We get the browser for free and these are just ads, not trackers - they are not stealing our data like Chrome, FB, and the rest.
I have nothing against straight ads.
I have nothing against straight ads.
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.)
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 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.