Firefox is reviving “Sponsored Tiles”
support.mozilla.org
support.mozilla.org
This is cutting out the middleman.
That is saying they are okay with status quo. Otherwise they would have already quit.
I feel like with this initiative they can set a price for a user’s attention. One could hope the user also gets the option to pay it upfront and opt out.
I do for other open sourcy services (Bitwarden etc), there wouldn't be a huge public for that, but it doesn't need to either I think.
Something like ublock with an open list maintained by the community. That way, I won't need to keep up with the latest crazy ideas Mozilla suits come up with to earn 0.01% more while annoying 99% of their costumers.
Why can't there be a browser that is just... a browser?
* Eat the costs because you're so wealthy you don't care (Apple, Google)
* Use the work of those who ate the costs (Waterfox, Icecat, Edge, Firefox-Fork-Of-The-Month-Whose-Only-Purpose-Is-To-Shit-On-Firefox-Lol-Palemoon)
* Find a way to actually make money (Firefox, Brave)
Needless to say, you entire lifeline being depending on Google when you're Firefox is horribly bad.
Maybe web technologies have gotten too complicated. Maybe they need to be replaced with something that does not cost hundreds of millions to support?
Why can we have the whole galaxy of free software with the various distributions and desktop environments and entire kernel ecosystems and device drivers free of this kind of monetization yet somehow this is impossible with browsers?
I don't think twice about using Debian, Freebsd, Openbsd, or Openwrt.
What the hell is going on with Mozilla and Firefox?
A lot of the remaining OSS ecosystem benefits corporate software development and is already supported by corporate backers.
Many of these ‘forks’ emerged because of the Firefox trademark policy which prevented distributions from packaging Firefox under that name.
How are these stupid additions better for anyone? Consumers find them more annoying and they probably don't result in any significant month for Mozilla.
Anyway, we need another open source browser, one that is controlled by the community and not some SV company.
Plus, while Mozilla the corporation is technically a for profit entity, they operate under the direction of the not for profit Mozilla Foundation. They are already the best choice for a browser that is free from an SV company’s influence. But they do have to pay their employees and keep the lights on. How are they supposed to pay for things if they don’t do stuff like this? At least they are honest about which things they are making money from.
The point is, I should not need to keep a close eye on Mozilla and disable stuff regularly. I should not need to fight my browser.
That is a bit hyperbolic. You see a feature in the browser you don't like, you can turn it off. Not really a 'close eye' issue to me.
> I should not need to fight my browser.
This also is hyperbolic, switching a single option is fighting with a browser?
Turn off telemetry. Set search to DDG. Set "Do Not Track" always on. Get rid of the Mozilla start page. Disable any suggestions for Top Sites or other junk like "Snippets".
That's just as I type, with no thought. There are myriad tweaks in about:config that I've promised myself I'll remember over the years since Phoenix.
My favourite browser is adversarial because they need millions of dollars to write a piece of software which shows text and pictures from a network connection in the intended place on a screen.
Why is this so complicated and expensive? What has the Internet become?
Turn it off and start over. This one is broken.
I just login to my Mozilla account, and move buttons on the UI around (for some reason that's the one thing that isn't synced).
> Why is this so complicated and expensive?
In the older days, people were willing to give up more for their faiths, their drives. You could make this choice and essentially live a life of service if you wanted.
> What has the Internet become?
It's still an open network and there is nothing stopping you really from doing your own thing on it.
And yet the KDE team was able to build the best browser in the world (Konqueror) while being funded only by charity and charity-like governmental development grants.
So even if Konqueror is still "the best browser in the world", that is meaningless to this discussion. Building the chrome around an existing engine is almost trivial compared to developing a 100% independent browser engine.
Back then, the web was simpler and so we had many different engines. Today, we really only have two. All other attempts have failed - even Microsoft couldn't compete. The only reason Mozilla is still going is because of their head start and Google money. If Apple hadn't picked up KHTML and turned it into WebKit and Google developed their own thing, KHTML would be even more dead than Gecko is today.
I would argue it was more complex, trying to get something moderately advanced to render the same between many browsers became a massive chore compared to today.
It's the same situation as RISC vs CISC - for a programer, CISC is "easier" to write for (== it does more work for you), but for a chip designer, RISC is much simpler to design and implement.
I'm running two versions: 85.0.1 and 87.0a1 and haven't seen it on either. On the other hand, I had configured my new tabs to be entirely blank, so maybe if you'd like to try the same we could find out if this removes their ads?