Mozilla Is Moving Ahead With Sponsored Tiles On Firefox’s New-Tab Page
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
It would also be in their interest to have customers pay a base fee as then It would be much easier for them to sell extended services like music, movies and privacy.
And thus we return to the glorious days of "shareware" and ad-supported "free trials".
This is a rather silly statement - most of Mozilla's funding already comes from Google, and has for a while.
If you want to make Mozilla less reliant on "big brands", it's very easy - just donate[0]. Every dollar from its users makes Mozilla slightly less dependent on advertising money.
However, a lot of their recent actions have seriously dissuaded me from doing so.
Desktop Firefox, for example, has gotten progressively worse over time. A lot of useful functionality has been stripped out, and the Chrome-like UI these days is much less efficient and effective than the Firefox 3.5.x UI was.
Mobile Firefox on Android doesn't exactly offer a very pleasant experience.
They basically gave up on Thunderbird.
They've wasted resources on unnecessary and unwanted efforts like Persona and Firefox OS.
Asm.js is not a very sound approach, especially compared to technology like Native Client.
Rust seems promising, but won't be seriously usable until at least Rust 1.0, which still seems a long way off. As the year progresses, I get more and more doubtful that it'll be out during 2014, like was claimed earlier this year.
As it stands now, Mozilla is now offering me far less useful products than they once were. I've also seen them squander a lot of the resources they already had on unnecessary products. And their future offerings aren't very inspiring, either. I just can't convince myself that any donation I do make would be used in a productive manner, I'm sad to say.
by what metrics? it uses less RAM, runs faster JS, renders faster, is easier to write add-ons for, is more in line with the HTML5 feature-set...
> Mobile Firefox on Android doesn't exactly offer a very pleasant experience.
compared to what? the stock browser? mobile chrome? in my experience it blows both of those out of the water.
> They've wasted resources on unnecessary and unwanted efforts like Persona and Firefox OS.
Persona was a three person, part-time team for under a year. It is used pretty widely, and has sufficient community support to continue past Mozilla's devs moving off of it. It and Firefox OS, imo, are the two most promising things that Mozilla is doing right now. Mozilla's mission is to stave off a walled-garden web wherever it rears its ugly head. I can think of no areas where this is in a worse state than mobile OS's and "login with X".
> They basically gave up on Thunderbird.
True. Probably their biggest mistake of the last three years, imo
> Asm.js is not a very sound approach, especially compared to technology like Native Client.
a very hotly debated topic by most of the leading voices in the field; far from a settled issue.
> Rust seems promising, but won't be seriously usable until at least Rust 1.0, which still seems a long way off. As the year progresses, I get more and more doubtful that it'll be out during 2014, like was claimed earlier this year.
fair enough. i don't currently doubt they'll just make it in 2014 tho
In the Phoenix, Firebird and Firefox pre-4 days, I'd quite often find myself answering with "Yes". Since Firefox 4, though, I'm not sure if I've answered with "Yes" even once. Sometimes I'm not any better or worse off, but most times I'm worse off.
For example, extensions would break very frequently for a long time after Firefox 4 was released, although they eventually managed to get that straightened out. Then there's been the progressive dumbing-down of the UI, to the sorry state of affairs after the recent Firefox 29 release containing the Australis disaster. Useful functionality has also been removed, such as the status bar and the ability to disable JavaScript through the preferences dialog. With each update, a lot of us users now have to install more and more extensions just to restore useful functionality that has been removed.
Worst of all, I don't think there's been any significant improvement in its RAM usage, its speed, and other factors like those. Yeah, I know about the are-we-fast-yet style benchmarks, but those don't translate well to the actual experience when using Firefox. Chrome, as much as I dislike its UI, still feels far more responsive and efficient than Firefox.
As for Mobile Firefox, yeah, I'm comparing it to other mobile browsers from Google and Opera, for instance. I find it slower, I've had it crash more, and I don't think it really offers any significant benefits. If it's no better than its competitors, and worse in some ways, it inherently can't offer a good experience.
And it's nonsense to suggest that Persona was "widely used". It saw basically no adoption, compared to its competitors. The same seems to be happening with Firefox OS. Some people try it out, and there is some hype, but it's still a very, very marginal player in the big picture. It won't have any impact on "walled gardens" when almost nobody actually uses it. And in many ways it forces developers into a "walled garden" worse than that of its competitors, with JavaScript/HTML5/CSS basically being the only option for developing applications.
From a technical standpoint, the Asm.js versus Native Client debate is over. Native Client is a much more general, technologically-superior approach. Asm.js is basically just a human-unfriendly subset of JavaScript, without the benefits that a more general approach offers.
I think the Rust crew could have pulled off Rust 1.0 by the end of the year had they stabilized the language and standard library a few months back. But that didn't happen, and we're still seeing relatively significant breaking changes happening to this day. It just doesn't leave them much time all to freeze the language and libraries, and to then give it the significant amount of testing and bug fixing required of a respectable 1.0 release, before the end of 2014.
Yes, according to you, we should have frozen the memory-unsafe design decisions in a language whose entire selling point is memory safety, defeating the entire point of the language in an effort to reach 1.0.
these changes also generally go in the desktop client.
I don't use Android, but I think those two have been one and the same for quite a while now.
Does everyone at Mozilla get a shiny new Retina MacBook or something? Because on my machine, Firefox is definitely worse at rendering than Chrome or Opera. It's just no contest. I can't get a solid 60 fps with WebGL in Firefox, there's constant intermittent jankyness, it's not a problem on Chrome.
Maybe this a Windows vs OS X thing? I keep hearing Mozilla folks insist they're faster, and I've just never seen that actually happen.
Yes, it is. NaCl is not portable. PNaCl is tied to the nonstandard and Chrome-specific Pepper APIs, to say nothing of all of the issues of LLVM bitcode.
> Rust seems promising, but won't be seriously usable until at least Rust 1.0, which still seems a long way off. As the year progresses, I get more and more doubtful that it'll be out during 2014, like was claimed earlier this year.
As someone closely involved with Rust development, I do not share those doubts.
Last I saw, there were over 1500 issues in the project's GitHub issue tracker. Even assuming a lot of those may no longer be relevant, and assuming minimal growth, that's still not a small number of potential problems to deal with.
And we're still seeing disruptive/breaking language and library changes, like the box-related ones recently. I know, I know, I've heard the "let's break it now rather than later" argument from you guys before. But these kind of changes don't instill confidence.
2014 is nearly half over. I know that production-grade programming language implementations don't just happen over night. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of thorough testing, and many bug fixes to result in a truly stable release. All of that takes a lot of time.
While I'd like to be wrong about this by the end of 2014, the current state of affairs is not very encouraging.
A tiny fraction of which are marked blocking 1.0.
> I know, I know, I've heard the "let's break it now rather than later" argument from you guys before.
And that's invalid why, exactly?
> 2014 is nearly half over. I know that production-grade programming language implementations don't just happen over night. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of thorough testing, and many bug fixes to result in a truly stable release. All of that takes a lot of time.
Backwards incompatible language changes don't set us back in terms of the 4 years of compiler stability and bug fixes that have been going on. Believe it or not, you can change the way a keyword is spelled without affecting compiler stability.
Anyone who has used Rust for a long time knows that ICE's are far less common now than they used to be.
I wasn't a huge fan of Australis under Linux (it's okay in Windows), but Classic Theme Restorer [1] helps clean things up a bit. I'd highly recommend it.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/classicthemer...
Click the link, click install. That's about as tedious as it gets. I've actually been using fewer addons as time goes on and the Classic Theme Restorer addon has some additional UI tweaks that I find interesting.
That said, I generally use two Firefox profiles: One for general browsing, one for documentation. The former is configured to use Australis more or less as packaged while the latter is configured to appear as closely as possible to classical Firefox (minus the FF button). Although there are some things I don't especially like about Australis, it's grown on me, and I'm someone who likes his tabs below the address bar. Thus, as someone who's been using both, I can't help myself from thinking that you're either not giving the new UI a fair wrap or you're being unnecessarily harsh. Some of your earlier comments in this thread strongly point toward the latter, but I suspect I'm just reading too far into your apparent disappointment. Or your disappointment is coloring your opinion more than you might realize. The point is that there are solutions to rectify what you perceive as significant drawbacks in the direction of Firefox's development.
> or to fix up functionality that has been broken or made worse.
To be honest, the only glaring issue I've found with FF29 is the rather horrid behavior of the print dialog. I like the direction it's going, generally, but under KDE, it doesn't allow printing a selection of text unless I re-enable the menu bar and print from there (maybe this works under Windows, I haven't tried). Otherwise, I can't think of any other issues that have been "broken or made worse." Compared to Chromium with 50+ tabs open, Firefox is exceptionally light on system resources, and I've since switched my browsing habits to use FF instead. I'm glad I did. It works well for me.
> I'd be very willing to directly donate money to them, as well.
I don't believe you.
I know I'm not alone in these beliefs. Just look at how Firefox's market share has plunged, for example. Look at how Persona saw minimal adoption. Notice how Firefox OS is suffering from a very similar lack of adoption.
Mozilla has a lot of potential to do a lot of good. This was exhibited quite well during the early years of Firefox and Thunderbird. They produced useful offerings that benefited millions of people. But since then they've been acting in ways that don't help their users, and that don't help themselves. At this point, they're just going on inertia they earned years ago.
I, for one, would really like to see them return to their former glory as a true leader, rather than an imitator and a maker of bad decisions.
If it's a post about Project X, then feel free to criticize Project X, but don't derail whole threads by complaining about Projects Y, Z, A, B and C.
Hopefully they hold the ads to a very high bar, akin to what Reddit does (with manual review of every ad), instead of self-service ad networks that are of dubious quality.
Granted, one of the first things I do with a fresh Firefox install is get rid of the new tab page. Opening a new tab, typing the first two letters of the site I want, and hitting enter is faster than the new tab page, waiting for the tiles/images to load, and using a mouse to click on a top site.
but sponsored tiles is not one of them. out of all the browsers out there with silly home screen tiles firefox's are the easiest to disable or never actually hit in practice depending on your browser habits. it's not even really ads just someones homepage similar to the google sponsored home.
i feel this is not a functionality issue at all. it's a complete failure in the marketing and pr department. when people heard ad their alarm bells starting ringing(mine did too).
It almost feels like a case of Stockholm syndrome. We're stuck with ads anyway, so why don't we come up with silly reasons to like them . . .
I installed Nightly on Friend's computer yesterday, and
there were "suggested sites" on the new tab page. And you
know what? I was grateful. A few of them were frequently
visited by him, so I was able to simply pin the items
already there (which had recognizable icons instead of
thumbnails) instead of having to browse around and
manually click and drag.
I do think that ads can be useful when done right. For example, ads about tickets/cd of a band when I'm browsing Last.fm. Or ads about the stream/box of TV Series/movies when I'm browsing IMDB.
Mozilla could try to ramp up the usefulness of the ads by selecting a bunch of popular sites like Facebook, Twitter and IMDb. But since those sites are already so well known, they won't have much incentive to pay for the privilege of being on the New Tab page. Many of them can already be selected in the Search bar.
Useful ads need to be contextual, but contextual ads require tracking the user's browsing habits. As a result, it is very difficult to display useful ads while respecting the user's privacy as Mozilla wants to do.
That's because people tend to think of ads as one thing, when in reality, paid for features that enhance the browsing experience is something that people are quite happy with.
Firefox already does this with the search bar, and with default new window screen, both of which advertise for Google. It happens to also provide a service people find useful.
It sounds like Mozilla is seeing how it can apply this type of advertising to other parts of the browser.
> We're stuck with ads anyway, so why don't we come up with silly reasons to like them
HN supports ads. We just don't see it as ads because it's highly targeted and something we are interested in. Is it any less an ad because you want it?
> Excited to share the launch of @mozilla @firefox Tiles program, the first of our user-enhancing programs http://awe.sm/q55cA
https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504
More generally, https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publish... oozes with doublespeak and obfuscatory language
Open isn't always good when it comes to your PR.
This is simply for new users and new profiles, to populate the newtab page with useful links until all of those items would be sufficiently populated.
Or you could click the button in the top-right hand corner of the newtab page to turn the tiles off completely (it also seems to disable thumbnailing now, you had to turn that off manually a few versions back.)
What you've missed is the overarching issue here, though.
Mozilla will strip out useful functionality from Firefox (like the status bar, for example), and anyone desiring such functionality is told to install some extension to restore the now-missing functionality.
If such an attitude is acceptable when it comes to functionality that Firefox users find useful, then it is just as acceptable when it comes to functionality that Mozilla may find useful.
Mozilla should offer this as an optional extension. If users wish to financially support Mozilla in this way, then they are free to install it and provide such financial support. Otherwise, Firefox users aren't subjected to financing Mozilla in a way that may not be considered acceptable.
ie everything would be an extension (or in their words, addon).
That would ensure everything stays compatible and that you can make your browser look exactly the way you want (it would also shut you up! :p)
That being said having looked and sometimes contributed to the gecko source code this is not something that is easily doable.
Til then im actually quite happy with their choices. i uninstalled my status bar addon eventually. Its better without it. I even like the new FF UI. Sure theres a few things that could be better, but overral i find most of the complains to be because of the "i dont want any change, better or not" attitude (even i have a little bit of that attitude).