I make monthly donations to Mozilla to support their cause. I will stop my donations and migrate to a different browser if they continue down this path.
And it's still Firefox: if you're upset enough to consider "migration to a different browser", why not instead get upset enough to just look up the pref that turns them off? Because that's the whole point of Firefox: you're still in control of your browser, and almost everything is yours to set to your liking, even if it's not in the normal options UI. Don't want those ads? Hit up about:config, turn them off, problem solved?
And in the mean time, Mozilla still needs your help, because breaking today's Chrome dominance by offering a better product (not just a competing one. People don't switch if the offering is more of the same) is orders of magnitudes more difficult than when they broke IE's dominance many decades ago.
If Facebook made 32.03 per user last year, I think it's fair to say that Mozilla will probably do even better if they offer an ad-free subscription option for e.g. 36/y across their entire suite of services.
It's not weird to expect Mozilla to do their best to try and remain solvent.
Near 100% of Mozilla users would agree to get the $36/year subscription?
> Near 100% of Mozilla users would agree to get the $36/year subscription?
No, not at all.
And I'm surprised at how many downvotes this is getting, but the basic concept is that at $36/y, each person paying that amount will assuredly be donating more to Mozilla than Mozilla would be making from ads on that user. I couldn't find any numbers on what Mozilla makes from ads, but I'd be surprised if it approached what Facebook makes per user.
More importantly, it's not just ads. This is another example in a long line of conveniently whoops-didn't-mean-to thumbs in the eyes of users. Mozilla has this weird split-brain, one step forward two steps back mentality when it comes to building and fighting for their users.
It's exhausting to see this pattern play out over and over, so it absolutely makes sense that people will eventually get fed up with it and stop donating.
The forward people and the backward people are probably different people.
This is the exact businessmodel of Brave. So apparently is is not that strange a suggestion.
If Mozilla is going broke, ask for donations by all means! Slap ads all over Firefox by all means.
Get my consent first though, eh? Give me a chance to open my wallet before you start ruining the only reason I interact with your company.
Can I note this is not the first time Firefox had made people think they've been hacked for monetary gain. I also disabled any and all checkboxes that involved being experimented on which they have ignored for this one.
Remember when they promised it wouldn't happen again? I do.
https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-investigates-mr-robot-fire...
It also feels weird to donate to have an ad-free, privacy first, open source browser and get ads in it.
> And it's still Firefox: if you're upset enough to consider "migration to a different browser", why not instead get upset enough to just look up the pref that turns them off?
Default settings matter. "Just turn it off" is not a valid suggestion in my opinion.
You're talking of Bitcoin donations, right? ;-)
I have nothing against straight ads.
I also have nothing against straight ads. Who knows how Mozilla will implement this though, and whether it will be more annoying than useful. I have some suspicions, but I'll reserve judgement until I've experienced them, since I sometimes have a hard time predicting correctly (as I suspect many people do) because the topic is somewhat emotionally charged.
Why? It's almost always noise nobody wants to see. Advertising hurts usability by definition. Putting ads in the address bar of all places is actually hostile to users: people who are used to finding bookmarks that way will end up opening sponsored links instead due to muscle memory.
Now I am older and tired of doing the symlinking every time I setup a new install of Ff.
I've been moving around the same firefox install since Opera died.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1543752
It's a slow and steady advance, not something that happens overnight.
If mozilla is moving towards expanding advertising in FF from the developer, then they're changing their incentive structure in a way that makes putting ads in front of my eyes against my wishes more and more beneficial to them.
I can't see this as a good step forward. It only leads to places where they're incentivized to make the browser worse to make more money.
I do. They are actively hostile to the user experience. I will criticise any update to software that deliberately makes the user experience worse.
Personally I don't mind at all if Mozilla wants to display ads in Treeherder or in their corporate offices, I wouldn't even feel like I want to pay to remove those :)
My point being, I don't expect firefox donations would amount to very many millions, but it's important to note that today the option doesn't really even exist.
Don't.
If that means not doing further development, great. Leave that to people who want to make the software better, not worse.
If you can find a way to monetise software, that's fantastic, but if that monetisation requires degrading quality I have no respect for it.
You mean apart from Pale Moon, Basilisk, Waterfox, Tor, XB, Iceweasel, Swiftfox, Swiftweasel, Cometbird, and IceDragon?
Yeah no idea why that thing that has happened several times hasn't happened.
It probably doesn't help that you can't choose to donate to/for Firefox. If you disagree with other things Mozilla is doing, perhaps moreso than the things you agree with, then you don't really have much options.
For many people, advertisements - especially ones enabled without announcement, sneakily - are simply an unacceptable red line, nomatter how important Mozilla thinks they are.
I should also add that I never disable any telemetry in Firefox or anything that helps them earn a cent or two (as long as it does not abuse my privacy too much, and there were not a lot of those during 15+ years of using Firefox exclusively.)