations model.
Would donations model work? There is a difference making Wikipedia work, and making Mozilla work.
Firefox was made great without all of this monetising, it can be made great again without it as well.
Anyway, what kind of content delivery are you thinking about?
Perhaps it includes things like the changes to the AwesomeBar they're making? It now (in beta) appears to prefer doing searches and visiting the root of a domain over your bookmarks and history. For example, instead of visiting the local Transmission instance hosted on my NAS when I type "transmission" into the location bar, it wants to "transmission - search with {your default search engine}.
(It also gives much weirder suggestions presumably based on the domain name - if I only type "trans" it suggests I visit "translate.google.com", a site I have visited twice in two years, vice the previous behavior, my transmission local instance. So no matter what I do, I have to hit tab twice instead of once.)
For me, this behavior is extremely annoying and disrupts my entire location-bar-typing-experience, but by suggesting web searches, perhaps it's meant to encourage content discovery.
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.
Firefox competes at a very large scale. Browsers that are not Chrome, IE, Safari and Opera are likely blips that don't register. It wouldn't surprise me if the tiles were a blip in Mozilla's revenue.
You really showed them!
I didn't make the decision to prove anything to anyone. I just made the most logical decision (for me) based on trade-offs. If I'm unable to maintain control of my browser and my privacy on FF, then I don't see a point in using a worse product. And as I said, it's probably a minority opinion, but I believe that without those freedoms, FF is a poor browser compared to its major competitors.
They could have at least put in an option in the settings to disable this.
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.)
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.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/38aorv/psa_mozilla...
> Although the company emphasizes that Pocket and Telefonica didn’t pay for placement in the Firefox browser, Mozilla Corp. chief legal and business officer Denelle Dixon-Thayer told WIRED that Mozilla has revenue sharing arrangements with both companies.
http://www.wired.com/2015/12/mozilla-is-flailing-when-the-we...
A seriously irritated yet still loyal user since Netscape 3.0.
I also doubt that Telefonica makes significant money with Hello. I can't even imagine a business model around this feature.
I suspect Mozilla was just opportunistic here and made those arrangements in case these features happen to generate revenue some day somehow.
I actually think that with the way they did the integration, they probably should have received money (Otherwise, why not do a generic "read later" button and a way for services to register instead of adding a single, proprietary service). But for me, right now, the most important reason to use Firefox is trust in Mozilla, so I don't like it if it looks like they are not telling the entire story. (Compare to the advertising tiles: they clearly showed that they are receiving money for it, they also described what they did to preserve user privacy and security.)
And we still don't know that money is involved. ;) But I agree the revenue sharing arrangement should have been communicated better / earlier.
> And now it turns out that there potentially is, but no details are published.
It's not unusual for contracts with for-profit companies that you're not allowed to make the details public. We still don't know the exact terms of the old contracts with Google or the new ones with Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu etc.
> I actually think that with the way they did the integration, they probably should have received money
Like I said, I don't think Pocket, the company, is big enough. Mozilla could probably have demanded a six-digit figure for integrating Pocket, but to what end? It's too little money to really matter and would have just inspired more "Mozilla is selling out!" rants.
> (Otherwise, why not do a generic "read later" button and a way for services to register instead of adding a single, proprietary service).
As you can imagine, there were discussions internally about whether there should be a provider-agnostic read-later button and I don't think anyone disagreed in principle, nor is that idea dead now. Integrating Pocket first was just the cheapest and quickest way to ship something to users.
Please don't.
1. Mozilla is among the few organizations in the world that must thrive and also expand for the good of the web and the people relying on it.
2. Every time there's some kind of controversy about Mozilla that appears to be a setback, I keep wishing it would be dealt with quickly and appropriately.
3. Mozilla, there are a lot of passionate users who get upset when (seemingly) controversial decisions are implemented. I'm pained to watch Mozilla losing market share and mind share, as are many other users.
4. Mozilla, it's important that you listen to these vocal users and engage with them, even if the seemingly problematic decision(s) cannot or won't be revoked.
5. Mozilla, experimenting is not bad as long as the users' feedback and your learnings are utilized.
6. Mozilla, few things in this world are black and white when it comes to strategy and decisions. So I'm willing to be more accepting of your decisions as long as you show agility in reversing them when necessary and as long as those decisions favor my next point.
7. Mozilla, we want you to become bigger, better and succeed. All the things that you stand for don't have a (complete) parallel in other organizations and companies in the wider web ecosystem.
8. Mozilla, thanks for all that you have done and all that you do.
Well, Mozilla brought this onto themselves. I only hope they enjoy the dish that they have created for themselves.
Perhaps it would have been more smart to keep the power user features too and not dumping that kind of users, Opera is the best example that replacing a feature rich concept with minimalism and limited customization options in the hope to create an user migration from a competitors browser towards their own is not working well.
No, they just mean they will no longer engage with the Tiles. Their contract with Yahoo is not impacted and has nothing to do with Tiles.
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Sigh.
Edit: added info about search/display ad split
Were they unable to sell the ads effectively? Was nobody clicking on them? Was the income not significant enough? Did they decide that it wasn't a good idea to have ads in Firefox? Did they find a better way to monetize the browser?
Anyway, the ridiculous content-free way this post is written does unfortunately not inspire confidence in Mozilla.
People have even made games like Bullshit Bingo based on corporate-speak in meeting rooms. http://www.bullshitbingo.net/cards/bullshit/
What does "value to the user" mean? What exactly were your goals for "value to the user" before you released the feature? How did you measure it? And how did you fall short of these goals?
Mozilla briefly dabbled with advertising on the new tab page. That's now stopping. Like the article says: "We have therefore made the decision to stop advertising in Firefox."
But they both have URL bars, copy!
When Firefox came out, they wanted to differentiate themselves from the clunky and awkward cross-platform UI of Seamonkey, so they emphasised following platform conventions.
When Chrome came out, they wanted to differentiate themselves from existing native (and native-feeling) browsers by being minimalist, so they invented their own cross-platform UI. Some people were quite happy to learn a new UI to gain perceived speed and switched to Chrome, some people preferred native-looking apps to Chrome's gratuitous differences and stayed with Firefox.
Then Chrome started eating Firefox's marketshare. Whether that's because of better marketing, technical superiority, or just technical differences in ways that happened to matter at the time doesn't matter; the point is that these days when most people think of "web browser" they imagine something that looks more like Chrome than, say Firefox 3. And so Mozilla feels that to stay relevant, Firefox has to hide its menu-bar, put tabs above the address bar, cram a whole bunch of disparate things into a single hamburger menu, and so forth.
There's a small but vocal contingent who stayled loyal to Firefox and avoided Chrome so they could avoid those UI idioms, and the fact that Firefox is now adopting them anyway feels like a betrayal of sorts. I'm not saying it is anything melodramatic as betrayal, but people are entitled to their opinions.
They are apparently no longer going to be advertising in "Tiles", whatever that is. A quick search makes it seem like an optional interface for the new tab page, before any navigation has occurred.
I don't use Firefox so can't really comment about Tiles, but I would be kinda annoyed seeing ads on the new tab page in Chrome.
I agree with the second sentence, but not the first: the fact that you can't have both easily doesn't mean that you're doing it wrong by trying to have both.
Remaining polite and as little annoying as possible is definitely doing it right, so the only sense in which this could be "doing it wrong" is if advertisers weren't paying; but that seems not to have been what happened here—the rollback is (or at least is being presented as) a response to user, not advertiser, dissatisfaction.