Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions
support.mozilla.org
support.mozilla.org
> relevant suggestions from our trusted partners
The suggestions are not relevant to, and the partners not trusted by, me.
That said, I don't understand, why would somebody use Firefox instead of Chrome, Edge, or Safari if they ad in-browser ads.
But I'm software engineer, and I didn't know about it. I don't think most (as in 95%+, even in tech) people would know difference to care. My point is visibly – firefox seem to be just as ad-hungry as competition.
They could be better behind the scenes, but customer wouldn't know it.
Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm just grumpy.
You know what I wonder? Where's the hatred threshold for ordinary people? When you see an ad in a middle of something and you're so pissed that you'll go out of your way to specifically avoid the product that's shoved in your throat. I know mine's been reached, but, hey, I'm just an grumpy asshole ;)
Guess what Mozilla's response is when Google lists something they shouldn't? "Take it up with Google". And you think Google supports those who they defame better than their usual customers? No. This is not a hypothetical scenario.
This was released in Chrome 69 and rolled back in Chrome 70: https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/product-updates-base...
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
This said, of course, I hate this "feature" and I'll make sure I disable it.
Placing ads in the search bar and datamining everything you search for is failing at this mission.
Mozilla needs reform as an institution, it needs new leadership. But its raison d'être is still very much there.
Basically a open source project were the downstream is considered hostile.
There is an institutional problem at Mozilla, we should focus on fixing that rather than trying to come up with even more complex sticking plasters.
Basically what nature does when the elder generation acquires to many parasites and dna damages, spawn a new generation and die, taking most of the parasites with them.
How do you fix that from the outside if not by forking or at least using a different Browser to make it clear that the current behavior is unacceptable.
"When contextual suggestions are enabled, Mozilla receives your search queries. When you see or click on a Firefox Suggest result, Mozilla collects and sends your search queries and the result you click on to our partners through a Mozilla-owned proxy service. The data we share with partners does not include personally identifying information and is only shared when you see or click on a suggestion."
Doesn't sound like "datamining everything you search for".
This, right here. They get those regardless of whether you click on anything. What happens with those queries afterwards?
> "No new data is collected, stored, or shared to make these new recommendations."
If that's true, it would imply search queries were already being sent to Mozilla. I hope it isn't true. I feel incredibly dumb that I never bothered to verify it, that I trusted them. If it turns out the queries were sent, I'll look into filing a GDPR complaint, because I sure as hell didn't give consent for my queries - intended for the search engine of my choice, and which might contain PII - to be processed by Mozilla.
https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2021/09/15/data-and-firefox-su...
> Mozilla approaches handling this data conservatively. We take care to remove data from our systems as soon as it’s no longer needed. When passing data on to our partners, we are careful to only provide the partner with the minimum information required to serve the feature.
> A specific example of this principle in action is the search’s location. The location of a search is derived from the Firefox client’s IP address. However, the IP address can identify a person far more precisely than is necessary for our purposes. We therefore convert the IP address to a more general location immediately after we receive it, and we remove the IP address from all datasets and reports downstream.
That's hogwash without access to details of actual cases. What is the definition of "minimum" for a given partner here?
Reminds me of the UX of Android a couple years ago:
- Android: "I'm a better system than desktops, I offer fine-grained permissions that ensure apps only have access to what they need, nothing more."
- Every single app, upon installation: "I need every single permission enumerable in the current SDK version."
>> A specific example of this principle in action is the search’s location. (...)
Oh, that's nice, I feel a bit more relaxed - this means they can't enable this feature for me at all, because they first have to seek informed consent from me for this kind of processing. They'd better remember to ask.
I wonder how containers affect this behavior? Since the same history seems to pop up regardless of which container I'm in, I wonder if this effectively makes containers permeable?
I feel like this kind of marketing language is only there to obfuscate the real reason why things are done. They want to include ads to help finance Mozilla – the main goal isn't "to enhance and speed up your searching experience". Calling the introduction of ads an enhancement for the user is just dishonest.
I just want a browser that isn't controlled by the ad mafia.
Maybe a way to rely less on Google and "trusted partners" money is just to spend less.
[1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/public-records/
It's also worth noting that there is a strict separation between the Mozilla Foundation (the tax exempt non-profit) and Mozilla Corporation (the wholly owned, for-profit subsidiary which builds Firefox). The Foundation is not directly involved in the creation of Firefox.
Wow I didn't know that. I always assumed Firefox was developed by a non-profit. So it basically means that Firefox is a commercial product (the purpose of which is to make money). Thanks for that bit of information which was not at all obvious if you don't pay close attention...
In contrast to all other browser products, whose main purpose is increasing share holder value.
The subsidiary is a for-profit, but the profit all goes to the parent non-profit, which is then constrained in how it can use that income.
Think of a little charity shop that sells, say, second hand clothes in order that the profit from sales funds a charitable purpose like fighting cancer. The little shop is likely to be a for-profit company, wholly owned by its parent charity.
Charities have to follow strict rules about how they spend their money, care for their assets, make decisions, report on everything and be audited.
Everything they do is required to be demonstrably for the charity's purposes, which clashes with the on-the-ground flexilibilty required to make business-like decisions for something like a shop. For example when you decide to spruce up the lighting at the front of the shop to attract customers, which only indirectly serves the charity's goals.
That may be a poor example. The point is that the subsidiary business can be run more like a business, being managed, making decisions and spending its income in the freer way a business is allowed to do. The parent charity retains shareholder-like ultimate control, but that is indirect control; the subsidiary has its own directors and executives.
In the case of a shop that means it can spend on things that may attract customers, take gambles that may bring in more profit for the parent charity to use, and make day to day decisions that aren't subject to the same level of reporting, auditing and trustee oversight that the parent charity is. The shop's operating assets are outside the charity, giving it operational flexibility, but when it transfers some portion of assets as profits to the charity, those assets become inside and how they are spent becomes more tightly regulated.
I have no idea how that works.
[Edited, because I got it 180deg arse-over-tit]
Here's what I'd really like them to do:
* Stop paying out millions to execs
* Focus more on Firefox instead of other side projects
* Let me pay for Firefox development directly
It lasted a few years (it seem 5, based on Wikipedia), and they ultimately ended up switching to the default engine business model.
Maybe people would be happier if they had to pay to switch off the ads instead of it just being a setting (/switching default search engine)??
A lot of people just think that Mozilla should be a nonprofit and not aim to primarily enrich it's CEO and leadership. This isn't the case at the moment, which is clear if you paid any attention to what they've been doing for the last few years.
Little of the money that's going to be raised by this will end up paying for engineers to improve or maintain the Firefox code base and the vast majority of it will end in the pockets of said leadership, and this is kinda displeasing.
https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...
mozilla employs at the moment around 800 people.
according to their FAQ
> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2015/f...
> More than 75% of Mozilla spending is on people-related investments to produce the products and programs that support our mission: keeping the web open, free, and accessible.
this would mean they had around 300 million to spend on these 800 employees, averaging around 375 000 per employee.
Sr. Software Engineers get <$200 000, so IF all of their 800 employees were senior software engineers (extremely unlikely), their salary would be around 160 million, which is slightly more then 50% of what was available. a more realistic calculation would be around 20-30%, because not everyone will be getting SV wages. They've got global presence after all with offices SF, Toronto, Berlin, Beijin etc.
you'd have to verify in which unrelated projects by third parties mozilla invests and generally follow the money to figure out anything more, but that is simply out of scope of a hn comment.
Minor nit here - they don't have to pay taxes because they don't make a profit, not because of their status. If a for-profit corporation doesn't make profit (and few tech companies do), they won't have to pay income taxes either.
$375k per employee for a pure technology company doesn't seem outrageous? That has to include facilities too.
It's hard not to read into your message the suggestion that you'd like Mozilla to outsource development to lower-wage countries. I really doubt that's going to succeed in a challenging and competitive market like browsers. IMO they'd be better off spending more trying to poach the best brains behind Chrome.
does it? whats the remaining 25% (100 million) for in that case?
> It's hard not to read into your message the suggestion that you'd like Mozilla to outsource development to lower-wage countries
i do not want them to do that particularly. i just pointed out that not all 800 employees will be getting the $137,000 with a $54,800 bonus wage to point out that i'm being extremely generous in my calculation of how much they're likely paying to actual employees.
there are no conclusive numbers i know of, but if you just look at their open positions portal (https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/) you will surely agree that few of these will be getting that $190k...?
this is quite offtopic but what i find especially disheartening about mozilla is that almost all of its revenue comes from google.
every nation i know of is trying to build up their online/web presence, and yet we have only one mega corporation sponsoring web browsers to a significant degree. why isn't every nation like the USA, Canada, Australia etc each investing at least 10 million into a fund to build an open source web browser or contribute to one? why is every nation fine with that situation?
A common rule of thumb is employees cost a company 2x salary.
The 2019 combined financial statements show $210 million for program salaries and benefits. Management and general salaries and benefits were $109 million.[1] Program means software development basically.[2]
[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201...
[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201...
I'm sure you could find 50,000 people in the world willing to pay this. I'm one of them.
The problem is how you get started while building reputation, but I'm sure that it's possible.
In case of Mozilla/Firefox: do this while you still have some reputation left. It's literally the one party on the Internet that would have a chance of pulling it off.
But Firefox is open source. This is very important for many reasons.
Same. I already donate to the Mozilla Foundation but I'd love to fund Firefox more directly.
Maintaining an independent, high-quality browser engine so that the design and implementation of the Web isn't up to a Google/Apple duopoly is incredibly expensive: https://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/12/maintaining-independent... (4 years old, but the situation I describe hasn't changed, except that Microsoft has switched to Chromium so Mozilla's engine is more important than ever.)
Feels like a massive missed opportunity - microsoft is the only big player not funded by ads.
Also having their own Engine was cool, i liked it, although it did sometimes have failures. Looks like they got tired if different issues and thew in the towel
Remember the W3C DRM standard and how Firefox implemented it?
Read this: https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....
To quote,
--- start quote ---
The total word count of the W3C specification catalogue is 114 million words at the time of writing.
If you added the combined word counts of the C11, C++17, UEFI, USB 3.2, and POSIX specifications, all 8,754 published RFCs, and the combined word counts of everything on Wikipedia’s list of longest novels, you would be 12 million words short of the W3C specifications.
--- end quote ---
This is why. It's currently impossible to start a greenfield browser [1]. And even forking an existing engine and trying to keep up is almost impossible [2]
[1] There's Flow browser, https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/ I don't know if it's truly from scratch
[2] Microsoft forked Chromium and is still almost 2000 APIs behind, https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
It actually used to be that way. For example, it used to be the case that the Firefox product owner was a Googler getting paid by Google to work on Firefox. Lots of other contributors hailed from other companies (or universities), too, whether they were specifically getting paid for it or not; there was a long-tail of completely unpaid contributors. Mozilla wasn't anything like the Bay Area company you see today so much as it was, loosely speaking, a co-op. Mozilla's various formal organizational incarnations were supposed to handle, in order of importance: A. keeping the infrastructure running, and B. paying the salaries of its own contributors to the mozilla.org commons.
Several things changed this:
1. Google, the biggest contributor to the project, pulled their people off Firefox to go build Chrome.
2. Mozilla-the-Corporation, having deceived themselves about the role that the commons-style development played in the project's success, went and Netscaped it.
On the latter point: basically, the Corporation abused its position. They tried (and unfortunately succeeded) at consolidating things under their corporate structure (particularly during the FirefoxOS era after hiring an Adobe exec to be their shepherd through that doomed project—convinced that what Mozilla really needed was good, business-minded leadership). This launched Mozilla on the descent we've seen over the last ten years, and burned all sorts of bridges including goodwill with external contributors and other parts of its base. They hollowed it out, and then had people on payroll to fill in the parts that were getting fucked up. As with the case of Netscape, not all of their hires were good hires.
The perverse thing is, if you know anything about Mozilla's early history, i.e. Firefox pre-history, you'll know that this was already tried once before. What's amazing is that it actually "worked" this time. You'll hear (from people like Mitchell, even) stories about how mozilla.org was an escape pod, and that it had to be rescued from Netscape, because Netscape thought they were the rightful rulers by fiat—this, even after mozilla.org had been set up! Unfortunately, Mozilla-the-Corporation (distinct from mozilla.org) succeeded at taking control where Netscape failed, mostly because everyone involved pretty much let them. A lot of the mechanisms that had been put in _specifically_ to keep Netscape hires in their place were rolled back as part of the post-Firefox-4.0, "we want to move fast and break things, too" era.
Lots of people who at one point once had @mozilla.com email addresses will dispute this, choosing to tell themselves—and others—a different story. And of course they do. It happens for exactly the same reasons that the "are we the baddies?" meme is a thing.
- Developing Firefox looks way more expensive than running Wikipedia servers. - It looks like there’s at least 10x less Firefox users than Wikipedia users.
It might still be possible (Firefox users might me more willing to pay and to pay more than Wikipedia users). It still looks really hard.
I wish they didn’t try to match the startup/VC/pivot/diversify frenzy but, in the end, I’m really happy that they exist.
Conversely, AFAIK, Wikimedia doesn't accept money for merchandising their users. At least not in any official, straightforward way.
Of course if you don’t like what an organization broadly does with the money given to it, don’t give it money. Maybe issue some feedback that you think the organization should do x or y, and the fact it’s doing p and q makes you hesitant to donate.
I also don't understand what will stop all five of their remaining users from switching to IceCat, Chromium, or Brave.
Do I hate the current exec team? Fuck yes. Do I have any serious alternative? Effectively, no. Am I a hostage? Sadly, a bit. I hope people with the power to influence this state of thing will, sooner or later, draw a line and find a better way forward (i.e. a new exec team). Either that, or the project will die and hopefully someone else will pick up the baton.
I am sure I will regret asking... but why do you think that?
Users receive crypto if they join the brave rewards system. The rewards are directly related to Brave's revenue from their ad network - the notification ads. Advertisers put money for a known reason and a quantifiable investment. It's all opt-in. Users don't need to put any of their own money to be able to withdraw the rewards they receive. It's as much the opposite of a scheme as it can be.
What would you take to get you to take another look at it, to see it for yourself?
The big concern there is that ads that don't track are generally less valuable so even widespread adoption of Brave's system would cause a decrease in ad revenue, same as Apple's recent anti-tracking changes.
> Every time I try to espouse an issue that I have with the design or architecture
If you start a conversation with "issues that you have", you are going to have a hard time. Always. Starting with "issues that you have" is bad because (a) it assumes that you know more than the developers who have done the work of designing and addressing the trade-offs of the system and went through the actual work of developing the solution, (b) it assumes that your needs are more important than those of other users who are satisfied with the solution and (c) places the burden of solving your issue onto their shoulders while offering nothing in return.
In other words: no one likes a know-it-all.
If you start the conversation with the intent of understanding why things were done in a certain way and why certain design choices were made, you will be more likely to get in an engaging and productive conversation than just showing up with a laundry list of things that you'd like to see "fixed". By asking why instead of "confronting" design choices, you are more likely even to get them to recognize when a choice is sub-optimal.
I follow a good part of the lead members in Brave on Twitter. I've seen a lot of conversations from them with other people. Most if not all of them are working with false assumptions and don't even bother to question themselves. Those that come right away aggressive against them or assuming malice are indeed met with brashness. It might seem rude, but I would probably do the same after fending off the 100th random person on the internet accusing you of things you haven't done or demanding that you do something about the token price.
Those that come with the intent of understanding and assuming good intentions are way more likely to be treated cordially.
This is not an issue on Firefox, Chrome, or even Safari god forbid. These browsers are the main contenders because they're simple, and just browsers. Trying to build an "everything machine" is what made Internet Explorer such an unbearable slog, which is why all of our modern browsers are defined more by their limitation than their capabilities.
Again though, these are not my problems to fix. Brave has already burned their bridge of trust by involving themselves in crypto (and pocketing a portion for themselves, worse yet), so I have nothing more to do here than kick back and watch your development slowly turn back into a Mozilla-type org again.
Anyway, you just created a bunch of strawmen and expect others to spend time trying to reasonably argue with you? If this isn't the biggest "QED" to my comment, I don't know what is.
I could point to at least 5 false statements in your 3 paragraphs, but it is clear that you are not interested in having a productive conversation. So, don't be surprised if others just tell you to piss off and be less of an entitled aspie prick.
No, I find it amazing and I can probably write an essay about it.
The "ad-supported" economy is directly responsible for a lot of content, but the majority of it is not just bad, it is also actually damaging to society. Think of all the sites that "make a living" on clickbait, content farming, fake news, SEO manipulation and outright fraud. Also, think of all the big ad tech companies that have no incentive in ensuring any kind of quality on its users and just focusing on metrics like "engagement".
It is not too much of a stretch to think of how the "ad supported" content economy is correlated with the increased polarization of people, the growing tribal divide and the isolation of individuals. I honestly think that we should be treating the majority of "ad supported" websites as heavy polluters of our minds and our societies.
"Ad-supported" sites have nothing to gain by working on quality content and can put all their efforts optimizing for controversy, shock value and eyeballs. When everything became "free", we lost our ability to vote with our wallet and lose any power in steering the market to produce the things that we value.
Given that we can not simply ban "free" sites, the next best thing is to find an alternative way to finance content creators, but where the users can have a say in how the resources are allocated. The Brave model does exactly that. Content creators still have a way to make money from their work, but it is not just enough to plaster ads on our faces and collect a check from Google. They will have to compete for quality. They will have to be able to demonstrate that their work is not just worth of the people's time (for those that want to put up with ads), they will have to produce something of value to us.
> If it became dominant, you'd just be creating a new monopoly.
No, not at all.
There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING stopping Mozilla to create a similar ad network and to follow a similar model. In fact, they can even also base it on BAT and leverage all the work that Brave already did and avoid all the pitfalls that Brave had along the way when they were developing the system. Brave buys the token in the open market, Mozilla could do the same. They could use the same partner exchanges. They could probably even use the same codebase on the client side.
Honestly, if Mozilla did just that on Firefox, I'd switch back to it immediately. Like you, I also wish that Firefox continued to be a strong alternative to keep Google in check. But after the many years of poor management, blatant cash grabs and all the marketing spending that makes them more focused on "looking good" than "doing good", I've given up. I don't want wishy-washy feelings, I want to destroy Surveillance Capitalism.
Mozilla/Firefox are not working on anything to do that. Brave is.
That's a huge jump. Incentives are basically the same, at worst the same as subscription-supported services that are slowly becoming the standard for news websites that still care about their reputation. The Brave system simply moves some of the power from multiple ad networks to a single entity, Brave. No thanks, this is not the open web.
> There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING stopping Mozilla to create a similar ad network and to follow a similar model.
It doesn't matter who runs the network, you are still creating a massive bottleneck that can potentially determine the fate of any site.
I'd rather have a browser be a browser, without any cryptocurrency bullcrap, thank you. If that means I'll be limited to Konqueror when Mozilla goes down in flames, so be it.
Those with brand recognition and that can charge subscriptions are not the ones in the long tail. The rewards system is supposed to be a way to help those that are in the long tail: Youtubers with a small but engaged community, Open Source software developers that want to work on their own project, kids making Fortnite skins, investigative reporters that want to cover stories that are not getting picked by mainstream media.
- "Well, these people could use Patreon", you can respond.
Yes, some of them could. But Patreon requires people to contribute their own direct money and requires that people to have access to the global financial system. While with Brave anyone, in any corner of the world, can take whatever little amount of money they want and send as a tip.
> this is not the open web.
Do you use an ad-blocker of any kind? Over 40% of internet users do. Do you think they are "against the open web" and "abhorrent"?
Are you against ad-blockers? Are you okay with Google's push to make it difficult to run ad-blockers on Chrome? To me working actively against the interests of the users is the abhorrent thing.
> you are still creating a massive bottleneck that can potentially determine the fate of any site.
HOW??? To a site that is dependent on ads, I'm still failing to see what the brave rewards program does that is different from any other ad-blocker. That revenue opportunity is already sunk, Brave has no fault here.
> I'd rather have a browser be a browser, without any cryptocurrency bullcrap.
You started to move the goalposts. You only need to deal with "cryptocurrency bullcrap" if you decide to cash out the tokens you receive. If you just want to take the BAT token to tip for other creators, you don't even need to signup to an exchange and you don't need to give away any personal data. If Brave was able to run its revenue share program by transacting with cash, would you be okay with it?
> If that means I'll be limited to Konqueror (...), so be it.
Honestly, it just seems like you just have a bunch of misconceptions and prejudices you don't want to re-evaluate. If you don't want to use it, fine. What is not fine is to be calling companies and people "outright corrupt" without anything to actually back it up.
Vivaldi?
I'm using Firefox myself and have been using it almost exclusively since it was named Firebird back in the day, but I have considered Vivaldi as an alternative at one point.
There is really close to no choice for browser alternatives.
Long term the gemini protocol and browsers like lagrange might be the only option - its just too hard to build a modern standards supporting web browser these days (even Microsoft has thrown in the towel and adopted Chromium for Edge).
Also, Firefox mobile lets me block YouTube ads with ublock origin.
Take out all the crap, and strip it back to a plain browser. Freeze all new features. The only maintenance that is needed is security patches. That shouldn't need more than a handful of full-time devs. They could be paid using just one exec's salary.
I'll maintain my contribution to Thunderbird; if Mozilla doesn't feel like helping financially with that more-or-less unique product, fair enough. But I'm not OK with having to drill into about:config to disable Firefox Pocket's hijacking of high-profile screen real-estate - why hasn't it gone yet?
If you pay for it, yeah. But you can't have that and have the software be £free to use
Donating to the foundation feels a bit like donating to the WWF because I want to help a specific Panda I met at the zoo.
It seems it's time to find a Firefox alternative now, privacy-minded and ad-free.
Pity the web is mostly unusable with w3m. Would any HNers recommend DDG's browser as a viable alternative?
Notably was the notion that it came with a kitchen sink when most just wanted a web browser.
As it stands now, they are obviously wanting to monetise their product but for whatever reason don't want to open up to the option of a retail/consumer grade price. Probably it is because they'll make more from feeding ad companies.
Once someone gives away a roughly equivalent good enough product for free charging for a competitor becomes incredibly difficult and that ship sailed when MS bundled IE with windows.
A few don't, like VLC: https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/73dafr/vlc_creator_...
There are in fact not a lot of posts about this topic
I'm still waiting for any concrete evidence, as I am genuinely curious what kind of sponsorships of that kind there are, or were, if any.
Are you sure? For me, I can only "Disable" it, and it gets promptly re-enabled right after clicking on some other item in the sidebar.
There doesn't seem to be any way to disable it permanently, or, preferably, removing it entirely.
I remember seeing lots of devs complaining about Safari not implementing the latest new shinny google technology for chrome but looking at some of these features those aren't things I'd have in my browser like PWA. Web developers are totally out of touch if they expect that everybody wants a website to have access to things like USB ports.
This extends to the splash screen as well. No "disable ads" button just "not now" or "settings".
In contrast the settings dialogue looks fine.
I understand Mozilla needs money but it is very disappointing to see them do the same dark user patterns as other tech companies.
"Relevant" is a code word for "we spy on your every move and also share your personal browsing behaviour with our many external partners to serve you relevant ads".
For those who actually want to understand the feature, and its implications for privacy and data sharing, https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2021/09/15/data-and-firefox-su... is a starting point.
The fuck with this?
How can they make _relevant_ suggestions without spying on my (s/browsing history/activity/), profiling it and phoning back to the mothership?
(Edited, "browsing history" -> "activity")
Once enabled, Firefox Suggest sends what I type in the address bar to Mozilla. There it gets augmented with my location and makes its way to their "preferred partners", limited, for the moment, to a lovely establishment called "adMarketplace".
You don't see a slightest problem with that, no?
Reading through their "how Mozilla handles data" page [1] reveals absolutely nothing specific. What's collected, what's being passed on, etc. Just a bunch of hand waving and "don't you worry, everything is tip-top".
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2021/09/15/data-and-firefox-su...
If adMarketplace is just receiving from Mozilla a stream of (search text, city, clicked yes/no) then no, I don't see a problem with it.
If Mozilla sends a unique user ID as well then I would see a problem with it, but as far as I can tell, they don't.
Because this is on by default in FF93, be it a new install or an upgrade.
For now limited to the US, but it's safe to assume they are just testing waters.
The default, in friendly big blue colors, is to "Allow suggestions" with the alternative called "Customize in settings". It is also not clear if disabling "suggestions", switches off all its machinery or merely prevents them from being shown.
As others have said up this thread, the problem is not as much the feature itself, but the fact that Mozilla deemed it perfectly fine to roll out something like this in the first place.
It becomes increasingly obvious that Mozilla no longer understands (or cares!) what it was that made Firefox special, made people stick with it and what the motivation and priorities of these people are.
I wish they'd give the about:config key to disable it as well as UI instructions in posts like this. The former can be set in a preferences file; so easily synchronised between machines and not forgotten when setting up a new one.
If you search for "hotels", they'll show you suggestions that match "hotels".
Doesn't seem that complicated to me.
Try again.
If you search for "hotels", they'll show you things related to "hotels".
That doesn't require access to your browsing history - it's right there in the search term.
The principal is the same. People don't want their private lives (in part expressed through what they search for) exploited and exposed.
That is exactly the problem I have with it - weasel words and euphemisms; FF is scoring an own-goal here and eroding trust.
Why not just tell it like it is. "We need funding and are lining up deals with third parties to display their ads/messaging in the address bar search. We vet these third parties by holding them contractually to these standards [list standards to establish bar required for "trust"]."
It's only my opinion, but spelling it out clearly - the need for funding and how/why "trusted partners" get to display their stuff - would make me far more likely to allow these suggestions. (Oh, and as for "relevance", FF should explain how that's intended to work, ie what data are being used etc.)
Yeah, I guess Baker needs a raise.
Yes, the kind of leaders that forget the core of what they are doing and that make shady deals and decisions like this. "World-class leaders" are sharks and have no place in a company for common good.
https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
I'd rather have people that care about the cause in charge of these NGOs.
‶Firefox usage is down 85% despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up 400%″ -- https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
You're equating greed and competence. It's an oddly common mistake.
NGOs and benevolent societies are attractive on the basis of their values.
If monetary compensation were correlatory with quality products, we clearly wouldn't be in this position with Firefox: Mozilla's current leader is clearly world-class by your own definition (where world-class==well remunerated), and is yet demonstrably failing the company on every possible metric.
I second your opinion - I'd be willing to entertain, or even support, this way of them making money iff they spelled out honestly what they're doing and why. In details. Talk with me like two adults that respect each other.
"I'd be willing to entertain, or even support, this way of them making money iff they spelled out honestly what they're doing and why" implies both of these:
- "If they spelled out honestly what they're doing and why, I'd be willing to entertain [...]"
- "If I'd be willing to entertain [..] then they will honestly spell what they're doing and why".
The second of which doesn't make sense to me, unless I'm missing something? He should have used "only if" rather than "iff" here.
If I am willing to entertain then they honestly spell what they're doing and why.
It means that if you know that I am entertaining the idea you can infer from that they were honest.
> - "If I'd be willing to entertain [..] then they will honestly spell what they're doing and why".
This is true, because if they won't, then you wouldn't be willing to entertain [..]
A = OP supports Mozilla making money from address bar ads
B = Mozilla is honest about making money from address bar ads
"B -> A" (OP supports Mozilla if Mozilla acts a certain way) makes sense. "A -> B" sounds confusing in a sentence, but its contrapositive, "!B -> !A", also makes sense.
However, for:
B = Mozilla decides to make money from address bar ads and is honest about reasons
"A -> B" no longer makes sense, since OP can support Mozilla having the address bar ads with an honest justification, but Mozilla can still decide to not have the address bar ads.
(2) Logically, iff, equivalence and double implication are themselves equivalent, the expression in question is (necessarily) logically correct even in those forms, though it is irrelevant as of (1) and a confusing way to express the relationship, as the causality clearly flows in one direction.
(3) It was not meant nor interpreted as a bare logical proposition, hence it is improper to blindly apply logical transformations and reinterpret in a different system.
But even playing the game of treating informal language by the rules of strict logical formalisms, it still makes sense. The two elements implying one another would be (1) trusting mozilla and entertaining this new program, and (2) mozilla communicating clearly about their ads. You trust them if they communicate honestly, and communicating honestly garners trust. Makes sense to me.
We understand the intent and thought behind the use of iff in the original comment, regardless of what it may be interpreted to mean outside of a _very informal_ setting.
Because the sad truth is every other company is doing exactly the same. We live in a world where the people who track you most will greet you with "we value your privacy".
aged like milk i guess.
I'm no expert, but from what I've heard the reasoning is that ad companies don't like it when you do that and won't want to work with you. They'd rather FF says "we love these guys and they just happen to be handing us bags of money" rather than "look, we dont like this anymore than you do but we need the cash".
Not excusing it, and I could well be wrong (there could also be a way of saying it that satisfies both parties), but thats my understanding of the rationale
Because they don't want to say: "we want a lot of money to all kinds of projects irrelevant to the browser".
They should focus on their core product and cut everything else away.
Instead they are an organization that tries to save the whole world. It seems like they think the jobs created for themselves by "saving the world" is the core business and Firefox is just a cash-cow for this.
The first of its sins is the tacit agreement that Mozilla is doing this because, as the parent comment says, they "need funding". Mozilla needs funding now like Wikipedia needs funding: they have more of it than they've ever had, but by all appearances, you'd think they're really strapped for cash or something, because their pleas have gotten steadily more intrusive and desperate.
Second is the "focus on their core product" remark. There's so much wrong with this sentence. First, it's the tacit acceptance that Mozilla is and should be a classic Valley tech company—a bit player with a product competing in the market, rather than the way mozilla.org operated in its heyday—you know, when it was actually a force for good and were winning hearts and minds. This is another case where the trend does not support the thesis. Mozilla _has_ steadily gotten more focused on Firefox compared to its historically diverse interests (to the exclusion and chagrin of many of its volunteers and advocates), and by most measures we're worse off for this Corporation-centric mindset. At its height, Mozilla was accomplishing way more, had greater influence than it has today, and did it on a fraction of the budget. Today, Mozilla has half a billion in annual revenue but the Firefox team claims that keeping a menu item around that lets you jump to a site's RSS feed is too much of a maintenance burden.
Where do you think all the money is going? It's not Thunderbird or developer.mozilla.org that are sucking hundreds of millions away. And as bad as Mitchell's leadership has been over the last 5+ years, her new salary in the low single-digit millions has pretty much nothing to do with it. For comparison, Mozilla has something like a 50+ million dollar marketing budget. This is classic cost disease. Ten years ago, it was a common quip that Chrome's effective marketing budget (i.e. in imaginary dollars) was greater than Mozilla's entire annual revenue. Well guess where we are today? A well-funded contender in the browser wars could almost certainly appear tomorrow and grab as much market share in the next 3 to 5 year period as Firefox currently has and do it on total operating costs that measure half of Mozilla's marketing spend (in actual dollars).
So please stop doing this. Every time you feed into this meme that you heard on social media and that sounded good to you because it wrapped things up in a nice, simple narrative, at best it's going to have no effect, and at worst you encourage Mozilla to lean in and do _exactly_ the things that have led to present situation. If you want to provide encouragement, encourage Mozilla to overhaul its entire leadership, to live by the principles they purport to care about (how about starting with removing opaque clicktracking links from emails?), to put a real content blocker in the browser, to stop hawking VPN snake oil, and to open source Pocket like it was promised over 4 years ago. Demand that they make falsifiable claims that can be evaluated for success or failure on well-defined criteria. Campaign for them to either cap the marketing budget to $1 million or actually do something effective with it (like writing a check to Wikimedia and then blogging about how the reason that there are no overlays on Wikipedia this year nagging you for funding this year is because Mozilla decided to foot the bill and so you're welcome—which would be way more effective than _anything_ the marketing department has done to date).
This is true but it also has nothing to do with anything Mozilla is currently doing. It is actually a business maxim of Jim Barksdale [1] (and others probably) who used to be an executive at Netscape. Barksdale said that you could move into a market with a large concentration of users and steal a percentage of them away by just offering an alternative.
Maintaining a position is not the same as building a position. If Barksdale is right then the existing players in a market need to work to ensure that they can't lose market share from new entrants.
If a player M controls some "share" in the game and an independent contender C can appear and match M's current share on <1/10 M's current costs, then M's costs to maintain its position relative to all others are not greater than C's costs. If M₀ is M's current offering, then M can carve out part of its budget to fund the entry of their own, controlled Cₘ, independent of M₀, and when Cₘ reaches maturity and matches M's share from M₀ alone, they can let M₀ die—or keep both M₀ and Cₘ around, having advanced their take with greater efficiency than all the costs it would have required to make the same gains with M₀ alone. This assumes that the share from Cₘ comes entirely from those competing with M. This won't be the case; M₀ itself will suffer. But even in the worst case scenario, the share from Cₘ can come entirely from eroding the share of M₀, i.e., a simple transfer. This also won't happen. However, even in the event that it does happen, it's still a net win for M, having used Cₘ to cut their costs by >90% under the regime with M₀.
I doubt wikimedia would agree to that, since their schtick is that it's user funded and thus a neutral actor
I think the big thing about VPN is that its value is predicated on others being shit. Stuff like Edge Collections, Brave's privacy respecting Search/News/Talk/Rewards(tips) stack, Vivaldi having built-in RSS and notes, and yes Pocket all provide direct value to the user. A password manager is direct value, as was Send or whatnot.
Mozilla has a lot of no value initiatives activities that they want to fund
And Harvard has a multi-billion dollar endowment that they hoard. Mozilla is doing it wrong.
Harvard endowment is so huge for two reasons: (1) fundraising, (2) earning more than 5% per year for long, long, long time. But they still must spend 5% per year of their massive endowment.
Running a non-profit with only an endowment (no fund-raising) for more than 20 years with is hard to do.
Mozilla Corporation (which is where your donations go - you can't donate to Firefox as such) is a taxable, profit-making company.
Mozilla Foundation wholly owns Mozilla Corporation, and is a non-profit. But you can't donate to Mozilla Foundation.
(I don't know how you can be a non-profit that wholly owns a profit-making corporation; I'm not an accountant, and I'm not familiar with US tax law)
The history of Netscape and Mozilla is sufficiently farcical to fuel an entire 6-series comedy franchise. Were it not for the jaw-dropping salaries that the absurd execs draw, I'd laugh.
The incentives aren't made clear and you're left with the gaps to fill leading up to how decisions like these got made at an executive level. Does Mozilla stand to lose favor with Google or someone else by trying to be more honest about what it's trying to accomplish, or avoid?
Mozilla does stand to lose a lot of favor with its core audience by trying to act corporate now of all times, with Firefox marketshare at an all-time low. And I have to wonder if these kind of statements were universally accepted by the people who are a part of the company, on the foundation or corporate side. Are there any Mozillians that believe that this is not Mozilla as people remember it? Would they be willing to express their thoughts, if so?
I hope it is not coming to you as news the fact that those corporate statements are scripted, likely much more heavily than a TV show.
Given the massive salaries and bonuses paid out to upper management[0], I think their problem would be not sounding like that dril tweet about budgeting[1].
After the massive layoffs and cuts to vital web platform projects this move just feels consistent in their move from their old "quirky nerd charity" image to a new, more corporate one. I'm not saying that this is a good thing.
One thing surprised me as well:
"Firefox barely exists on phones, with a market share of less than half a percent. This is baffling given that mobile Firefox has a rare feature for a mobile browser: it's able to install extensions and so can block ads."
Yes, indeed, FF is pretty great on the phone, it looks like someone fails to advertise it as such. I use it precisely because I can use add blocker. The person with 2.4M compensation should notice that something wrong is going on.
I am afraid that Firefox/Mozilla at some point will become something like Yahoo or Commodore, a name that is being bought and sold by investment founds to extract some income and sell it further...
Ironically Netscape itself became "something like Yahoo or Commodore": AOL bought Netscape (which led to the Mozilla foundation being created), then proceeded to sell discount services under the name "Netscape ISP" and eventually renamed the original Netscape company. As far as I know the original company (now non-operating) eventually ended up being owned by Facebook and the Netscape brand somehow ended up being owned by Yahoo.
They've been losing market share, and these actions and language are not going to help.
This is exactly the point why I left Google Chrome back then and considered FF as a good alternative. I didn't trust Google anymore. But now I face the same problem again, because I don't want these "features and trusted partners". I also don't want to have to justify over and over again why I don't want them. I just want a well-functioning and secure browser that people can trust.
You can't trust any of them. The real question is, who do you trust more? Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, Brave. You can't trust any of them, but you have to pick one.
It's bad enough to have to instruct people how to disable the New Tab ads, now you have to add one more step. At this point it becomes pretty awkward:
"Don't use Chrome browsers, they don't respect your privacy and are bad for the web! Use Firefox instead. Oh but wait you have to disable integrated ads first, just do this and that and this and I swear it's fine!"
This is why I use Ungoogled Chromium and build it myself.
Indeed. Mozilla should be honest. That's what builds trust.
We all know they need money, so if this gives them money to improve FF, fine by me. But they need to quit the marketing bullshit-speak.
Is it some business school process or management training BS? It usually only happens when "trained" business people get involved that this sort of BS happens.
Whomever they have hired to (1) perform UX research and (2) make executive decisions aren't performing, IMHO.
I dont really have a lot of complaints about it. I like the dark mode and the address bar at the bottom it has ad blocker.
What all changed between those versions ?
Poor design of tab history (chronological order)
No more about:config
Change in the text rendering engine causes some websites to be unreadable (esp. news, arstechnica, and reddit), accessibility out the window
There are many more, but I don't mean to rehash because it's been a passionate discussion for many over the past year.
So few realize the importance of this. Some say "well only in Android" or "use nightly". The plan is clearly to incrementally erode freedom to a final state of dysfunction under the guise of gaslit improvements and false switches. They actually argue that removing about:config was for our own good. Printing webpages to PDF is also something we're supposedly better without. But we shouldn't complain, for they've abandoned the crusty old obsolete concept of configurability for brave new ones. Pocket, guerilla advertising, binary over variety, cloudflare, dom.battery.enabled, privacy.resistFingerprinting.alwaysdisabled and an emoji level of privacy. Why design good software when they can design good users? They're not all bad though. At least they saved us all from the terrifying overwhelming burden of RSS, right?
They're attitude is that, yeah, the internet is becoming a roiling cloaca, which is accepted and inevitable, yes? So rather than resist and try to improve it, adapt and contribute to it's descent.
That's quite the accusation, and completely baseless. about:config was removed from the stable version on android to prevent users breaking their installations. It's interesting you mention privacy.resistFingerprinting, as it alone is the cause of countless bug reports and support tickets from users who don't understand the implications. If you're confident enough to go digging in about:support then you can run beta or install a fork with it enabled. There's no alterior motive.
Removing a whole toolset of configurability because one tool was causing trivial issues is practical? And you have evidence of jubilant hordes prostrating themselves in gratitude for this benevolence? Where are they? Did they all get disappeared along with this post?
This mentality goes down well-known paths.
Autoplay forever, whether anyone wants it or not!
Also note that an ulterior motive doesn't need to exist for the path towards centralized, user-hostile control to happen. It starts with "the developer knows better what the user wants than the user themselves" sort of attitudes.
… which, in fairness, is itself a species of selling ads! But setting a search engine default is far more benign than what they’re planning here.
Speaking for myself, I'm not shocked, nor even surprised, that marketers would like to get into my living-room and my bedroom. If Mozilla wants to facilitate that, then they become my enemy.
Marketers are going to do marketing, just as pigs roll in shit and rabbits breed. I'm not trying to stop the tide; but I'll sandbag my front-door, so the tide doesn't wash into my home. If Mozilla wants to try an end-run around my flood defences, Mozilla can be removed quite easily.
Mozilla execs seem increasingly the same as the execs at IANA. They don't have real customers or shareholders; they are not held to account. It astonishes me how much these greedy oafs get paid. They are removing value, not adding it.
Wouldn't it be cool if we could get some of the products we use from companies that are structured so that they "serve their customers" and nobody else? Customers (i.e. users) would then have a veto on idiotic new "features" and infelicitous marketing partnerships.
If Mozilla had been such an organisation, then perhaps Firefox wouldn't have slid away from the top spot.
But then I thought, okay, they need money, ads in address bar isn't the worst thing in the world.
But then then I thought: But only if they are clearly disclosed as ads! Instead we seem to have a combination of " traditional suggestions like browsing history and open tabs, as well as new suggestions from our partners" -- are the "paid placements" clearly designated as such? Unclear? Probably not?
In "traditional" media, the first rule of advertisements is that they be clearly identified as advertisements, as content put there by someone paying for it, instead of by editorial judgement. Because how can you trust the editorial judgement of the publisher if you can't tell which is which?
That even Mozilla no longer thinks this is necessary shows how much the culture has changed, where "paid placement" is pretty much assumed everywhere (or if not, you're a naive fool) and nobody trusts anybody.
Replace the brand there with yours and that's what you get. No contextual bs, no crazy logos or statements, just a simple word from a sponsor.
National "NPR" may be better. But our local NPR "affiliate" has whole shows that are really pay-to-play. :(
https://www.baltimoresun.com/citypaper/bcp-why-so-much-pr-wy...
Maybe Mozilla needs to do a pledge drive, instead. I had used Mozilla products for many years before I even realized they accepted charitable donations.
Excactly them trying to find more sources of income is fine by me. The hiding it and the deceptive messaging is awful. "enhance and speed up your searching experience" - I'm sure it will.
Even the opt-in screen is an anti-pattern.
"Allow suggestions" or "customize". No "do not allow suggestions". On the first level.
This is the stuff I want (and in the past expected) Mozilla to fight, not to become.
Tho not in the best way, I feel, but at least this is opt-in?
They did not. I checked on all my computers following the update and all of them had the option enabled by default.
It was my position that ads violate the ethos of free software by making the user serve the software. You can debate that, but in any case that was the beginning of this culture at Mozilla to use bs language to placate users.
While it would be good news if they were, insofar as creating more competition for the incumbents (let's be honest, the incumbent, google), at this point only regulators can do anything about the state of search/ad industry.
If this is actually the case Mozilla is yet again being used as one of Google's pawns.
"See, there are other browsers and search/ad companies flourishing despite our market position!"
This “Privacy First Data Sharing Platform” for example
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/take-control-over-your-d...
To me this is clearly not spin or weasel words, this is glaringly blatant dishonesty.
Apart from many questionable choices over the past few years, they fired fired a large number of employees, then their CEO bumped up their own salary to 3 million USD: https://www.zdnet.com/article/endangered-firefox-the-state-o...
I am not sure whether their fall to around a 5% market share in the browser market had anything to do with any of the things in the above article, but to me it feels like the logical next progression at some point is to remove Mozilla from the actual Firefox software.
So my question is this: how long will it be before any fork of Firefox will gain a large following, much like what happened to CentOS/Rocky Linux?
Seems like there are quite a few independent forks, but nothing that i think would be a no-brainer for replacing Firefox as the default browser of any Linux distro or on a Windows desktop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#Gecko-bas...
Firefox still has no alternative in the privacy / user-centric space (don't mention Brave, I'm gonna get mad). Mozilla has done a lot for the web, I can give them some slack for exploring different revenue models.
Still, I'm going to keep on eye for this kind of practices in the future. I don't want them to get too comfortable with it.
Plus, Google controls Chromium and Firefox is literally the only alternative now. They push changes that are against or in in ignorance of of web standards because they can. Downstream browsers like brave,edge and opera basically have to accept whatever Google says. This isn't good for the web at all. Frankly there should be an anti-trust suit against Google for this because it is very anti-competitive.
But that's not available on Android or Windows (the WebKit port exists there, but no good UI frontend as far I know)... which are the two big platforms. (because Apple doesn't care enough about those I guess?)
It does replicate a lot of buggy behaviour in Safari so from what I can tell you can be reasonably sure that your website works in Safari if it works in WebKit, but that's the only use I've found for it so far.
As for a good UI on Windows, I think you should be able to compile GNOME's WebKit browser for Windows. It'll look terribly out of place like any GNOME application in a different environment, but I think it should work well enough to use?
If you used it in the past from the Debian repos, they didn't use to do security or feature update servicing for WebKit in their repositories. That's no longer a thing nowadays.
You can use both the Technology Preview at https://webkit.org/downloads/ or check if the version is recent on your distribution however.
What? One of the main points of the project is to build a browser with a whole bunch of tinfoil like tracker blocking and anti fingerprinting measures. They wrote their own built-in adblocker with Rust so it won't get fucked by Manifest v3 since it's part of the browser. They're the only Chromium browser that does CNAME uncloaking, something that uBlock Origin can only do on Firefox.
Containers are unique to Firefox, Chromium browsers handle that via separate user profiles.
2. it's based on Chromium, contributing to the Blink monoculture
3. BATs are based on Ethereum, which has its own downsides (still PoW, speculation, ...)
Think of the type of business involved with that, and there's your answer.
They're very straightforwardly ad salesmen like every other browser out there, they've just tried to build an ad ecosystem that doesn't track users.
- "Sponsored" backgrounds (often crypto ads or credit cards!)
- "Cards" with more weird Crypto ads!
- Brave "news"
- Brave "rewards"
Yes I can turn all that of, and I have, but hard to recommend to normal users that dont spend 10min turning all the shit off.
They also did some weird link shit a while back.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/privacy-browser-brave-busted-f...
- Sponsored Backgrounds: just random places of the world like tropical beaches, Buddhist temples or mountains.
- Cards? Nothing at all.
- Rewards and news are under the settings menu and seem to be off.
Maybe Apple's App Store conditions prevent Brave to do a lot of its crypto stuff.
On Android, Linux or Windows I'm a happy user of Vivaldi.
No, these are just random backgrounds. At some point I started seeing backgrounds advertising Crocs and stuff like that, at which point I discovered the Sponsored backgrounds option and turned that off, leaving me back with random pics of scenery
So... I looked up its configuration and looks like Sponsored Backgrounds are activated... But, they don't work at all. I deactivated them in case they suddenly start working.
These just clog up the interface and make it feel sketchy. I just want a normal FOSS browser, but I also understand the whole financing issue.
Mozilla has tons of money, but they just
1. spend too much of it, 2. on the wrong things, 3. and always want more.
One of the best parts about Brave is that they are trying to build independent revenue streams from things like integrated Jitsi features, an independent search engine and the like. Vivaldi builds in things like mail clients, RSS readers and a rudimentary notetaking tool.
In that vein, Pocket is a really good thing, and also helps combat link rot. The vocal Firefox userbase is moronically hostile to add-on services though, even if they are the ultimate key to Firefox's health.
http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2021_09_06.ht...
People complain when the default is opted-in. Now someone makes something that by default is opted-out and... people still complain.
They ask that when someone uses telemetry, that would be shown upfront. When someone does that, they ask it to be disabled by default. And when we get disabled by default, where do we go? Remove the feature, ofcourse :)
Ads, privacy and telemetry is a hot cake topic on HN.
That button is actually a cheap way to support mozilla, if anyone cares.
Safari.
3rd party cookies make pervasive tracking much, much easier.
Thanks a lot for mismanaging your budget like seemingly every other non-profit, Mozilla.
The problem is mostly the way they introduced it.
Pocket is a good thing. It provides a reason for Mozilla/Firefox to exist.
Such a thing should not exist in the first place. It is predatory and wrong.
> Firefox still has no alternative in the privacy / user-centric space
It is no longer in that space, because it contains advertising tech now.
Just wonder the reason? Is it because it support the monopoly of google rendering engine? Or other reasons?
Brave seems more trustworthy than FF to me right now.
1. Unverified Brave Creators UI - Two days after the complaint, Brave issued an update to "clearly indicate which publishers and creators have not yet joined Brave Rewards so users can better control how they donate and tip. Tom Scott, the original complainant, tweeted in response: "These are good changes, and they fix the complaints I had!".
2. Affiliate Links to Crypto Exchanges - Two days later, Brave released a new version which they said disabled the auto-completion to partner links, followed by a blog post explaining the issue and apologizing. Def the most scummy of the list IMO.
3. DNS Leaks with built in TOR - An issue was discovered and fixed via their Bug Bounty program, where they have an average 6 days to bounty payout.
4. A company violated their terms of service.
I definitely have my biases, although I don't use Brave daily anymore. But I don't think the controversies section you linked is particularly egregious or indicative of bad faith.
Their ad setup works the same. The browser downloads an entire country-specific catalog in one go, and decides what to show you completely locally. Whether you trust their cryptographic setup that tells them you've seen an ad is another thing entirely and is its own brand of black magic.
But the basic setup is simple. They sell adspace and show you ads from that local catalog. Brave takes a cut, users get a cut. They have a tipping service to compensate creators.
There's definitely parts that might be suspect, like that proof of having seen an ad.
And even if it all works just as intended, there is the concern that ads that don't track are generally less valuable so even widespread adoption of Brave's system would cause a decrease in ad revenue and thus ability to keep sites up and running. We've already seen the fallout of Apple's recent anti-tracking changes, and Brave's system is definitely similar in effect.
But Brave have just proven to be an unethical, borderline scammy project. And I'm saying this as someone who owns crypto and can see the value of advertisement in some cases.
Here are a few cases documented on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...
And I'd add that having a business model where you put your own adds on top of ad-blocked ones is the most hypocritical thing to do.
Vivaldi perhaps https://vivaldi.com/ ?
It is still a chrome derivative, but it feel less shady and less spyware than Brave. And it's pretty good and configurable.
Firefox remain my first and main browser tho. I never ever used "proper" chrome, not even one day.
In a perfect world we'd have nothing but fully open source software funded by support contracts and commercial interest in offering superior software, but the world isn't perfect and so we have to compromise sometimes. But the browser is one place I draw the line.
> Of the three layers, only the UI layer is closed-source. This means that roughly 92% of the browser’s code is open-source coming from Chromium, 3% is open-source coming from us and only 5% is our UI closed-source code.
Except they have used the language of "not now" and hidden the link away instead of making it a button with equal prominence to the yes button.
That's not the behaviour of an organisation which thinks its users will be happy with what it's doing, it's the behaviour of an organisation which is trying to trick them.
Like with Firefox, you have to change your preferences if you want privacy.
Just take Google Chrome first.
Search suggestions are displayed and the items are conditioned to your location, cookies... Pages which know how to trick themselves to the top of this suggestions get visitors straight from the user's navbar.
The main difference between Google/Microsoft's approach and Mozilla's is that the pages themselves don't pay to be displayed directly onto your browser's navbar dropdown.
Each time I install Firefox, I end up wasting a non-trivial amount of time carefully working my way through the settings in order to disable the pile of defaults that are as 'easy' to deactivate as they are infuriating. When updating the browser, some of these changes get rolled back, and some of them become more difficult to adjust, either by being removed from the options menu, or by being obscured in about:config - maybe the name has changed for no reason, or maybe the behaviour now depends on an entirely different configuration value.
A particularly obscene case is the auto-updater, which has gotten so bad that I have literally given up on figuring out how to disable it. (At least on Windows; firefox-esr on debian is, so far, free of this insanity) (Ever noticed how forced automatic updates in software get pushed by security fanaticism, but mostly exist to steal your data and ruin your day while they're at it?)
You, apparently, see an easily-deactivable feature in a clear and extensive settings menu. I see an ever-growing eldritch labyrinth, built solely to prevent me from having a straightforward internet browsing experience, all the while the browser's performance is slowly but surely - and noticeably - worsening in the new versions.
Anyway, screw you, Mozilla. At this point I'm only using firefox because I don't see much of a choice either.
Would you mind expanding on this one so I can better understand what you mean?
I'm guessing the "ruin your day" part is that you have to interrupt your workflow for some minutes? But it's not entirely clear to me how automatic updates "mostly exist to steal your data" -- excepting software which is already stealing your data anyways (so I don't understand how automatic updates factor in). Does manually updating somehow protect your data from being stolen in a way that automatic updates don't? Or you just don't update?
In fact modern webbrowsers are bordering on being an operating system in their own right. They're already a virtual machine, with their own run times, plus one of the most complicated document markup standards known to man (and to make matters worse, it's not just as simple as supporting correct standards, they have to support incorrect usages of those standards too because webdevelopers often use deprecated standards, tags or even just use those tags wrongly and people still expect those sites to render).
Lets not forget that JS isn't just a simple interpreter like in the 90s. There's 3D rendering with WebGL, audio rendering with WebMidi, real time communications with WebRTC, location services, WASM, and so on and so forth.
Let's also not forget that HTML, CSS, JS, etc are not the only standards a browser needs to support, there's GIF, JPEG, SVG, video formats and audio formats too. There are network protocols like HTTP, FTP, SSL/TLS. And HTTP is non-trivial these days because there's multiple revisions of it, each different significantly from the previous. There's websockets, binary encodings, MIME types, etc.
And all of that isn't even touching on the UI. Even just supporting a modern multi-platform native desktop UI is more than a single persons job. And that's before any of the complexities mentioned above.
Linux hasn't been a single person operation since the 90s.
In fact is the total comp of all the people significantly involved in Linux kernel development anywhere near the total comp of Mozilla's C-suite? I doubt it.
Most of us developers, devops and sysadmins are paid an obscene wage compared to many critical services like nursing. Is it fair? Probably not. But that doesn't have any baring on the complexity of Linux vs Firefox.
However, you can compare the people in the same business, such as those writing software for operating systems and web browsers and compare the cost and productivity in both.
Torvalds is at $2M and Baker is at $2.5M.
These comparions are caveman level arguments.
[1]: https://www.openhub.net/p/firefox/analyses/latest/languages_... [2]: https://www.openhub.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest/languages_s... [3]: https://www.openhub.net/p/linux/analyses/latest/languages_su...
What makes you think a web browser is comparatively simple compared to a kernel?
For me the core values of the browser are:
- free software, open source, as in freedom
- independent (mozilla is weak here)
- developer friendly, good debugging/dev interface (they are slowly losing here)
- keeping up with web standards, letting me play with proposed changes
- good performance
- not tied to a advertising business model (they are weakening themselves here)
- privacy defaults
These things are very important to me and I'm not alone. The browser is one of my primary tools that I rely on to work as well as the wider open source ecosystem.
I'd be very much willing to pay a subscription fee if I end up being the actual customer, as a web developer and not a target for other Mozilla products that I don't care about and advertisements that distract me and get in my way of working. I'm already distracted enough to begin with as I'm literally working within the web...
I haven't been a fan of many of the news surrounding Mozilla as of late:
- laying off hundreds of workers
- continuing to increase C-level salaries while revenue goes down
- products I mostly don't care about
- dropping support for innovative browser tech like Servo
- now spamming their users with ads...
What do I do?
Recently there was an announcement of the replay browser (replay.io). I played around with it a bit and I'm very tempted at the moment to try it as my primary working browser. They tick some of the boxes above (developer focused browser, subscription fee => I'm the customer). Not sure about it yet.
Edit: to the paragraph above about considering the replay browser, I just checked their privacy policy and it's a big no-no...
Is there any browser with good developer experience that respects my privacy and freedom?
I don't mind it if they need the money (they don't, look into their finances and come tell me with a straight face that this non-profit isn't making the ends meet), it's comparable to default search engine placement and search suggestions, can be turned off etc.
What I have a problem with is the dark-pattern-esque language, like "relevant suggestions" and "trusted partners." I'm used to seeing that kind of messaging from the FAANG boogeymen, not Mozilla who's supposed to be the last fortress of the open internet. After years of conditioning it very strongly implies untrustworthiness to me, makes me immediately suspicious of some nefarious scheme.
I would vote with my feet but there are no options left, any other choice would mean betraying my values even further. I am being held hostage.
Mozilla seems to attract criticism for how they run the whole operation, I can’t tell how correct it is, but even if they run it perfectly they still need revenue.
Ahaha, who am I kidding, capitalism be capitalism...
Edit: before you knee-jerk downvote, please read up on the evolution of exec compensation at Mozilla. It's pretty eye-opening, and really exemplifies what's going wrong with the project.
1mn users paying $4/m is going to be just over $40mn per year. There's no way any company can compete with MS or Google on that revenue stream. Get investors and they will enforce whatever it takes to build revenue = ads.
This whole argument that only ads can save FF is weak and unfounded.
Also I don't want a "competitive browser", I want a simple browser that is customizable and that if needed, developers can run more complex addons on top of it. That is it. I am sure I am not alone in this.
And I most certainly don't want FF to spend money/time on "search engine" features. Let the search engines companies do that.
>> Also I don't want a "competitive browser", I want a simple browser that is customizable and that if needed, developers can run more complex addons on top of it. That is it. I am sure I am not alone in this.
Get your wallet out, hire some developers, build it, share it. You want a lot and make demands but I don't see how what you said is economically viable.
FF _is_ already what I "demand" they just need to stop copying every UX feature of chromium under the ilusion that it will make them "competitive" with Chrome. And they need to stop spending money on all these side projects and focus on the core products FF and TB.
These corporate people need to step aside and stop chasing an impossible goal of FF market share growth. They can never compete with behemoths like Google or Microsoft or Apple. The funding disparity and they way the competition setup mottes and baileys is just not realistic.
Google paying Mozilla for default search engine privilege is just a way for google to go CYA, in case they get into anti-trust litigation ("we even fund the small players"). The moment FF actually make a dent in market share is the moment that Google closes the tap on funding.
Edit: My assumption was that a proportion of the money donated to the Mozilla Foundation is used to fund Mozilla Firefox.
I stand corrected (but I still consider the foundation worth supporting).
A follow up question for those replying to this comment: does the revenue from Pocket and/or the Mozilla VPN help to fund Firefox?
Mozilla Foundation != Mozilla Corporation
Evidently they're not attracting enough donations to not consider advertisements.
No it isn’t. Please stop spreading misinformation.
You can donate to the Mozilla foundation, which wastes copious amounts of money. It is NOT possible to donate towards Firefox development directly.
No thanks.
[0] https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=22270#p16867...
https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=17442#p12769... https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=15168#p109681
The only remaining issue with Palemoon for me is webrtc (which is selectively disabled). For those that value stability (especially on Windows) that's no bad thing (personally, I'm not a fan of being forced to use a specific browser to access some sites). It's like the IE6 days.
No donation will change that, it would require a strategic rollback from leadership.
Of course people can always fork it and remove it blabla. But we're talking about people who otherwise would donate and just want to do it more directly (as opposed to the whole Mozilla foundation)
;)
At this point, threads like this help me add to my list of what garbage i need to compile out every year or so when i feel like syncing up hahaha.
I'd however gladly pay around 10-20 euros / month for firefox.
With that feature, that I will of course disable for my personal use, I will not be able to recommend Firefox to other people any more.
Please let us pay!
If nothing else, there's not that many rendering engines out there. Chrome, Brave and Edge are all Chromium. Safari is separate I guess, but that's tied to Apple platforms. I really don't want yet another Google monoculture.
Firefox has lost almost half of its users since 2010, yet it keeps burning more money every year. Run the company in a lean way, cut the fat, do one thing well. It's like Wikipedia, every year they seemingly find new ingenious ways to burn more cash.
Empirically, it is not. Even Microsoft gave up that chase. Browsers are staggeringly complex and expensive to build. Which may be an indictment of the Web itself, but in the absence of a simpler alternative (Gemini?), the Web we have is the Web we've got, and browsers have to meet it where it is.
Mozilla's engine is modern and they have a clear revenue stream to subsidize its development with their browser revenue.
But instead the browser revenue goes to dumb shit like mobile OSes (that definitely is too expensive), VPNs, executive bonuses, and basically anything but their browser or engine.
This is just not true. Mozilla spends millions on exec salaries and useless side projects, yet they still have hundreds of millions in cash reserves.
I never heard of that before. I'm off to investigate.
I've often thought we need to rewind the clock on the internet, as the whole thing has gotten way out of hand.
What's to stop feature creep of Gemini, though?
Gemini is deisgned to be non-extensible, for precisely that reason (if it becomes mainstream though, I'm sure the monetisers will find a way).
They claim to stop feature creep by not including any kind of optional data support like headers and the spec team will reject any feature additions.
While I would be happy to have HTML/CSS exactly as it is and replace JS with a minimal WASM implementation that lets the website bring whatever tools it wants rather than relying on 1 billion JS apis.
The culture. A portion of Gemini users use it as a way to escape from the complexity of the modern web, including some small "browser" writers who want to target a small and easy to understand spec for their efforts.
EDIT: I guess I forgot shopping in essential services, which is another huge source of fuel in the arms race.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
Today that means it should actively subvert the business interests of the web. Advertisers want to show ads? Block them and make no exceptions. Surveillance capitalists want data? Give them fake data or no data at all whenever possible. Sites start detecting Firefox? Start pretending to be Chrome.
It doesn't matter what these companies want or need. Firefox needs to take the user's side every single time. This arms race is absolutely necessary. Firefox needs to be a true user agent. If it ever stops being one, it's over for Mozilla.
They've been receiving hundreds of millions of dollars each year just for what they set as the default search engine.
https://www.ghacks.net/2021/09/17/firefox-experiment-is-test...
> 1) Never-ever in any circumstances sends anything I type into URL bar outside my PC until I press Enter.
All suggestions must come from my local bookmarks and visited sites history, and there must be "old-school" dedicated Search bar (or explicit keyword searches) triggering remote lookup for fuzzy suggestions and stuff like that.
> 2) After I press the Enter, it loads precisely what I've typed. No implicit searches, no www+.., ..+.com|org|net guesswork, nothing.
If I type invalid address, I want to see error message saying that the browser does not understand my intention. The only exceptions are adding default protocol (if what I've typed is not keyword command), and doing URI encoding stuff if necessary. Nothing more. And "keyword searches" done from URL bar must display resulting address.
Thankfully, Firefox is still capable of being configured this way, except that "display Keyword remote URL result verbatim"), but it is increasingly more and more difficult to keep it this way. It makes me sad, and confused, because I see these requirements as a clear manifestation of philosophy Firefox is (used to be) built on.
But for me these features are useless at best and a distraction in practice, I don't want suggestions from my browser, at all, I want to think for my self.
I use the url bar simply for entering addresses, or for copying and editing them. I completely disabled my history and what I want to remember I keep as bookmarks. When I want so search something I use the search box.
I never saw a fundraising like the ones from Wikipedia.
Do you think they should find a CEO below market rates?
Have you donated money to Mozilla or Wikipedia?
The rates have bubbled, and do not reflect the value CEO's provides for their organisations.
> Do you think they should find a CEO below market rates?
Yes. A dedicated person, at home - in a bathrobe, approving code merges would do.
No it isn't - salary is salary, and these deals existed when the Mozilla CEO was not paid as much. By her own admission, at one point Baker just went "fuck it, other CEOs get paid multiples, why not me?", so now she brings home $3m per year, with the whole exec structure likely benefiting in similar fashion (because why only the CEO?). See: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html but it's on wikipedia too.
That's $3m that could pay for a dozen engineers at Bay-Area salaries, or 30-60 in cheaper locations - maybe enough to match (or surpass) Google's continuous push for new specifications that forces everyone else to play catch-up all the time, as well as stacking the standard committees where Mozilla is systematically overpowered.
> I doubt that Baker is getting anything near Beard's salary
You're right, she's making 3x Beard's salary. Even with 7 years of inflation, that's a lot more.
Mitchell Baker has given a lot to Mozilla, but she's now very clearly decided it's her time to cash in.
See how the last year on that graph is 2018? Baker became interim CEO when Chris Beard stepped down in December 2019, officially hired around April of 2020. It also never reaches $3m.
Additionally, look at the ~2015-2018 revenue. That is when Mozilla was with Yahoo and making ~$500 million a year as opposes to the ~$300 million now. That is when the CEO pay spiked, I doubt it's stayed that high and they arguably deserved that pay for earning enough extra money to prevent needing these ads for an additional five years.
>You're right, she's making 3x Beard's salary.
Just to drill this home, Baker's CEO salary is not currently public.
So let's drill this home: Baker or Beard, the whole Foundation board is complicit in enabling skyrocketing compensation rates for executives, whose only merit seems to be that they can maintain long-running commercial agreements more or less intact - while dropping the ball everywhere else.
https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salar...
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...
Hey, maybe if they paid them more, they could start running ads too!
I'm not saying they are doing a bad job, but I really can't say if they've been doing a good job either.
More expensive doesn't mean better, it most likely just means putting someone in charge whose primary metric is short-term profit.
Both companies are known for their big products, Firefox and Wikipedia, and both suffer from a chronic insistence on funding projects their userbases don't support.
One day people might start to see being inflexible and principled and not giving in might be a better characteristic than being easily compromised and selling out at every turn. Even when some principles are problematic. It's a cost benefit analysis ultimately and there are objectivly bad principles would could make this swing the other way of course.
I'm thinking of RMS as the model for this mainly too. Many here said he should go, but the FSF actually got the most members when they did, because some saw RMSs inflexibility as a strength.
There also is a big difference between not wanting gays to marry and being homophobic. I don't want people to be able to marry tables, and that does not make me a tablephobic. I'm not disgusted or afraid of tables, but I don't think they should be able to be part of the sacrament of marriage.
>he hasn't publicly gone back on his stance AFAIK
If, as a tech worker, you told me to publicly declarate my stance on a political issue, I would rightly tell you to sod off.
What a ridiculous statement. What point of history are you wishing to conserve? Do black people have rights? Do women have rights? Is public education OK? By your logic, the following argument is valid: “I don’t think blacks nor tables should the right to vote. Including the table proves it’s not a race issue for me. There’s a big difference between not wanting blacks to vote and being racist.”
Judging by your past comments, it looks as if politics are an emotional topic with you. It’s best to up/down-vote and move on than clutter the boards with this dribble.
Is there a backlog (I know there's always a backlog) of WORTHWHILE features/services they could be working on if more money was reallocated to engineering?
Seems like a lot of their more recent services are probably breaking even or maybe even costing them. And I doubt they're really affecting market share or reputation in a meaningful way.
Meanwhile Firefox seems either at parity or ahead of Chrome/Safari/etc, depending on who you ask. (Ahead if you ask me, except on power consumption).
Perhaps Mozilla would have been able to continue Servo, but that's about the only example I can think of. The Rust language and ecosystem doesn't seem to need Mozilla at this point in time. https://killedbymozilla.com/
Maybe lack of a vision has a lot to do with the state of Mozilla and/or Firefox. Then again, it would depend on the vision. After all, Mozilla/Firefox's competition have deep pockets to keep up with any technological advantage that comes their way that doesn't negatively affect/impact their lucrative business interests (advertising, services, etc).
From the FAQ:
>How will my gift be used?
>Thunderbird is the leading open source cross-platform email and calendaring client, free for business and personal use. Your gift will help ensure it stays that way, and will support future development.
=> https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/
Iceraven is a similar (less mature) project for Android.
=> https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser
It would be nice to have a single umbrella project/brand, which could essentially treat Firefox in the same way Edge and Opera treat Chrome.
https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
If they need money, they already know where to find it without polluting the experience with ads.
The c-suite is paid millions all while their market share (their primary leverage and source of influence) slips towards nothing.
Google has won without lifting a finger - they just let their opponent blunder into defeat.
On a technical perspective, i'd like a modern document browser, not a webapp engine. I can appreciate a cross-platform app runtime (WASI project sounds good), but running random code from every website i visit has only downsides for me. I feel like the useful aspects of the web are declarative (HTML/CSS) that the browser is free to ignore/override to provide better UX, and i'm sad innovation in declarative web seems to have entirely stopped after HTML5 shipped <audio> and <video> (and a few others).
Why can't login/logout, drag & drop, background polling for dynamic content updates, and content "tabs" in page (not based on :checked hack) be part of the HTML spec?
<section reload="2m" src="https://foobar/newarticles.rss" schema="https://foobar/template.html">
^ my browser would let me opt-in/opt-out of background updates and/or change the frequency... which i can't control with crappy JS applets that just make tons of background activity and break in the most unhelpful ways when wifi/VPN/tor looses connectivity
All in all, declarative formats empower users, whereas imperative formats (ECMAScript) empower content producers and advertisers. I wish we had a sort of web users union doing R&D on such topics and employing people to work on user-respecting tech.
Mozilla claims they have some special agreement that supposedly prevents Google from using this data for advertising purposes but if you actually believe it then I may have a bridge to sell you.
BonziBuddy [1] described itself in a similar way
Along with the layoffs and now this unscrupulous decision to bring in revenue to offset the haemorrhage.
Time to go back to a no thrills browser.
I'm sure this will be able to be disabled in about:config but seriously.
From Mozilla:
Principle 4
Individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.
Principle 5
Individuals must have the ability to shape the internet and their own experiences on it.
Greed. They want to have they money to spend on increasing their own salaries each year, while their market share is plummeting.
First comes ads, then the seductive siren call of selling user data to advertising partners, then the irresistible funding for selling that user data in a more packaged format. We've seen this story play out. The only thing that keeps/kept you above the others has been your drive to be user focused, and I hate that you feel your niche can't be performant without adopting a third party advertising model.
Au revoir, Mozilla. May you find sense and abandon this model.
Off by default? Fine by me.
OTOH, if Firefox developers provided e.g. a Patreon link, and could wean themselves off the "default search engine" and "suggestions" revenue, how many people would it take to keep it running in the direction actual users want? Could it score, e.g. a million of $5 monthly pledges worldwide?
The fact is, Firefox needs funding and this seems to be the way of doing it. Brave does something similar too.
I hope the ads are purely contextual and do not track me, and I would appreciate a way for people to opt out.
Do they need me to pay? I would 100% pay a reasonable annual subscription for a browser that works for me and not advertisers. Maybe $30 per year?
Oh well, guess there's nothing to do but write your own browser.
There's too much overlap with the VC crowd plus the salaries are huge.
Mozilla should be a regular, frugal non-profit.
Option 1: FOSS community will actively participate in developing one big web-browser project to free the web from malicious corporate practices and guarantee respect of users freedom.
Option 2: A corporation will create commercial web-browser with fixed price or SaaS model without "partnerships" and data-hoarding business model.
Option 3: There will be only one way to browse the internet: The Google's way.
Option 4: Users will learn to use "text-browsers" with hardened security and move to "standard" web-browser UX only if necessary.
Option 5: P2P local networks will provide a "cached" versions of scraped websites for safety and free access.
Option 6: The Internet will be used only in embedded IOT systems, apps from closed app stores, government approved experiences with mandatory ID verification.
No discussion on how much money they're making from this.
So absolutely sleazy. Whoever wrote this has read too much marketing bullshit from other tech companies and wants to emulate their intros. The weasel wording in this is just sad and pathetic coming from Mozilla. I expect this from a company like Facebook, but if Mozilla is going to introduce something like this they should at least have the decency to talk to their users like competent human beings and not complacent idiots. It's insulting.
And here I was hoping that the industry would start recognizing the poison of this business model, exemplified by FB. Instead, we see it spread. (And, notably, in case of Firefox is no overwhelming network effect or potential for user lock-in, unlike with Facebook et al.; so this seems obviously, possibly intentionally short-sighted.)
Meanwhile, Firefox could have been such an opportunity to deliver the first actually paid product in the market, and to use direct revenue to make it superior and keep aligned with paying customers’ interests. Such a waste of reputation, which would’ve made this so much easier to pull off.
At this point I imagine for most people it makes more sense to download Chromium, if you're worried about privacy, or use Chrome if you're not.
Mozilla's been running out of money for a very long time though, this isn't exactly a surprise.
So its opt-in, what is the issue?
A little over a year or so ago I downloaded Firefox. It kept bugging me for updates. But I didn't want these pestering updates. Erstwhile, I could just disable updating with a single unchecking of a box. But they changed it to make it almost impossible to disable updates. I never put enough effort into figuring it out.
Firefox is getting just like Microsoft, Apple, FaceBook, GNOME, etc. "We set the policy, it's our software, you're just the user."
I switched to Debian, which managed to sort all this nonsense out, thankfully.
Alternatively, on Linux you can use the distro Firefox package and control its updates that way.
Any fork of Firefox is mainly a change in default settings or branding. None of them would exist without the huge contributions Mozilla Foundation receive. People who criticize Firefox and then use one of its many forks, I'd like to tell them to just stop whining and appreciate what they have.
The bulk of their income is from Google donating 450 million USD every year just to remain the default search choice. That shouldn't reflect poorly on Mozilla, it should make you question how Google can just throw 450 million dollars on remaining the default search choice in a browser with 1% market share.
It should make you question the massive monopoly that is Google, not Mozilla who are struggling to make open source software for people.
To me your position reads analogous to "Im sick of people smearing organic produce corp for trying to make a living selling agent orange. If you dont like it dont buy it!"
But this is exactly why I feel Mozilla and Firefox deserve more respect. If we're free to fork their code, then any such decision from their part to keep their funding should be met with respect from the user base.
Mozilla is now in exactly the same camp as Microsoft, Google and all the other spyware companies. There is no "worse" any more! Their rhetoric uses the same language and tactics as the others therefore they are the same now. Their plan is to monetize your web views, just like Google. This change is absolutely not for your benefit. Not even a little bit!
They have crossed a line. A massive line imo!
Firefox held the torch for companies in the "internet space" (couldn't think of a better term) on how to do things without bending your users over and telling them it's for their own good. But no more.
This is the end for Mozilla for a group of people that absolutely care about privacy and (total speculation incoming!) the beginning of the end for Mozilla in general. For a number of years, their userbase clearly was more interested in privacy over speed and features but if the playing field is now levelled (in terms of lack of privacy!), then the obvious choice is no longer FF these days as Chrome and Edge are faster.
I've watched them over the years become worse, bit by dark-patterned bit. This is a huge leap into a steaming pile of privacy shit though and a clear sign they are circling the drain.
Still, I have no idea what to do! Hopefully there sill be a way to turn it off but they've laid their cards on the table now...
I continue to use Firefox because I want to avoid a chromium monopoly. Yet I don't see any plan by Mozilla to avoid being reliant on their direct competitor.
Wut?? You must be referring to the partners that you have, that I trust. But I don't know who your partners are, and I have no reason to trust them.
And how is it that you are privy to what I'm searching for? Is DDG among your partners? I know you're in bed with Goo, but I am migrating away from Google Search, partly because I know you are infected with Google Search addiction.
Please stop adding "features" to Firefox.
People harp on about how we must all switch to Firefox, but in the years I have been using Chromium I’ve not once had any marketing BS popups, nags, or issues like this.
And no, Chrome is not the new IE, it’s open source and there’s various different builds available and ways that is is distributed.
> When you see or click on a Firefox Suggest result, Mozilla collects and sends your search queries and the result you click on to our partners through a Mozilla-owned proxy service. The data we share with partners does not include personally identifying information and is only shared when you see or click on a suggestion.
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/bromite/bromite
Brave has crypto ads and a lot of other unnecessary stuff built in. They've also made questionable decisions in the past, like inserting referral codes in links. If anything, Brave is a worse choice than Firefox in terms of privacy even after enabling this new ad suggestions feature.
neither is uBO on Firefox and uBO is more effective than anything else out there including Brave's adblocking
I'd also be interested to know exactly how Brave intends to bypass Manifest v3 since it's a change in Chromium itself which is what Brave is based on.
> tracker blocking
also built in to Firefox, gets even better with uBO
> anti-fingerprinting tech
Any article or blog post to show how effective it is? Most anti-fingerprinting tech ends up making a browser even more fingerprint-able. The only browser that successfully achieves anti-fingerprinting is Tor Browser and it relies on a lot of people using an exactly same config of Tor Browser
> defaulting to privacy friendly search engines?
Changing search engines is trivially easy in Firefox.
I'm relatively okay with non-targeted advertising (in fact i'm strongly against it, but i respect their perspective). Just replace your Google partnership for default search engine with something else if it suits you.
But why on earth would my browser transmit all of my keystrokes in the URL bar to a third party?! That's an unexpected and very frightening development. That means a single centralized entity gets notice of all the websites i browse and queries i search for. All in all, this change means Firefox would no longer be better than Google from a privacy perspective.
The one asset they have or at least had was being the privacy sensitive good guys! Why not build on that?
Building yet another browser just for privacy might not have been the right move (firefox klar on android), but at least the right direction and a good experiment.
firefox continues to kill itself. it seems pretty clear now It's past the point of no return.
im hopeful brave fills the void. theyre the only company inelligently addressing the root issue with the web - advertising.
I'll never enable or click on any of these ads but I'd gladly pay a monthly subscription _that goes only to the Firefox budget and not Mozilla_. I don't think I'm alone here - it would be a non-negligible revenue stream.
Mozilla have found perfect place to put ads, they do not cover screen space, are not annoying or always visible. Not that different from Google paid search results, honestly even better.
YouTube has 1,500,000,000 monthly users and 50,000,000 YouTube Premium subscribers.
1,500,000,000 users
50,000,000 subscribers
How many of 200 million Firefox users who do not like ads are ready to pay as little as $1 per month? I am pretty sure even 10%, i.e. $20M/month will help Mozilla a lot. But people love free things and whine.
That is actually about 3.3% which is much higher than ad-click conversion raters (0.77% for display ads). So a premium model is a superior way to monetize long term from a standpoint of what users prefer.
Do you believe Mozilla should be able to pay its bills? If you’re not happy with this way of raising revenue, what else do you suggest?
I don't have a clue on how to read such a statement correctly. But what I am seeing there is over 800 million USD worth of revenue. For one year.
If that is not enough to build one browser that is not crammed with ads then we are all doomed anyway.
Another nit-pick, when I type "github", the first result shown is "github.blog" which forces me to type "github.com". I assume it uses my bookmarks for this completely irrelevant suggestion.
The feature is clearly designed to push their Trusted Partners into the faces of their ideological opponents. Wikipedia is non-scary entry point. Expect SPLC or some fact-checkers next. The low revenue un-targeted advertising feature can easily be jettisoned to placate people while the real payload is deployed.
Firefox recieves 100s of millions in advertisement revenue via Google yearly through the search bar.
Firefox is practically 100% advertisement financed.
I trust Mozilla these days about as much as I trust career politicians. It really is a damn shame that this organization has become what it is.
This is a real shame as I was hoping it would be more privacy focused. Maybe it could just download a list of advertisers locally and then locally compare the search text to the ads but instead everything typed in to the address bar will get sent to someone else's servers. I might have had it on if it was all done locally (but I guess there is too many flaws in doing it locally for Mozilla).
Still very sad they are doing this, but at least it seems an easy opt-out/not opt-in.
I already give monthly contributions to the Mozilla Foundation. Do they need more money? Fine, I can increase my donation. But the whole point of donating money is to avoid ads harassment. If I don't have that right anymore, then I'll either stop donating to Mozilla, or use all my power user skills to ensure that not a single ad shows in my search bar.
How on earth do they think users want that? Seriously Mozilla, how? Why?
Bizarre and scummy beyond belief. They claim to be all about privacy to sell their VPN service. And then they also start selling what you type into the address bar to some creepy adtech company, so they can show us ads.
Such shame there’s no one to hold Mozilla management to account for this kind of malfeasance.
Personally Ive been done with them since that incident a fee years ago where they were silently pushing out some adware extension for some movie. That followed by their explanation and non-apology told me they were already dead.
Yes, they want to diversify in case that valve gets shut off but they should be 'set for life'. They have been making hundreds of millions a year on average for over a decade. Why does it take that much to make a web browser and how much of that money goes to Firefox?
We need an ad-free open-source alternative that is focused on speed and encourages an extensive plugin ecosystem.
I was going to say I will pay a subscription for the best browsing experience you can offer, sans ads.
But this is opt-out. And there's a donation option at https://donate.mozilla.org/. As long as it's opt-out, that's fair enough to me.
It still has enough large advantages that I will continue to use it (especially on mobile, with extensions), but I'm just one person. Those less knowledgeable about computers in my friends and family make up a lot more potential Firefox users, and they are the ones at risk with this kind of change.
This battle is over: Chrome won. Perhaps the war (whatever it is) isn't over yet.
Qutebrowser here I come.
Compare that scenario to the nowaday advertising popup and thank <pasta> that the market hasn't been taken over and the numb masses haven't adopted it yet.
It feels weird to write this, but somehow i am glad.
We (users of the free web) desperately need to prevent complete takeover by Google's Chrome ecosystem. But when I see Mozilla wasting valuable resources on integrating advertising...
Mozilla, set up a 'Firefox supporters' program. I will gladly chuck you $10 a month to ensure Firefox remains viable. I'm sure I'm not alone!
How hard is it to charge money for the browser? Literally make it a paid app and I'll buy it.
I do not trust Google but I don't trust Mozilla either. I just hope they don't kill MDN. We can't trust big corps be it for profit or non-profit.
IMO adtech is the root of all that’s wrong with the modern internet. It gives companies 2 masters: advertisers and users. Guess who’s prioritized when there’s a conflict between the needs of the two? Whoever’s paying the bills, of course.
The major downside is that web extensions (addons) don't work in qutebrowser.
Oh I like this. It's subtle in a way that flies under the radar but still blesses someone's little heart effectively.
On a side note: I love qutebrowser, even as someone who doesn't prefer Vim or Vim keybindings in things. I like it because it is slim up top, and does what you tell it to and not a stitch more. If it got paywalled tomorrow, but everything else remained the same and open, I could see paying 10 bucks a month for it.
One thing I would perhaps consider is having more "proper" releases for macOS and Windows (with things like code signing, automatic updates, etc. - perhaps even via the Windows and macOS stores) for a small one-time fee. But that's mainly because supporting those platforms properly costs me additional money (and additional time).
edit: I am not a windows or mac user, I just like the thing you make.
The guy who contacted me didn't understand "if you won't offer a SOCKS or HTTP proxy, even if I wanted to, it's not possible".
Naturally I would be anything but comfortable with such a "partnership" (the only thing I'm exploring is getting money from search engines for qutebrowser users' searches).
Nevermind that it'd also be a bad idea from a monitary perspective, given that I'd probably lose more in donations that I'd gain from such a thing.
You don't need dark patterns to opt in your users to something good for them.
browser.privatebrowsing.promoEnabled: falseIn practice (like the Amazon search), it probably won't cause much actual harm; but it's still a net negative to user experience.
I really missed the old days of Opera, which for a long time was superior to Firefox and Chrome in so many ways. Up until they changed the web, and Opera dom/rendering engine couldn't keep up.
Vivaldi is the successor to Opera in many ways.
The real problem is websites, ever-increasing the capabilities of browsers. If that went away then the whole problem of choosing a browser would be solved.
All browsers are capable of rendering vanilla HTML, and even graphics, so there's usually very little need for JavaScript. There's always the option of processing dynamic content on the backend.
I heard that Google Maps originally spat out pages that were in the region of a few 10's of kb. Imagine that!
We live in curious times. Engineers used to design for simplicity, now we seem to just sling more mud onto the pile. It's also curious that environmentalism is such a hot-button topic these days, yet manufacturers are pushing out stuff that makes it harder to repair.
I swear I double checked the date.
Focus on speed, not ads.
Possibly the more sustainable model overall is for software to become a gig job, where engineers get paid for the features they deliver and there's only a skeleton crew of maintainers keeping the project on track (to keep the ongoing costs minimal).
To offset the cost to users even further, you could potentially apply for government grants, at least in Europe. Or corporate sponsorships in some places, in the vein of the Django Software Foundation.
It could work if the base product was free and some addon could be purchased as a subscription, but that is also pretty much happening already with Mozilla VPN.
Signal is run by a known angry dictator. The same goes for Mozilla. These companies don't mean well for users, they mean well for themselves. The rest is the narrative sauce that they abuse to insert themselves into a specific niche.
That said, subscriptions are the most direct, comprehensible and straightforward way.
1. Can it be blocked without recompiling Firefox? 2. If so, how?
> Firefox has always provided address bar suggestions, such as websites from your browsing history, bookmarks and open tabs (on by default), as well as suggestions from your default search engine. Beginning in Firefox version 92, you will also receive new, relevant suggestions from our trusted partners based on what you’re searching for. No new data is collected, stored, or shared to make these new recommendations.
Given that these recommendation require PII processing (e.g. IP, location) by Mozilla, and "no new data is collected, stored (...)", how does that work? I don't recall ever giving consent to Mozilla to process my data.
(Yes, I'm pissed. They just admitted to going to bed with advertisers, and didn't even bother to give us a honest explanation. You can bet I'm looking if they can be slapped with GDPR.)
EDIT: missed this on first reading. I blame banner blindness.
> Note: Firefox Suggest is currently available for a limited number of users in the U.S. only.
Right. I wonder why?
It could be a freemium model: users paying for premium features (Sync, VPN, ...) support the company, for example.
They don't need money, they have an almost unthinkable amount of capital. If they'd kill all their stupid side stuff and fire that weird shark at the top they could develop this browser for a long time. In fact, instead of firing the servo team that is what they should have done instead of this alienating and frankly extremely problematic policy shift.
To label a thread with 671+ comments a dupe and kill and abandon it for one with 81 comments is dubious. It should be the reverse. Not accusing, but this almost appears protectionism against scrutiny of Mozilla. Regardless, it's odd.
* CVS
* LowesThis doesn't change my opinion of them in any way. Although I think ads are cancer, I think it's much worse for Firefox to stay dependent on Google for their entire revenue. I want them to experiment with finding ways to make money off their browser. I want them to keep existing long-term and that's only possible if you have money.
Would I like Firefox to have no ads at all? Yes. But I believe it's better for Firefox to have ads than to be dependent on Google's money.
What a sad day for Mozilla.
Are they scared of GDPR, or are they just boiling one pot of frogs at a time...?
I dont feel like donating to mozilla under the current bean counter CEO.
If its an individual organization doing just firefox, i would 100% buy/subscribe to a paid version of the open source browser, which is not shilling my data for ads. I cant believe i am the only one who wants this.