Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla wants web users to be targeted with online advertising and/or pay for online advertising not Firefox development.

Mozilla is an online advertising advocacy project. Just try suggesting to anyone from Mozilla the idea of web without ads. They will be 100% opposed, unwilling to even consider alternatives, as if they are being paid to defend this pro-advertising position. They are indeed being paid indirectly from the coffers of an advertising company.

"Free and open web" apparently means web open for advertising. The presence/absence of advertising on the web is a non-negotiable. Mozilla insists advertising is a must-have.

Why was the original internet free of ads before it went public. Are there more important uses for a computer network. ISPs privatised the financing for the network. We pay for internet. It is not free. Funding from advertising has never been a necessity.

But Mozilla argues advertising is 100% essential.

View on HN

> even consider alternatives, as if they are being paid to defend this pro-advertising position.

There's no way they would manage to exist like a business with a multi million dollar a year CEO without all that sweet Google money. So they are totally beholden to advertising straight from the top down. It doesn't even matter who is at the top, the whole step setup guarantees it'll be one of the big business players.

Basically when they moved Firefox from a foundation to a corporation, this was pretty much inevitable. They don't even want our petty donations anymore. We can donate to the foundation's pet side projects but not too Firefox.

Google funds Firefox and Mozilla knows its purpose is to prevent regulators to looking at Chrome the same way they did at Internet Explorer.

People always say that like it is a problem.

I shit on Firefox every damn day, but that's because I'm a tech-brain(rot) weirdo. Truth is I absolutely love it. Firefox, or one of its derivatives, is the main (often times only) browser on every device I own. I literally wouldn't buy a device if I knew I couldn't install Firefox.

Right now, our options are a world without Firefox or a world where Firefox is supported by the dominant market player. Maybe that changes in the future? Maybe it doesn't. But a chance for a future that isn't just the children of KHTML can't happen if Firefox doesn't exist.

The obvious Apple in the 90s comparison comes to mind.

> But a chance for a future that isn't just the children of KHTML can't happen if Firefox doesn't exist.

TFA is about one such chance (and why it might be more donation-worthy), no?

It is, but we don't really know anything about Ladybird at this point. I hope for the best and wish Kling nothing but success. They have shown themselves as an exceptional and committed developer.

I hope for a future where I've got even more options, but right now, it's a baby project. Getting standards-compliant rendering working is step zero. Things like site isolation, hardware video acceleration, and extensions that have enough access but aren't running wild with permission are really where a browser in the modern world shows its metal. Not to mention multiplatform support.

An OS isn't just a kernel, and a browser isn't a just rendering engine.

>But Mozilla argues advertising is 100% essential.

Citation needed. I realize they get a ton of money (probably most of their funding in fact) from Google, but still have they actually made such a statement? For now at least, they support ad-blockers a lot better than Chrome (because of Manifest v2).

While it doesn't directly say it, their acquisition announcement for Anonym (an ad/tracking company) comes about as close as you can by saying Anonym believes it (and implicitly they support the viewpoint)[0]:

> Anonym was founded with two core beliefs: First, that people have a fundamental right to privacy in online interactions and second, that digital advertising is critical for the sustainability of free content, services and experiences. Mozilla and Anonym share the belief that advanced technologies can enable relevant and measurable advertising while still preserving user privacy.

Which completely ignores non-profit uses of the web, which is interesting since they're a non-profit and all.

They've made similar statements in the past[1]:

> Advertisements pay for all those “free” services you love, as well as many of the products you use on a daily basis — including Firefox. There’s nothing inherently wrong with advertising

Which is of course true because they don't accept donations to fund Firefox despite people complaining that they want to be able to make such donations for years.

[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-t...

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/the-future-of-ads-and-pr...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com