New Tab Experiments
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
My personal opinion (which might be wrong!) is that jonnath is trying to reassure people that 'Directory Tiles' is not about slapping random ads on the newtab page, and is not going to just ride the trains to release. They're going to stew in the Nightly channel for a while while we iterate on them and figure out how to make them useful to users.
What I don't see is an assertion that the final feature won't involve some form of revenue. There's been no final declaration, but my understanding was that the suggested system involved choosing sites that are useful to our users, and then going to those sites and discussing payment for the placement, rather than letting sites come and pay us to be put on the page. This is very similar to what we do with the search box: we choose Google as the default because we think they're the best default for the users, not because they got to us first or paid us the most[1].
If you want more details about the implementation that's going to land on Nightly, check out the tracker bug for the feature and the dependent bugs: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=973273
(And remember kids, Bugzilla is for input on the implementation, discussion about the feature itself goes on a mailing list like firefox-dev[2]).
[1]: Granted, if we choose Google and Google said "Hah, no money for you" then we'd probably go to another provider because we have employees to pay, but this becomes a more important distinction if, say, Bing wanted to pay us more than Google.
[2]: https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/firefox-dev
Disclaimer: I'm a webdev for Mozilla, and can't speak for the people actually working on Directory Tiles, only as someone who knows how to navigate Mozilla's public information.
Is there a public record of this discussion? I'm kind of curious if anybody brought up the idea that not having your searches tracked by an ad network would be best for the users. Unfortunately that leads to the conclusion that the default search should be DDG (or similar) and I doubt they could afford to pay you enough to keep Mozilla running. Call me cynical but I'm not sure I believe that anybody in the room was going to take that suggestion seriously when it meant their paycheque was on the line.
I can accept the argument that Google is a better search engine right now so the tracking is 'worth it' for most users (although that does seem to conflict heavily with Principle 4 of the Mozilla Manifesto: Individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional). What happens if DGG catches up enough to be functionally equivalent for most people? Do Mozilla engineers collectively fall on their swords and lose their jobs to improve the privacy of the internet for most users? Or do we have to engage in 'lesser of two evils' style mental gymnastics about the world being better if Firefox is well funded?
I'm not a big fan of this argument, and I argued that DDG, or another privacy conscious search engine (though DDG is the best I've used), would be very much in line with Mozilla goals. I'm sure many users are still unaware of Google's practices (whether those practices are inherently harmful or not), and exposing DDG as a search option would be a means of raising awareness.
I don't quite understand the rationale behind it.
It starts off specifically about the removal of Yandex as the default for the Russian localization of Firefox, but touches on the greater question of why Google vs anyone else given our differences on tracking users and such. For context, the Harvey mentioned is Harvey Anderson, who was Senior VP of Business and Legal Affairs at the time.
My personal summary would be something like this: Mozilla has a mission defined in the manifesto. We have a ton of projects that are supported by the funding provided by Google and other search engines. There are several factors being balanced in the choice of search engine: usefulness to users, respectfulness of user privacy, and sustainability of the project, to name a few.
JohnTHaller's got it right: Sure, we could switch to DDG and max out the respectfulness of user privacy aspect. In return, the usefulness to users goes down[1], and the sustainability plummets. We'd be sticking perfectly to our ideals, but shooting ourselves in the foot (assuming we want to continue doing all the different projects we do).
In choosing Google, the leadership of the project decided that Google as search provided offered the best balance of usefulness, respectfulness, and sustainability. You can argue that they're really bad at respecting user privacy[2], but they'd argue all the alternatives offer an even worse balance. They think that we can provide a greater net good to the world by going with Google than we can by going with DDG or someone else.
Mozilla tends to favor pragmatism, IMO, and sometimes that means focusing on sustainability (a nice word for making money to pay for our other activities). Hence why we considered directory tiles, among other ideas, so that we can pay the bills and keep making the web better.
(I'm intentionally ignoring side-arguments like "Why does Mozilla need so _much_ money?" or "Why do VPs get to make decisions without consulting the community" because one comment isn't enough to address a complex topic like this :D)
[1] IMO, I find DDG's results to be worse than Google's, and although I'm fine with that in return for their other great features, not all users are.
[2] And I'd mildly agree, not being super-knowledgeable about the specifics personally.
1. http://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-abandons-plan-for-ads-on-fi...
There is something rotten in the Mozilla stewardship.
First they come with an idea that clearly goes against their users best interests. Then they actively try to disguise it and sell it as something that people really truly want, but are just dumb enough not to realize and appreciate. They still get an earful. And now they don't have chops to simply say that the idea was bad and it was written off. Instead there's this masterpiece of weasel wording that effectively puts blame on the users for killing a perfectly good idea. What the f#ck.
The ads were unintrusive, and made sense in context. It was just populating something that was replaced over time with info from your own browsing habits.
[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publish...
From what I've seen, when people use the web for the first times, they "don't know where to go". They don't have surfing habits yet and they're completely overwhelmed by so much to choose from.
If you offer people a handful of useful/informative/fun sites, it'll be much easier for them to pick something and get going.
If this is implemented carefully (and I think Mozilla is putting a lot of though into it) this could really be a win-win-win situation for Mozilla, the users and the advertisers.
Also note that chances are that you never see those ads because Firefox will continue showing you the sites you visit often.
Mozilla isn't getting handouts from Google. They probably deliver more revenue to Google by setting it as the default search than any other partner Google has. iOS/mobile Safari is probably the only other contender.
Finding ways to diversify is good, though.
...but I think its pretty clear not everyone agreed it was a good idea, to put it mildly.
I love the fact that at Mozilla we listen to community input and make decisions that we feel are in the best interests of the user, I dont feel like I work at a company at Mozilla, I feel like I work with a community.
But at the same time, a lot of the broader community are (rightly) cynical and when something like this is proposed it causes a minor uproar, Its also hard to filter out what is the vocal minority between a genuine concern, I have no doubt that it would have been implemented in a responsible way that benefited everyone involved, so I think this may be a bit of a missed opportunity, but onwards and upwards.
StartHQ replaces the new tab page with one that you can fully customize, giving you quick access to commonly used functionality using "deep links", as well as the ability to search inside your cloud services, like Greplin did back in the day.
We also have an API so you can add search support to the services we don't support or internal apps used within your organization.
More info here: https://starthq.com/features
Off the top of the head I have three ideas that might help:
- Maybe make it possible for users (not webmasters) to edit information about pages or at least let them leave some feedback.
- Send personalized mails to webmasters, to give them some incentive to actually help you pad the little information you have about their sites. Or even better let me just reply to your mail with a short description of my site and directly put that on Volafile's/Whatever's profile. That would basically take away all of the friction I'd have to endure while 'claiming' my profile. Replying to a mail isn't hard and you could be pretty sure it belongs to the rightful owner.
- Just pull some reviews off other sites, like Google does with reviews for restaurants (only the first few lines with a link to full review)
Use these suggestions however you like, they're just my few cents but they might help to pad the little content you have on each page with something more useful to the user. Currently stuff like this: https://starthq.com/apps/volafile-io looks empty and cheap to me, like something created by a machine. Not many people will be intent to discover more stuff on your page if the information they'll get is so little with each click.
Even I, who wanted to discover 'alternatives' to my own service got bored after a few clicks. I didn't feel like I was finding out anything useful about the suggested alternatives and related services.
Plus you don't seem to refresh the 'stars' very often. Volafile doesn't have a lot WoT ratings, but they don't seem to warrant 1 star. Why don't you let your users rate service by clicking on the stars? It works well for most other online 'market places'. I actually thought the stars would be clickable at first. Looking at some other services I don't think the 'stars' they have make sense at all. Most have 1 star throughout the bank and others have 4 times 1 star and one 5 star 'gauge'. They look pretty random and only confuse. Maybe you should try to work out better conditions on when to display them. Services with not enough data points available seem to get 1 star by default, maybe just gray them all out?
Okay that's all I noticed. Maybe you should take my opinions with a grain of salt as I'm not really your average user, but I know how valuable feedback can be to small websites (running one myself, unsurprisingly)
Edit: I can't seem to claim Volafile's profile. Just takes me to some launcher.
There's an automated tweet sent out when an app is added to the directory. I presume you got notified of that via email. I've intentionally not emailed app owners directly as I thought that would be pretty spammy. Perhaps it may be worth doing, especially if the benefits of having a full listing would be explained in more detail.
I like the idea about letting users update info on webapps, much like what Lanyrd is doing for events. Not entirely sure how to go about implementing it though, but will probably start by letting users review apps and go from there.
The stars are refreshed once a day, but the rating you see on StartHQ is relative to other apps in the directory, not all the sites on WoT.
I've sent an email about claiming your profile. You've actually claimed it by signing up, however updating the profile is still a manual process.
Did you try out the launcher and search? Would be great to get your input on that.
"particularly for fresh installs of Firefox, where we don’t yet have any recommendations to make from your history"
Does this mean they are going to be scraping people's history to find 'suggestions'? If so, time for me to move to pale moon.
Hey, that's not the title I upvoted
Do you people suffer split personality or something?
When a company changes its mind about such things it's the worst of both worlds: you get all the negative PR, none of the benefits, and on top of that it makes Mozilla management look like a bunch of indecisive amateurs who have no strategy, rhyme or reasons behind their actions.
A company that decides to have sponsored new tab links and then decides it's not "who we are" might decide something completely random tomorrow. You can't rely on there being consistency, because apparently they're not sure who they are.
Mozilla fears their users now. They fear them. That's not a good thing, because it means Mozilla doesn't have the credibility to do what's good for their users and for Mozilla if users might perceive their actions as bad.
But popular actions and good actions don't always overlap. I wish it was that easy. The word "populism" wouldn't be a bad thing.
I'm not sure if these events are related, but Firefox developers have been talking about this decision in the mailing list for a while. This doesn't come to me as a surprise.
I'd consider the reception of a software product update to merely be "positive" if there was generally praise, basically no negativity at all, and people expressing that they are now significantly better off.
"Very positive" would involve no negativity, and complete and total jubilation from users. This is extremely rare.
A lot of people are not happy about Australis, and justifiably so. While Firefox has been imitating Chrome the past few years, Australis sealed the deal and made them nearly identical in the most critical ways.
The only mitigating factor is that there really isn't a viable alternative to either Chrome or Firefox these days. Opera has basically become Chrome, and Safari obviously has very similar roots. IE is engaging in the same imitation of Chrome. Both IE and Safari suffer from a lack of portability, too.
Many Firefox users are extremely disappointed with Australis, but they have no recourse. Switching browsers isn't really an option. And we wouldn't be in this position had Mozilla listened to all of the past feedback they've been given, so giving more feedback is probably a pointless exercise. So they suck it up, as best they can.
Australis was a debacle, at best. I think you're deceiving yourself, and people not familiar with the situation, to suggest otherwise.
Of course, in reality, forking and then establishing the fork as a mainstream replacement that aligns more closely with the traditional advantages of Firefox would be a huge undertaking. For any new browser to gain traction outside of geek communities would surely require both a substantial user base and substantial support from the development community.
But it's been done before, even for large and high profile projects, when the existing corporate stewardship wasn't getting the job done: the LibreOffice/OpenOffice split is the first example that comes to mind. If I were this week's CEO at Mozilla, I would consider a mainstream fork to be at least a plausible threat by now.
Reliance on third party addons for functionality is almost always a step backwards, but it is possible to run the latest Nightly with the pre-Australis UI.
I've never known a company to pull that off. Even Apple, praised for their design sense, has, according to you, never had a "positive" release of any software.
> A lot of people are not happy about Australis, and justifiably so.
The same exact thing can be said about the previous UI.
> And we wouldn't be in this position had Mozilla listened to all of the past feedback they've been given
That's a fairly selfish attitude to take. What you are really saying is that you'd rather piss off many other Firefox users who don't share your opinion.
How is that? Using the hamburger icon, which was used by Mozilla in mockups before Chrome used it, or rounded tabs (which Chrome doesn't actually use), or making the customization UI (something which Chrome doesn't have, yet again) not look like it's from the year 2000?
Please identify the critical ways in which it's imitating Chrome.
The most important aspects for me would be customization, and Chrome doesn't offer anything in the same ballpark. And with Chrome, you have to resort to tedious workarounds to install certain extensions if you don't want to login to your Google account. And if we ignore all of that, Firefox's add-on ecosystem wins too.
People get upset at every UI rehaul; you could hear much the same sentiment after Firefox 3.
I think it was Marissa Meyer who said, "Companies don't do things. People do things."
Companies are just collections of people grouped together under some sort of legal structure. It doesn't mean that they actually all act as if they were one monolithic entity. Even at relatively small companies, it's not unusual for one team to have the authority to make a decision that later gets contradicted or reversed either higher up the chain, or in a different part of the organization.
I don't know if this is better or worse than average at Mozilla, but it's certainly present to at least some extent in any company of (almost) any size.
It's less about contradiction (which implies a final decision was made and then reversed) and more about being painfully open. Other companies may also have lots of instances where there's internal disagreement on things, but when your standard form of communication is mailing lists, IRC, and blog posts, it's a lot harder to maintain the façade of a unified mind.
This would be like a person who is unable to lead internal dialog, and everything they think, they say out loud.
For good or bad, in the mind of people companies are allocated as a "person". We give personal characteristics to brands, so we value companies that act predictably, have certain well-known values and are consistent with their own values.
It's the utmost responsibility even if your CEO changes every month, that the next CEO ensure continuity in spirit and operation of a company.
After all, sure, companies don't do things, people do. But also people don't do things, brain cells do things. When a person is acting erratic and inconsistent, you don't talk about their internal brain cell conflicts, you see a problem at the person level.
Same way erratically behaving brands & companies will be written off, because they don't stand for anything and have no reliable characteristics.
Companies that act inconsistently are said to have "left hand doesn't know what right hand does" problem. It's not a feature, it's a bug. It's no coincidence the analogy is to that with the mind of a single person. You may be collection of brain parts, but for proper operations it's crucial you operate self-consistently. Companies are no different.
There are downsides to doing design and development in the open, sometimes looking that way is one of them. But the benefits are worth it.
Wow, this here is a textbook case of out-of-context quoting...even in a post that takes 30 seconds to read. Here's the context that the parent comment has completely failed to read:
> A lot of our community found the language hard to decipher, and worried that we were going to turn Firefox into a mess of logos sold to the highest bidder; without user control, without user benefit.
> > That’s not going to happen. That’s not who we are at Mozilla.
"That's not going to happen. That’s not who we are at Mozilla"
- refers to the perceived fear that:
"we were going to turn Firefox into a mess of logos sold to the highest bidder; without user control, without user benefit".
- NOT to an actual decision/policy that the Mozilla team is ostensibly standing behind. I don't necessarily disagree with the rest of your rant, but the fact that you so terribly misquoted the OP doesn't lend your argument much credence.
Except nothing in the original announcement came close to the perceived fear. Essentially, people were extrapolating in such a way that this[0] comes to mine.