Firefox Offers Recommendations with Latest Test Pilot Experiment: Advance

Nothing on the Laserlike website indicates how they plan to make money from their service, but I wouldn't bet on it not being overridden with advertising, corporate messaging, politics and other moneyed interests.

> this is the market working as intended

Is it? I would love for a transparent market-driven motivation to be presented. But in its absence, we can only guess.

> mozilla is experimenting with a new way for users to find what they want

Why? Because they don't like the existing ways? Because they believe it fits their mission? Because there is money on the line? My TV vendor also experiments with new ways to host apps and use the internet too.

> it may work, it may not, but i’m glad they are trying

I personally am not glad they are trying. In fact, these trials help solidify my beliefs in the Mozilla's ideals regarding the role of a browser and can potentially alienate me or at the least prevent them from maintaining an air of righteousness in my eyes.

i'll bite just a bit: you're concerned with sending your browser history to a third party but i assume are happy to send your search requests, hence search history, to a third party? i kinda understand the want to minimize the amount of third parties that know anything at all but otherwise don't see much of a difference in principal and history tells us that the search history may actually be worse.

Thanks for the response. I think by your phrasing that this experiment is not testing revenue generation you are also saying there is no revenue relation at all, correct? (well, maybe for Laserlike, heh) Disclosure of monetization of data in any form IMO should be a requirement, so I hope that its lack of disclosure means it is not occurring.

While I agree in general that alternative web traversal techniques could be explored, I am not sure I want my browser vendor + third party doing it. I understand the places we put in our address bar may have restrictive rules, and it's why I don't enter those places into my address bar. In good faith, if this experiment is deemed successful enough to improve/continue, I would ask that the role that Laserlike plays be pluggable with an open protocol. I would also ask that if it's adopted more mainstream that it always remain opt-in.

I know that it sometimes seems unfair to ask for all these freedom-respecting things while the other guys get away with so much. But what seems like a double standard is what endears trust.

Aren't deep hooks into the browser just making it worse? There are billions of websites and myriad search and sharing sites, and only a few browsers.

It just seems like something that can happen client side. Say there are deemed 100 new interesting articles in a day, send those 100 links to the client, and let the client rank them.

Thats how the recommendation by pocket works, right? Whenever I see these types of systems, I worry they try to hard to show us things more like our past, and dont try hard enough to shape our future. A recommendation engine should be more focused on "this is interesting, this is good for you to learn about" in a healthy way, compared to "this is more of the same but we know itll keep your attention better than facebook."

These AI recommendation engines ALWAYS fall too close to clickbait, like a drug dealer, and never close to a medical healer, currated lists like techmeme/mediagazer/longform/longreads/redef/aldaily. Prismatic and Trove come to mind. I bet one could get better results just parsing those 6 sites for new daily links.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7-...

The comments always look the same when Mozilla announces something like this. Perhaps the content team should have a specific checklist they run through when announcing third-party collaborations, answering questions like:

- is anyone making money off of this?

- what is the motivation for the third party to take part?

- is this the default, and if not, what extra demands would it have to fulfil to ever become default?

- what user actions, if any, can trigger interaction with this third party?

I'm sorry, and I respect your work, but I think this is nonsense. Let's say Mozilla moves forward with this project. Assuming that it will be a source of revenue at all, the "recommendations" are going to be based on whoever has the money to pay Mozilla for ad placement (and let's be honest that it is ad placement; if it's keyed to the specific interests of each user that just makes it targeted ad placement). That results in the opposite of the supposed goal of decentralizing power online. To be honest I'm not convinced that adding "genuine end-user value" is not just a paper-thin justification for accepting new sources of revenue that are antithetical to Mozilla's historical values. [1]

But let's assume the most charitable and best case scenario, in which Mozilla continues the program but doesn't accept any money for payed spots or higher placement. How are they going to automatically determine what is valuable? If the algorithms go by what is popular, then it's just a new version of any other content aggregator with all the associated problems. (The listicle and click-bait articles shown in the screenshot on the blog.mozilla link are very telling in that regard.) On the other hand, if the algorithms tailor content closely to a user's particular interests and views, that is the very definition of a filter bubble. [2]

Even putting aside these two worries, I find it deeply counterintuitive to expect automated content to better provide what a user wants to see than they are able to find themselves - e.g. with search engines. This is entirely counter to any previous experience I have had with automatic suggestions. I would very much like to see any justification for optimism here. And even if it were largely successful here, I don't see how it would avoid leaving very small sites, bloggers, and their ideas in the dust. I'm sceptical that a centralized source of recommendations is going to provide a solution to concentrated power on the web.

[1] This is the sort of line we got about recommendations from Pocket. "Bringing valuable content to the attention of users" is the kind of BS marketing-speak I expect from corps which run on ad revenue, but not from Mozilla.

[2] "A filter bubble is a state of intellectual isolation that can result from personalized searches when a website algorithm selectively guesses what information a user would like to see based on information about the user, such as location, past click-behavior and search history." - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble

Not the job of a browser. But neither was DRM and an integrated search engine and yet here we are... There is a nice fork of FF for android that removes the Mozilla if anyone is interested

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/

Walls? When I jump over the 1 inch high wall and visit random sites, I'm risking getting spammed with modal popups and tracked and other shit. Yes I should use some script blocker, but they're too much effort to setup to avoid breaking things I need.

This is why I prefer to remain on a set of few trusted sites.

This seems to be one of those ideas everyone has had at some point, but that are hard to successfully implement.

I’d love to see it succeed. Don’t let the gratuitous negativity in this thread get to you.

Strangely, all their ideas to heighten our enjoyment of browsing seem involve giving third parties privileged access to the browser.

It reeks of a lack of integrity. They say they respect your privacy, but the fact that they're considering things like this in the first place means their convictions are negotiable.

It's too much to hope that products could just focus on doing what they do, and doing it well, rather than bodging on miscellaneous shit until it resembles the Homermobile.

Build a browser. Implement the standards fully. Make it scream. That's your job.

> They repeatedly sabotage

As this is now (and has been for some time) a pattern of this kind of behavior, what's causing it? While other explanations exist, I believe it might be worthwhile to at lest consider the idea that sabotage is goal. Placing people into positions of power for so they can dismantle/sabotage has recently been a popular tactic (e.g. some of the current presidential cabinet appointments). Would anybody even recognize that this kind of tactic was happening before the damage to Firefox becomes fatal?

(to be very clear: I'm speaking hypothetically and not making any explicit or implied accusations about anybody at Mozilla)

Why are Laserlike's ad targeting algorithms better than Facebook? The alternative to Facebook is not a smaller younger Facebook, it's open protocols.

If you want to send all your browser history into a black box and get recomendations on what to read use Chrome.

> Isn't that how we ended up with Facebook's ad targeting algorithms controlling most people's web experience? Running a cheap experiment testing how alternatives might work seems like important if you care about not having network effects giving a couple of companies significant control over the web.

A social network doesn't mean Facebook. It could be an open platform like RSS or Mastodon (the latter I think is more closely aligned with Mozilla's mission, and could use the funding). Friends sharing content with me typically do so over Slack or Discord. I don't know how many people could be convinced to use an app that will algorithmically find something cool if you let it watch what you do all day. That's creepy and the value generated is pretty minimal.

> That was never generally true and it really hasn't been accurate for the last year or two, where performance has been very competitive depending on what you're measuring.

In my case, performance has been slow/stuttery on macOS to the point where I keep actively trying to use it, even enabling WebRender, and falling back to Chrome or Safari. I've also noticed the performance issues on Android. It seems fine on Windows, but not noticeably faster than Chrome or Edge.

There are plenty of forks of mozilla products. The real value that mozilla brings is their engineering organization.

So this is a violation of GDPR as well ?

I found it in about 20 seconds. Right next to "Powered by Laserlike" there's a settings gear, and at the bottom of the dropdown is a link to "Account Settings". In there, you can delete your browsing history and 'other data'.

They have been overtaken by data miners because there is an addon that you have to install another addon first and both make it very clear that you might send data to third parties and the first addon makes it clear that you definitely send data to third parties while also offering you options to control this sending of data and delete it on request?

Tbh, it sounds more like they are experimenting if having website recommendations in the browser is something worthwhile pursuing, if it is, they'll likely buy laserlike and integrate it clientside without violating privacy in any way, similar to how they have done it several times by now.

> This is how it should be

Well, that depends. What if the effect is that Firefox's market share dwindles, it disappears, and everyone is forced to use e.g. Google's browser? All of a sudden your higher standards have resulting in only being able to choose lower standards...

> Now, tell me how to disable that again?

You can disable it in about:config.

Pocket doesn't send your browsing history to a third party; it all works locally.

Exactly. And there is nothing that verifies anythong gets deleted anyways. It could always just tell you it deleted it while never deleting anything.

I imagine that when you request data deleted it’s only anonymized, and the actual learning data is kept.

Won't this explicitly fall afoul of GDPR? My completely lay understanding is that you no longer can offer give-us-your-data-take-it-or-leave-it services in the EU.