Make Firefox Private Again
make-firefox-private-again.com
make-firefox-private-again.com
> Asked whether Mozilla has any concerns that its user base, many ardent ad-blockers among them, will oppose Anonym, a spokesperson for the Firefox house told The Register advertising as a business model is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone, though there's still room for improvement.
No, the internet being free and open is what allows advertisers to exploit us. They can find other business models other than advertisement. It's not our problem. They need to stop making it our problem.
I turned it off in about:config
We would probably lose some good stuff, or see it moved behind paywalls. That would be a shame, but I think it would be worth it.
Right now the main search engine everyone uses is run by an ad company. Just getting rid of that conflict of interest would probably help to significantly weed out garbage.
maybe overall that would be a good thing as there's so much trash too
Further, most of them would have never even tried if it wasn't free to start
Then, I don't buy your premise. Most of the channels I watch insert ads directly for Brilliant, NordVPN, etc... which means even without YouTube's ads they're still ad driven
Those are third party sponsorships done by channel owners, not ads inserted by YT.
> That still means the ads are paying for YouTube to host the videos
Your assertion was related to the channels themselves existing, not YT as a platform. I can agree that the platform probably wouldn't exist without some sort of funding source but that doesn't necessarily need to come from ads.
That supports my point. Ads are paying for the content.
As for all the high production value channels out there now, YT doesn't pay their bills, subscriptions, brand deals and merchandise do. YT is like MTV: good for exposure, the real product is sold through other channels.
1. Premium subscribers
2. Direct support on Patreon
3. Direct video sponsorship (a form of advertising, but wholly tolerable IMO)
4. Direct support by joining Nebula, which has no ads
Especially for text content.
People still download or stream movies and TV series even though there are multiple high quality and official streaming platforms.
The internet is neither free, nor open. I'm paying for it and there are all the geo-blocked and walled content. I'm grateful for the parts that are accessible at least (without sucking my private data dry). I don't mind advertising, but it should be a function of what I'm currently watching/listening instead of myself. I pay for F1TV and there are so much logos, but I don't mind them. Likewise for Soccer.
That certain parts are locked off also doesn't make the internet as a whole not open.
However, I love love love Hackernews and dang is one of the main reasons this little internet place became such an oasis for the intellectually curious, and interesting as well as serious conversation.
Matrix, Lemmy, and many others exist, work well, are free from centralized control, and are well-known to the crowd that frequents this place. And yet users prefer to stick to one of the least transparent platforms of its kind, which could be turned off, or turned into something else entirely, at the whim of a small group of people, with no recourse or accountability.
I've been listening to users lamenting "the tech to avoid centralized control doesn't exist" etc. for 20 years, but it definitely does exist today, and it is now clear that the vast majority of people (including tech people) just don't give a fuck.
It's the thing a lot of tech people miss about centralization. It has lots of good effects.
This is a fallacy. Sounds like you're invoking "revealed preference."
I care strongly that decentralized tech like Lemmy exists... but Lemmy is a dumpster fire project badly managed, so I've given up on using it.
Not a link aggregator.
> Lemmy
Checked the top 6 communities (sorted by activity on join-lemmy.org), not counting the NSFW-oriented one. Five of them have some sort of political bullshit on the front page and one of them explicitly describes itself as a "leftist social platform". Now, to Lemmy's credit, the community in 7th place didn't have any political bullshit on the front page, but it's also got a measly 1k active users month, compared to HN's >1m. Have you instead considered that other platforms may have real issues that could drive people away from them?
If Google drops some pet projects we'll see the same predictable stream of comments blaming ladder-climbing PMs, MBA management, H1B employees, everything other than the simplest explanation, that the powers that be got tired of subsidizing it with the one line of business that actually makes money.
The awful thing is, I'm not sure they can.
Lots of sites turned to shitty ads and clickbait because it makes lots of money, but I've followed some passionate writers and journalists who decided to stick to their guns and focus on quality content with a reasonable subscription price.
I don't follow any of them anymore, because they all either want out of business or gave up and switched to advertising hell.
They're calculating with EUR 0.1 per user per month for targeted advertising. The "Pur Abo" (EUR 4-5 per month per site) are thus 40 times more profitable. The advertising has become mostly a mechanism to pressure readers into paying.
The question is, can you convince roughly 1/40 of your readers to pay 5 bucks a month if you don't use targeted advertising as the "threat"? Maybe, just maybe, non-targeted advertising would already be enough? Many people pay to get rid of ads, not of surveillance, after all...
Seen recently few sites which blocked access unless you agreed for vicious tracking - so much for convincing readers, I guess.
I'm afraid that it's a new trend to paywall everything and give user a quite harmful choice of being tracked if it won't pay.
Few years ago there was an agreement in Poland between major media outlets to put an unified paywall system but it was abandoned quite fast. That was still before these vicious tracking techniques and cookie banners. People simply didn't want to pay for the access. Their tagline was "Do you value good journalism?" and it was memed out because the quality of these paid materials was considered as low. Many people complained that it's not that much different from stuff available for free. Others raised an argument that access to the information on the Internet should be free and they didn't want to spend money on this. Discussion happen, taking on paid content in general but whole thing fizzled out just like that paywall system.
Well that's exactly what we've been seeing these recent years right?
And it's also the subject of the article whether that's even legal. Nobody disputes the legality of an actual paywall. But whether the "consent" given in face of an "aggressive tracking vs payment" choice is actual legally considered consent in the sense of the GDPR, that's exactly what's being sorted out in court now.
But as I've always said, the staunchly "anti-advertising"/"information should be free"/"the web would have far more high-quality information if it was fully free" people, not you specifically, but most people in this thread, just feel entitled to other people's labor, for free. Content creators know. Most of the people bitchin' about ads are willing to pay you zilch. They still very much want your content, though. Story as old as time. Just strictly regulate any data-collection and data-selling, that's the real problem.
It might be one of those things that are extremely painful at first, but becomes better when things have settled down.
All that sites that have turned to clickbait and scammy ads, wouldn't we be better of without them? If the ad market where to collapse the real newspapers, who still have actual subscribers would still be around, things like the BBC and other local and tax/license funded media would still be around and assuming that the free market is actually a thing, companies would emerge to plug the holes left be the clickbait sites, at a price.
As it stands we're seeing those with the means paying for actual content and everyone else is just getting absolute garbage.
msn.com is my favorite example, why is that still around? Most of the ads are actual scams, all article link to other sites, which are equally scammy. Why? Because it makes Microsoft money and they do not care about their users getting scammed, as long as they get their cut.
I don't think ads should be the main way we fund content online, it's clearly not working anymore. The ad space has become the product and whatever content remains is just enough to trick people to going to the site and clicking a link or two. The content is no longer about enlightening or even entertaining, it's about trapping people in some twisted hedonic treadmill.
I see very few ads, my daughter sees even less, but when I see how easily an ad can manipulate a child I question why that's even legal to create that ad and what kind of sick people thought that it would be an acceptable business strategy. Adults doesn't fair much better, the only way to see how awful it truly is, is to block out all ad funded media for an extended period of time, then come back and feel the assault.
The ad based economy is making the world worse. It promote scams, pollution, gambling, pushes people into debt, hurts the mental well being of young and old and creates division between people.
I don't like online ads and the web they've created.
I'm not sure "you should stop caring about other people" is the right message to take from...anything, really.
We’re a minority. See: every comment complaining about paywalls.
Just as most musicians or artists have to have a day job, so do most authors when they start. That's been true even for "political" speech: for about as long as people have had things to say, forms of self-subsidized pamphleteering have existed. In the 1990s, hobbyists were most of the web, enough to be able to kickstart a wikipedia.
Self-publishing still works today, thanks to platforms like ghost.org at $9/month that also give an onramp from free to patronage.
I'm saying it sucks that the majority of periodical writing has succumbed to race-to-the-bottom clickbait and adflooding.
Newspapers and magazines from three decades ago certainly weren't perfect, but on average they were a whole lot better than modern news sites, and I don't see how we can ever get back to that situation. I don't know what the solution is, but I can see a problem when it's punching me in the face.
As far as i know I still pay for internet. Only free internet is with public wifi.
Maybe for platforms like Youtube or similar sites advertising is part of their business model. But the primary reason here is foremost people creating content.
That Youtube has insane infrastructure costs is secondary and we certainly don't need Browsers to help advertising at all.
If it doesn't stay optional, Firefox should be forked. It is not a wanted feature. Danger is that Firefox gets gimped because of bad business decisions, because other features regarding privacy aren't as good as they could be.
It was better before the insane amount of advertising.
There was anything on it really before that. Wikipedia didn't start until 2001 and there were already pop-ups and banner ads everywhere. t was better before the insane amount of advertising. I seem to recall GeoCities having ads everywhere.
How do you think that the video content is going to be stored and served if not through paid infrastructure?
And that is simply touching the easiest problem to solve which is the storage part. Serving the video fast with adaptive quality and having the available bandwidth close to the user is another much larger problem.
Since filming, editing, and streaming videos already consumes users' storage and bandwidth resources anyway, the total amount of resources available to a P2P torrent-style network clearly is already in the ballpark of what's needed for YouTube.
> Serving the video fast with adaptive quality and having the available bandwidth close to the user is another much larger problem.
No idea how well it works in practice, but in theory PeerTube has already solved this using WebTorrent.
The nice thing about P2P is that your network's capacity scales organically with load. More users⇒More capacity.
I doubt it because a lot of this content doesn't exist outside of Youtube and because the content does exist on external drives has not internet connectivity or capacity to get it.
> No idea how well it works in practice, but in theory PeerTube has already solved this using WebTorrent.
It seems to currently have 220K users, not exactly what I would call representative or a success for that matter.
> The nice thing about P2P is that your network's capacity scales organically with load. More users⇒More capacity.
Only if they agree to themselves share the content they host which is not necessarily the case.
The Pirate Bay existed… huh, still exists, OK… without requiring any single person to have all the pirated content on any single system — the combined size of all videos on YouTube may be 10 to 15 exabytes or whatever, but no single video, no single creator, is close to that. Even LTT is about 3.6 petabytes for their entire working-archive backup system last I heard, and if they wanted to stream those as a torrent, well, the files are right there.
It may not suit the current way YouTube content is consumed, where you share a link to a specific timestamp and whoever follows that link can see that moment almost immediately, but that doesn't detract from "can people share videos, perhaps even ones they made themselves, using this system?"
Secondary doesn't mean nonexistent, it comes after the primary thing, content creation.
When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content. Creation was the primary motivation; costs were a secondary concern. I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money.
Yes and on this young Internet your site had 100 views, mostly from people close by.
The content shared was mostly text and a small amount of images. Video and audio were largely non-existant.
> I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money.
You're describing hobby content creators which didn't have the volume and quality of individual content creators nowadays.
agreed
> and quality
filming with an 8k camera doesn't mean quality though, it just means more production/hosting costs...
So if we were to move to a world where high quality productions were not feasible anymore for some reason or another then by definition most people would find this to be a problem.
Most "content" is "consumed" just to have something to do.
There are some great movies out of Hollywood.
Quality is also a factor of time which unpaid people usually do not have enough of.
There was also always a way to accommodate a large amount of users through mirrors and other channels, which people shared frequently.
With "the web" they meant their business idea for their specific platform isn't viable without advertisers exploiting user data to the largest degree possible. That is something entirely different. On if they just paywalled the content, people would probably again use alternatives.
Of course I didn't mean to say that infrastructure costs are negligible. On the contrary, it is the largest expense for certain platforms and services. But if a platform has advertising as a business model, it is not on my browser to accommodate that. Then they need to let someone else fill the space they cannot serve without manipulating my user agent.
I do even approve of platforms enabling some creators to make a living with online content creation. But I am still not interested to accommodate advertisers. It is a toxic industry that strives on exploiting users and their privacy. There is no sensible means of cooperation possible and I want my browser have realistic perspective here.
This silences a large number of people and communities who can’t afford that privilege. Not saying that’s inherently bad. But it’s worth weighing in the moral calculus.
Straw man. Nobody in this thread argued it is.
Disadvantaged groups will already have less free time to share content, less exposure to the technical skills needed to do so, less attention, respect, and opportunity from doing so, etc. Advertising places a fig leaf over unequal access, but really makes the inequality worse by centralizing wealth and control in the hands of a few rent-seeking operations.
Yes, but advertisement showed that it wasn't a structural limitation and that other options were available. Even if said options themselves had downsides.
I'd argue advertising silences many more.
Any niche topic is already so SEO'd to death with keyword rich but contentless content that those with something truly relevant to say are unlikely to ever be heard.*
* Unless commenting in a niche subreddit, a web-ring indexed by small web engines, or the like, where the audience are like minds who've previously found the niche.
predatory lawyers and greedy creators is the reason I don't.
On dialup?
In addition to that, dialup was paid per minute where I grew up, so either option would have been prohibitively expensive.
It never was free before modern internet advertising, the costs were just hidden somewhere else. I remember the time before that... IRC servers and a lot of code hosting (SourceForge, Linux distro repositories) were paid for by volunteers/donors/universities, newsgroup servers were ran by ISPs and paid for by ISP customers, forums, MMORPGs, general online game servers and the likes by donations or sometimes just the pockets of whomever in the community had some money to spare, and a lot of the warez scene was just plainly skimming off of others: STROs for hosting, phone dialer scams and credit card fraud. Additionally, some sites made small, direct advertising deals with relevant companies (say, a forum about car DIY could run banners from a dealership).
A lot of stuff that we take for granted today - especially animated content beyond short GIFs - simply was unfeasible because the amount of money you needed to cough up was so immense. The influx of money through modern advertising, especially Google Ads, made many things even possible in the first place.
Also, times (and legal responsibilities) changed, driving up the cost particularly for anything involving UGC. Blog comment sections, guestbooks and the likes got impossible to moderate due to spam, and as that vanished, so did blogs in general. Forums had to deal with CSAM spreaders hiding out, and then came terrorists and the regulatory responses towards them requiring very strict timeframe for the removal of such content... it's a real effort to host anything beyond a static HTML site these days.
If the customers of online advertising platforms ever realise that much of their ad-spend is in vain and cut their ad-spend proportionally, do you think that the internet as it is today will change?
BTW: Serious question, I really want to know what you think.
Oh of course it will, we're already seeing the first effects. Or rather, Twitter (now X) is - they lost pretty much all major brands as advertisers and the majority of their income as advertisers realized that appearing next to Catturd, porn spammers and dropshipping scams is not a platform that yields high returns.
The only platforms still offering decent ROI are Meta and Google's search results, and the real game for online advertisers these days is influencer marketing.
It was free to users, but the operators were paying hosting fees. Maybe the did that out of love or charity or simply because nobody knew how to make money with it. First gen ads came from companies buying banners directly with the host based on user metrics which ultimately landed with GoogAnals installed every where. Hosts used that to offset their out of pocket expenses. But the content was still the content. The wheels started wobbling when blogs started chasing topics for the metrics. The wheels came completely off the bus when socials introduced algos tweaked to feed your addictions.
It was never free. The form of payment has moved to unsuspecting users' data instead of money out of pocket.
This is already something they insisted on leaving enabled by default because they knew no one would opt into it. They knew full well that this isn't something people want. Mozilla is an ad-tech company now. Instead of improving firefox they spent a ton of money buying an ad company created by facebook employees. They're going to claw back a return on that investment and they're taking it from Firefox users.
They simply do not care about the privacy of Firefox users. There is zero chance that this is as far as Firefox goes in violating your privacy. Expect more anti-features, expect things you disable in about:config to re-enable themselves after updates, expect more tracking that you can't disable, expect more invasive forms of tracking, and expect your ability to block ads on firefox to get increasingly limited until it becomes impossible. It's all downhill from here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Ad_filtering,_ad_...
Yes, in the current environment, companies have to advertise to compete with competition that advertises. This is why we need to agree as a society to stop this nonsense, so that companies that don't advertise are in competition with other companies that don't advertise, competing for independent review based on the quality of their products and services.
Advertising undermines the fundamental premise that companies win in competition by providing the best products and services. An well-marketed inferior product outcompetes a poorly-marketed superior product every time, and that's a problem. Advertising should be viewed as anti-competitive, because it's not competing on the metrics that serve people's needs: which is the entire point of an economy.
My favorite period in internet history was the years in which self-hosted phpBB forums dominated the social landscape. We had a diverse set of forums paid for by one or more of their participants, who made the forum available simply because they liked hanging out with the community they were hosting.
Advertising-based social media took all the air from that model and replaced it with the enormous advertising-driven attention economy. Genuine social interaction was largely replaced by vacuous attempts to get "engagement" as the platforms persuaded millions to act in their interests. Vulnerable interactions with persistent communities that allowed real internet friendships to develop gave way to ephemeral rage bait that ruins real life friendships.
I'm not saying that advertising is the root of every single social ill we have today, but it's responsible for its good share of them.
In those old forums, you couldn’t (easily) bury things the way you can today. We basically handed an incredibly powerful weapon to anyone interested in controlling a narrative - especially so with the centralization of everything.
(I want to be clear that I’m aware old forums could be gamed still, and I’m mostly trying to underscore how messed up I consider upvote/downvote/ratio culture).
We had 'likes' but with actual accounting! For better or worse 'status' could be built with this. Likes, on the other hand, are fleeting
Both systems have perverse incentives, I think the audience - size/shape - matters, and how it all reflects/bounces.
Conspiracy moment: it's harder to fake 'grass roots' things with a smaller/tight knit community, we've been corralled. Once something is as big as Reddit, everything you're seeing is manufactured.
Personally, I think there's truth to the "Dead Internet theory;" less bot focus. Humans maintain responsibility with our choices.
Content must be hosted, and hosting costs money. So how is money going to interact with this system?
Copyright answered that question in the worst possible way. Copyright says that the content itself is the object with monetary value. To support that claim, copyright wraps every piece of content in a box, and says, "Whoever made this shall monopolize its value." In reality, only the box itself can actually behave as a discrete commodity, and no one truly creates content alone: all art is derivative, especially written media. Regardless of reality, copyright demands that we all participate in this delusional game.
So now everyone who hosts content is holding commodities. It's naturally advantageous to exploit the value of your commodities (you can reinvest your profit into actual value), so any business that does that will be more successful than the rest. Anyone who refuses to play the game will simply lose (or be prosecuted). So how do you sell forum posts and memes?
You don't. That doesn't make any sense, remember? You don't actually sell the content: you sell the box. You sell the warehouse. You sell the marketplace. This entire game is predicated on monopoly, so what's the most natural implementation? Vertical integration! Facebook and Twitter don't sell social networks: they sell social walls. What are those walls made of? Incompatibility. The best part is: if anyone tries to build a door into your wall, you get to sue them out of existence! It doesn't matter how broken or exploitative your business model is: if it is based on copyright, then it is guaranteed by law to succeed!
So now you own everyone and everything. How do you make money? By selling them to each other. In other words: advertising.
---
But wait, there's more! Copyright answered even more questions: How do you stop people from misrepresenting someone else's work as their own? How do you stop people from sharing your secrets? How do you censor abusive material? The answer is to prosecute fraud and abuse, because those are already illegal. Right? Right? No. That would make too much sense. The real answer is copyright.
When someone operated a forum in the days of yore, they had the opportunity to put up ads and many did. The difference I think is that they were doing so to fund or offset the costs of operating the forum, not as a profit engine above and beyond the cost of keeping the lights on.
That said, greed fed by other monetization models would not have produced the attention economy, and I don't think the evils of other models (dark patterns for subscriptions, planned obselescence, etc) could have come close to the society-wide damage that the attention economy has caused.
I think the centralization is actually a huge contributing factor to the decline in overall health of the internet. We didn't evolve in a way that's compatible with seeing everything that our friends say to any of their other friend groups—we're wired for compartmentalized interactions, not global state.
Either advertisement works, and you pay for your content by being psychologically manipulated into paying more than you otherwise would on things you don't need, or it doesn't, and businesses pay for ineffective advertisement, leading to increased prices.
Advertisement is not free. It's a trick that looks free if you ignore the entire way it functions.
There are two different definitions of free.
Advertising keeps the internet free as in your don't have to pay for it. However there is also freedom and advertising doesn't help there at all.
An advertisement funded Internet is still you paying for your content, it's just built so that you don't feel like you're paying for it. Advertisement is not free money, and it can not be free money. It's for-profit.
So with advertisement, you're still paying for the Internet. We don't have a free Internet. We have an Internet built around businesses that make their entire business around psychological manipulation and extracting money from people without being noticed. The fact that people still push the myth that advertisement enables a free Internet like ad companies are somehow a public service shows how good they are at manipulation.
But ... I happen to be someone who REALLY DESPISES ADS ALWAYS
I'm not as "black pilled" as the comments that started this. My issue is not that ads try and psychologically manipulate people. I don't think that there is anything intrinsically wrong with trying to persuade someone to buy something.
My problem with ads is that they are annoying and distracting, most are this way by design, and they come at you completely unsolicited.
If there was a way that I could opt in or out of being shown ads in all areas of life, so that if I were interested in learning about new products I can, but if I'm not interested the ads can kindly fuck off and leave me alone ... that would be grand.
And that kind of exists. I mean, if I attend a ComicCon I'm going to a big trade show. I'm hoping that the show floor will have tons of wares and demos and such. I'm looking to buy. If I go on Amazon and start searching for products, by all means spam me with results related to what I'm looking for.
But if I'm trying to watch tv, or I'm on social media or in a context where I'm not actively looking to discover products that I might be interested in purchasing, I get downright offended and triggered when suddenly some dipshit character in a commercial is like: "look how ridiculous and annoying I am while using this product I want you to buy. If you buy it you can be just as moronic, obnoxious and annoying as me." In those situations I wish that advertising would just cease to exist in all forms all together.
Most advertisements are for junk that makes your life worse if you buy, but there are some that are useful.
Ads and the spying they depend on only trick you into thinking that you aren't paying for it when in reality, not only are you paying (often resulting with money coming out of your pocket) but you also never get to stop paying for it.
Once your data is out there, it will be used against you for the rest of your life. It never goes away.
It'll be passed around to advertisers, data brokers, law enforcement, lawyers, employers, insurance companies, scammers, retailers, and activists and year after year, decade after decade, every single person who gets their hands on your data will try to use it against you in any and every way that they feel will be to their benefit, and it will almost always be at your expense.
I view content. It either exists and is delivered to me, or it doesn't. Either way, I'm blocking it, for my mental health. I see your viewpoint. But, I'm not a metric, I'm not a KPI, I'm not a cost per click, or a cost per view. I don't want my data saved, tracked, bought, sold, manipulated, interpolated, twisted, catered and sprinkled on top to deliver to the next guy. I'm a human being.
I get it, I entirely do, but that's my stance. I'm sticking with it.
I am 100% anti advertisement, for the record. It is disgusting and non-consensual, and nobody should tolerate it.
The internet is free to hardly anyone. People pay for broadband and mobile plans.
Free Wi-Fi hotspots are what actually keeps the internet free for many people.
[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/18/mozilla_buys_anonym_b...
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_abo...
He also linked to this technical explainer, though I don't think that's necessarily written for a broader audience: https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experime...
> The Internet has become a massive web of surveillance
And Mozilla are contributing to it in all but name.
> primary reason many of us are at Mozilla.
If that is the case, and this is the best fight you can muster give up, go home and hand over the fight to better people. A mission to create the weapons people need to fight online surveillance requires guile, a strong will, a strong stomach, a clear understanding of who the enemy is and the ability to stick to some basic principles,
> Digital advertising is not going away
What kind of a defeatist attitude is that? People want it to go away. That's why they use Firefox. Mozilla are supposed to be defending that corner. What a lame cop out!
> but the surveillance parts could actually go away if we get it right.
We had a working system for digital advertisement in the 1990s. Go back to that and figure where you got lost.
The linked post is a sad masterpiece of appeasement, cowardice and snivelling apologetic. Mozilla is abandoning it's mission and selling out. The CEO should step down.
"It’s about measurement (aggregate counts of impressions and conversions) rather than targeting."
No new technology is needed for measuring impressions and conversions. Your ad server can count impressions, and a simple referrer URL can track conversions. An Apache 1.0 server could handle this 30 years ago.
What the advertisers want is all sorts of other info on you, whether you end up as a customer or not. And they and their willing accomplices, now including Mozilla, ardently frame this as a necessity to keep the ad-supported content industry alive. What they never mention is that industry was thriving with the bare minimum of data they had 30 years ago, and more to the point, thrived with NO DATA AT ALL for over a century before it moved onto computers.
Do you think Macy's got any data on "conversions" when they listed their sale prices in the local paper? Yet somehow they were happy to keep paying for it, without any apocalyptic screeds about the imminent "death of newspapers" if we didn't start making customers record their unique customer ID before opening the paper or entering a retailer's store.
The truth is quite contrary to the ad industry's narrative- it's clear the shift of power balance in favor of the advertisers has been associated with all the industries dependent upon it getting worse.
Shooting in the dark is a so-so strategy, and every business strives to do things in a more cost-efficient way.
(Corollary: if you want businesses to stop building dossiers on you, you have to make it unprofitable.)
Conceptually, it's similar to cutting out a coupon from a newspaper to get a discount; the store then knows that that newspaper ad led to the sale. (Though of course, in the coupon case they can also see which customers saw those ads.)
The coupon analogy falls down anyway - Coupons are loss-leaders designed to impact and increase future spending trends usually, and typically provide a discount others cannot access, or a discount upon a known previous price point - in other words some type of (possibly spurious) discount.
Nobody leaves without a tracker, the description is vague and the direction of travel for purchasing becomes more Ad-laden. Company conversion and profit rates going up means the consumers are paying more than the otherwise would, either in price (profit) or volume. Can't you see how this can only be worse and is nothing like a coupon?
Advertising is not a net 0, people who see more advertising spend more of their money. This is correlated with quality of life and happiness negatively. Furthermore, if you have libertarian tendencies, advertising makes unknown companies like startups less appealing to consumers due to primal branding psychology, and stops them challenging incumbents. It's a net negative. It's worse for the consumers.
What's the primal reason you are contributing to this thread? To defend someone and their policy - or to avoid some other fear?
There's a separate discussion to be had about whether advertising in general is a good or bad thing, whether Mozilla should be actively fighting it, and if that would even be viable, but I'm not too interested in that at the moment.
echo 'user_pref("dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled", false);' | tee -a $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/$(grep "Default=.*\.default*" "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini" | cut -d"=" -f2)/user.js> we support people configuring their browser however they choose
I rate this one as half true. If you leave firefox for a while and come back, it displays a bar with text like "Would you like to refresh your experience?" The first time I clicked that, it uninstalled my adblock extension. Not making that mistake again.
It's like Microsoft acknowledging the crust in the registry and offering their own CCleaner. A lot of activity, dubious work actually being done.
Perhaps the effect of profile lifecycles should be addressed if some hand-wavy refresh process may be required and instituted by the application.
Said another way, that's a concern for the program. Not me. This shouldn't amount to wiping the profile/extensions
I don't remember if the refresh offer appeared back in the xul days, when there was much more scope for extensions to hurt the experience.
the suggestion that its purpose is to trick people into uninstalling their adblocker is a ridiculous one
Adblockers aren’t bloat; they make the web faster and more secure.
“ridiculous”
Mozilla’s paymasters are an advertising company.
re: "ridiculous", do you think it's likely that there's a deep conspiracy within mozilla (at the behest of google) to make users watch ads? or were you hoping that they'd write a whitelist of adblockers that should never be removed, even when wiping the browser?
Sweeping things under the rug, you know?
A browser should have history, data, and extensions. Getting rid of those things doesn't qualify as a fix. It's a diagnostic step!
Also always looking for someone to create a paid version of Firefox that:
- stays up to date with development of FF
- turns off all the stupid ideas
- gradually re-implement the most important parts that certain old extensions dependend on: scrapbook, scheduled website update checker (have forgotten the actual name), those kinds of things
I know many people here say: "everyone say they will pay for this or that but nobody does", but I am one of those persons who actually do pay for software that changes my life for the better or has the potential to do so.
So far I can only remember a single one (Logseq is good for now) in the last category that hasn't either collapsed in an honest way (rip sandstorm) or rewarded my early support by doing something really stupid, like typically breaking the thing that made me support them in the first place, but I guess I will continue trying.
If someone makes the thing I mention above at a reasonable price and I don't show up, please contact me, I might have missed it. (Reasonable = don't expect me to pay the same for bundling a set of patches as I pay for Jetbrains bundle or MS Office.)
Most of those who say "I would pay for that" would indeed never do it. Because those people want something very specific - something you can only have via extensions and personal modifications. What you want is very specific to what you personally want and it is different to what everyone else wants.
And no one can create a browser project for your personal preferences.
Just like you will probably say "Librewolf doesn't stay up to date the way I want them to... and they don't turn off all the stupid ideas the way I want them to."
Librewolf is everything one can ask from an open-source Firefox fork.
People always complained when Firefox moved to a more efficient extension system but practically no one cared about Waterfox keeping the old firefox extensions alive. That's because those people are the absolute minority and do not represent the common user.
And what they complain about is not actually the technical change - it is about the overall change in society and what a move away from the more technical approach that allows user modification symbolizes - the dumbing down of software in general. For example, RSS symbolizes the old internet, but the old internet is gone.
If advertising must exist, I'd prefer it to be safe and private rather than the malware-ridden surveillance machine that exists today. Mozilla is working hard to make this happen and catching a lot of flak. It's notable that criticisms usually fall into three buckets.
1. It has "advertising" in the name, thus it is bad
2. Meta is involved, thus it is bad
3. Mozilla earns most of their revenue from Google, thus they are incapable of doing a good thing
It would be much healthier if criticisms actually focused on the design and implementation of PPA. Perhaps things could be improved. Or maybe you have your own ideas for privacy preserving advertising. But it surprises me that even on a technical forum like HN, so many people endorse the awful advertising status quo.
Yes, you can mostly opt out of advertising with uBlock Origin. You can still do that when PPA is enabled. The vast majority of browsers will continue to subsidize your browsing. What Mozilla is doing is working to provide the same level of privacy and security for the 90% of the population who does not use uBlock Origin. I think that's a noble goal.
I don't think there can be a technical solution to this problem unless advertisers are forced by government regulations to behave, with very heavy fines for non-compliance.
I personally really hoped for Mozilla to take a strong stance against advertisers and introduce an aggressive ad blocker, but it was pretty obvious they're not going to do anything like that because of the conflict of interest (Google's money). Now we get another conflict of interest on top that makes it even less likely.
Indeed, but such regulation is much more likely to happen if there already exist privacy-preserving solutions like PPA.
"There's a good way to do it and a bad way, and we're making it illegal to do it the bad way" vs "There only way to do it is bad, and we're making that illegal, so sucks to be you"
As such, I will fight the ability of websites to monetize by tracking wherever I can.
Also most people don't want to pay for content.
This just means that 99.99% of the web will instantly disappear.
No, they'll be relegated to the charitable internet, the advocacy internet, the nerdy obsessive internet, the public science internet, the FOSS internet, the public domain internet, and the piracy internet.
And whenever any of these groups come up with a project they want to do, they won't have to ramp it up to billion dollar scale in order not to be drowned out by a terrible and loud commercial product. There will be plenty of broke users looking for alternatives.
> This just means that 99.99% of the web will instantly disappear.
I think the only risk of this happening is if free alternatives get so generous and useful that the commercial internet tries to raise the price of bandwidth somehow, or of running a server in general, or alternatively by lobbying for expensive regulatory stuff to get governments to do their dirty work for them. The US seems like it's on the verge of state licensing of speech and journalism, and that sentiment is easily moved to any sort of internet hosting of any service.
They absolutely will have to since they won't have the means to serve the content to the community otherwise.
Niche websites won't stay niche for very long if they are the only free option.
> I think the only risk of this happening is if free alternatives get so generous and useful that the commercial internet tries to raise the price of bandwidth somehow, or of running a server in general, or alternatively by lobbying for expensive regulatory stuff to get governments to do their dirty work for them.
I don't see most of these free alternatives even existing in the first place. For example: free news reporting (not even talking about foreign correspondents & co).
This is already happening.
They wanted to make us pay more because we are using netflix and other streaming services so much.
Everything important like internet and streets should be built and maintained by the gov and not some random companies, f*ck Telekom.
Source: https://slashdotmedia.com/advertising-and-marketing-services...
99.99% of your web.
The same HN that is heavily moderated by a paid employee and paid for by a multi-billion dollars net worth company called YCombinator?
That's not the question. Hacker News was used as an example of an old-school site that worked without monetisation. Which is clearly not the case.
Do you believe that users are going to pay to get access to HN?
The only reason HN still persists at the scale that it does is precisely because of its association with YC and "tech bros," because the billion dollar venture capital firm running it has made it a part of their identity.
I suppose you could call the Launch HN threads ads, but only just, and they're of the absolute least objectionable sort—on topic, clearly labeled, unobtrusive, first party, with no tracking.
Fine by me.
I'll browse the remaining 0.01%, search engines will be useful again and people won't be doom-scrolling all the time to see morons eating.
after that ads powered it all
I don't think a 1% rate of no ads is selling your point.
Even most of the smaller sites have Google ads on them in massive quantities.
1. Much of the internet simply doesn't need to exist. If nobody is willing to pay for something, maybe it doesn't have value.
2. For a lot of what does have value, the problem might be your idea of what a "viable business model" is. If I write a weekly blog post and it makes $2000 a month, that's a viable business model. It's more than a lot of writing jobs pay. But it doesn't scale into some sort of multinational content corp so half of the people involved in the conversation are willing to write it off.
3. A lot of sites simply don't need to be businesses. I've paid hosting costs and helped moderate to help run forums, with no expectation of financial recompense, simply because I enjoyed the community. The best forums nearly universally work this way, still.
The real value of Reddit, for example, comes from subreddit moderators who are typically volunteers. Everything I value about Reddit is provided by people who don't work for Reddit, and the hosting/software could easily be swapped out with minimal impact for most of these communities. In fact, all the problems I've had with Reddit are caused by Reddit's decisions--I've never had a problem with an AskScience or ProgrammingLanguages moderator policy change, but Reddit makes some decision that harms their users significantly probably twice a year.
Then advertisers and websites went beserk, covered every square centimeter with ads, including the content of the websites themselves, and started tracking everything, from location, age, gender to shoe and penis size, and the only way to browse the internet as a sane person is with an adblock.
They had the possibility to work with a few ads that didn't bother people, but that wasn't enough, so now, blocking just some of the ads isn't enough for us. They started with the shitty behaviour, and I don't care if they go bankrupt and websites switch to a new way of surviving.
Let's start with the fact that they've added their spying as opt out instead of opt in because they know that if people were asked they would not consent to it. They're already disrespecting users by trying to slip this unwanted thing into their browser largely unnoticed.
There is no way to exploit and manipulate people that is safe and private. A browser is a user-agent. It's supposed to be working for you, the user. Not for advertisers who will try to manipulate you and take your money.
Mozilla is not working to protect your privacy and security. They are trying to come up with a scheme that will trick users who object to ads and reject surveillance capitalism into accepting them along with the violations of privacy and security they depend on.
There is nothing "noble" about this. This is just about making money at your expense. It's the exact same goal every other ad-tech company has.
Please just let me pay for this in money and not my privacy :-(
GNOME Web/Epiphany (same thing) seems to use WebKit and is officially supported
https://apps.gnome.org/Epiphany/
It seems there is no WebKit browser for Windows.
webkit was forked from the kde browser, not the other way.
Webkit was forked from KHTML which has been discontinued.
thx for the clarification
Starting 2018, they showed personalized ads by themselves, through the GhosteryRewards program. I think that has since been terminated, but it would comply with the FAQ you posted (they claimed that personalization was purely on-device).
I don’t know of any current offending practices, but there is no reason to trust or support this enterprise in the presence of better alternatives. uBlock Origin never did any of that, avoids all shadow of conflict of interest, and works better.
My point being that the statement that there’s “no good ad blocking on Safari” is just not true. Saying “there’s no Ublock Origin on Safari” is true, but that’s not the same thing as “no good ad blocking”. AdGuard works just fine.
This is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising related to pets. It's reasonable to assume you have an interest in pets; otherwise, you probably wouldn't be there. No metrics required.
"Personalized advertising" is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising for automobiles because you did some searching 3 weeks ago. What the "metrics" don't tell the advertiser is that he is wasting your time and his money because you already bought a car last week.
"Personalized advertising" is just plain dumb. It is a way to waste your time and advertiser's money with a false sense of confidence that this is not the case.
This explains why more than half the users on the internet are now taking active measures to block this annoying stupidity. And Google is actively trying to counter this trend.
The only question left to answer is at what point will advertisers wake up and smell the coffee and realize a different, more privacy respecting approach might be just as effective for the same or maybe even less money?
Facebook isn’t a pets/cars/vexillology site, it’s an all-site; it and its kin are designed to contain almost all of humanity’s interests. It stands to reason that all manner of ads would fit in there, and in order to make these ads useful you need to filter or target them. If you see the history of targeted advertising, a case could be made that Facebook invented it as we know it today. No diss meant to Google and Googlers that might read this, I’m sure they played a big role as well.
If you're, say, the NYT, you can sell ads, of course. But anyone who wants to buy ads on NYT can instead buy ads on other websites that only target NYT readers. Which are much cheaper.
This is why news organizations all went paywall a decade ago. When you had to buy ads on a website to advertise to that website's audience, news was rolling in money. That's why they gave everything away for free, it'd be really dumb not to. But then Google and Facebook pirated[0] their audience, meaning all that free website traffic from the search engines is completely meaningless and provides no revenue.
[0] Piracy as in "stole our lunch money", not piracy as in copyright infringement. We're making a moral judgment, not a legal one.
Are they? According to whom and compared to what --- the ad networks themselves? They control everything about this game.
It's possible for someone with deep pockets to build an ad network that operates in a similar manner and offers pretty much everything Google and Facebook do minus the privacy invasion crap.
The only essential difference being how the ads are targeted. Instead of targeting individuals, the web content they are looking at would become the target --- based on the blatantly obvious "metric" that the individual must have at least some interest in what they're looking at.
This should actually be easier/cheaper to implement and maintain (no personalized metrics) and thus the ads should be less expensive. The main reason this doesn't exist in a more popular form --- Google/Facebook have sold advertisers a big load of their own marketing hype and used this to effectively monopolize the market.
There are easier ways of getting a 'fresh start' for cookies and logins on Firefox than this. It has taken me an hour to undo some of the damage done by even timid experimentation with these settings.
Sadly, this experiment logged me out of a YouTube-only Google account that I was able to make before Google closed the loophole that allowed you to make a YouTube-based account without the need for any email address or phone number. Re-authenticating at login for this account now requires that you supply an existing email address and phone number, so the utility of that particular account has gone forever.
Creating a backup before making any changes would solve that.
That means you have 3 choices:
* Use curl to run the script as directed
* copy/paste the command line content, edit if desired, and run
* follow the instructions to update through the UI.
"yeah but you could serve a different page with the curl UA"
ok, then you just change about:config?
I’ve been blocking ads in Firefox since you used CSS to do it [0] but let’s face it, advertising isn’t going away.
Advertising is annoying, but tracking is evil and I hope initiatives like this can pave the way to having ads while not compromising user privacy.
I’ll still block them, though.
[0] https://www.gozer.org/mozilla/ad_blocking/css/ad_blocking.cs... (love it that site is still up!)
:\
Setting the flag in about:config is simple enough, I don't understand why anyone would do anything else. Who's seeing this page who is also unable to make an about:config change?
This is wishful thinking. As long as ads exists they are going to grab as much information about you as possible. All this does is give them additional information to add to whatever they are already doing.
Someone should write instructions for this for both firefox and chrome.
I already block firefox.com and mozilla.org (developer.mozilla.org is exception for MDN).
> Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement
Strangely, though, it was already unchecked, and at any rate, greyed out so I couldn't toggle it. Toggling that about:config value didn't change the state of that checkbox.
I also found another about:config pref called "dom.origin-trials.private-attribution.state" (set to zero for me); I wonder if that has anything to do with it.
pti=off spectre_v2=off l1tf=off nospec_store_bypass_disable no_stf_barrier
Looks like a set of kernel params that turn off security features to speed up the OS. Did anyone test it in practice?
Probably a bad idea in the general case if you work with anything remotely private (ssh keys, banking) and browse the internet routinely. I visit few weird sites and block JS almost everywhere, so it both made sense to me and was relatively safe.
> 3. Firefox creates a report based on what the website asks, but
> does not give the result to the website. Instead, Firefox encrypts
> the report and anonymously submits it using the Distributed
> Aggregation Protocol (DAP) to an “aggregation service”.
> 4. Your results are combined with many similar reports by the
> aggregation service. The destination website periodically receives
> a summary of the reports. The summary includes noise that provides
> differential privacy.
-----
The intention of the project seems to be that the surveillance economy should switch over to this less invasive method of tracking you, and that perhaps if only Everyone did that then they would stop doing the worse tracking. Good intentions, but I'm guessing the only real effect it will have is to make some people stop using Firefox, most people not even notice it's there, and trackers will just use this as yet another input among their many other inputs. (OTOH, maybe Mozilla gets paid a lot for this aggregated data, I guess that's "good".)
I see it's mentioned and committed, but not in the latest release yet.
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30043918
Interestingly, it was already disabled on my phone, but enabled on desktop.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/firefox-for-android-abo...
It only works on the more insecure nightly version of firefox.
That's what I suspect for my own setting anyway.
chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml
Instructions: https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox/issues/240
Other option is to use another gecko based browser check this https://divestos.org/pages/browsers
I'm not sure there is an alternative. It's not just Firefox: other big projects like this already have foundations and lots of money in funding, but then spend the money on things not at all related to the core mission.
From what I've read, Mozilla won't even take your money to develop Firefox. They'll instead use it for the Mozilla foundation which funds a bunch of social causes.
Wikipedia has a huge endowment, so they really don't need money to keep the lights on, but if you donate, it'll similarly be used for funding social causes through the Wikimedia Foundation.
There's also a Linux Foundation for funding Linux-related stuff, but here again a lot of it is spent on social causes, not directly on development-related costs.
You'd think that if funding were really that tight, social causes would be cut and just keeping the servers running and essential personnel employed would be the highest priority, with SW maintenance and development a close 2nd. So, apparently, money must not be that tight. Or, if it is, it's being woefully mismanaged. But I think there's more to it: it seems like when times are too good (something gets popular and gets funding), then the people in charge expand the scope of the project to consume all the funding, adding on various pet projects (like those social causes), instead of saving the money in case of a funding downturn later. Wikipedia probably did it best by setting up an endowment so that everything else is just gravy, but even here they're constantly asking for more money on the site and acting like they really need it when they don't.
As much as I disagree with Ayn Rand on a lot of things, she did make an important observation.
Parasites will be attracted to high value things in order to extract value, not to add to it. They climb the hierarchy of the organisation and then use it for their own benefit.
It is not only developers who do resume building oriented work. These people start social causes so that they can claim that they spearheaded this or that campaign. In order to gain prestige.
Engineers who only care about the product become the bottom of the hierarchy and the organisation becomes a reflection of the needs and wants of these parasites.
From donations and government grants. You know, like proper non-profits that aren't trying to LARP as a SV unicorn.
All sorts of "experiments", normandy, telemetry, pocket, looking glass, all sorts of phoning back them or either google... so many things to name. And now this garbage to add to the list.
You have to do so much work in about:config to clean this up and i'm not sure if it can be fully.
Extremely scummy organisation.
# curl https://make-firefox-private-again.com | sh
sigh
Advertising is unethical psychological manipulation, full stop. I don't care if the delivery or targeting mechanism is supposedly "privacy-preserving" (yeah, right). Ads themselves, even completely untargeted ads, need to go.
(Which will also mean that Firefox's treatment of ads will not affect you.)
- advertisers
- users
So, given that you're unwilling to pay and that you believe advertising is unethical, how do you expect people to fund the content you consume?
Don't you think it's unethical to expect they do it for free?
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author%3Akelnos%20archive&type...
So if advertising is unwanted, and subscriptions to individual websites on the internet isn't working either, then maybe they should get more creative.
I had a lot of fun on old forums before this mess started, so if we revert to that so be it.
They are hand-in-hand with Google - Bought and paid for.
The first two are still fairly dependent on the upstream companies - but at least they're ripping out the junk - They are pragmatic solutions in the short term.
Ladybird is nicely independent in the sense that's truly one of the few offerings that isn't a derivative of Firefox/Chromium, but it's not "ready" yet for most daily uses.
But seriously - please don't fall for the Mozilla marketing that Firefox is some privacy beacon as an alternative to Chrome. It's marketing not reality.
[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/you-are-too-dumb-for-tech/
This article is 5 years old and I'm not sure whether it's accurate anymore, but might be worth checking to be sure we are completely private.
I also remember some drama about pale moon's author despising TOR and not wanting uBlock to work
And he's complaining about NoScript, which doesn't play well with Pale Moon to the extent of destabilizing the browser and whose Pale Moon compatible XUL version is long abandoned by its developer while there's an alternative (eMatrix, forked from now abandoned uMatrix that was made by uBlock Origin's author) available. (https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=17619)
Pale Moon is what Firefox used to be once upon a time in terms of customization and privacy before Mozilla became Google's controlled opposition to guard against browser monopoly allegations.
I don't mind using outdated software for a specific task, but I feel uncomfortable after a certain point. Unless you absolutely need the old XUL-era functionality, does it make sense to use Pale Moon when you can tweak Firefox to be more private? In my case, I'm not sure.
The only thing 'outdated' is their not jumping on the minimalist, mobile focused UI that Chrome invented and Firefox copied and retaining a sane, desktop user focused and fully customizable UI that doesn't need digging into about:config or userChrome.css tweaks and can be directly done from the preferences dialog or context menus. The way Firefox used to be until version 4 onwards when the copying Chrome and limiting user choice began. To your last point, why should you have to tweak Firefox for privacy at all when they keep proclaiming how privacy friendly they supposedly are? Pale Moon is private out of the box - there is no baked in telemetry (they don't run a telemetry server, for starters), analytics, tracking, advertising or anything else on those lines.
It wasn't just "Matt A. Tobin". For example, "Moonchild" was involved in that OpenBSD debacle ( https://archive.is/qbpmL ). Just someone trying to make Pale Moon to work and they approached it like that. Moonchild still blames OpenBSD devs for it... earlier this year he said they were "uncooperative" ( https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?t=30732 )... I wonder why.
A few were fine with Tobin's behaviour and happy to support him... and they're still there.
This doesn't affect the performance or security of the browser, but it's something that bothers me and so it's a point against when considering which browser should I use.
There is already a similar issue with forks for Windows XP called New Moon and My Pal - Pale Moon long since dropped support for XP yet users of these builds show up on the forum asking for help instead of asking the fork maintainers.
The maintainer was still in the phase of trying to make it work, the code was on a personal github... there was no Pale Moon for OpenBSD, no decision on actually making it available, let alone forking it or giving it another name... it never got to that point. And that's why approaching the issue with that style made no sense. "You will revise your mozconfig..."? The average person will tell you to take a hike. "I will not be as educational next time."? Would you continue working (for free!) on making someone else's "product" when they make a threat the first time they interact with you?
What's wrong with a "Hey, thanks for working on this, however since you're not using our libraries and <insert reasons>, you'd need to rename the browser as per our license and we also don't want to be associated with ports that do this. Let me know if we can help with anything."
There's nothing wrong with not wanting to be associated with something that might not work as you intend it to, not want to support it, etc, but you can't behave like an asshole if you want people to work with you. Like, you're being more hostile than someone like Mozilla would usually be under similar conditions... no wonder the attempted port died with that Github issue.
In any case, and going back to my point about them being toxic, Moonchild was fine with Tobin's behaviour (and vice-versa) towards others and even joined in sometimes... so only blaming Tobin makes no sense. Moonchild still doesn't see anything wrong with the way they approached the My Pal and OpenBSD situations, so it's only a matter of time until the next drama. Essentially, it might be a less toxic project now, but some of the people who made it toxic are still there and have not changed their ways. That's their right, I guess, but it's not something I want to be associated with.
# How to use:
# curl https://make-firefox-private-again.com | sh