Help Test Changes to New Tab in Firefox Beta
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
we started working to improve digital advertising experiences for the Web.
"we started working to turn Firefox into adware"
to show it is possible to deliver personalization
"to show it is possible to deliver advertisements"
However, it’s important to understand that no tracking is involved in delivering Tiles.
So all the content was downloaded at the same time as Firefox itself, and showing them doesn't make any requests to external servers...?
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publish...
(The first comment there sums up my thoughts exactly. If I open a text editor, word processor, image editor, or other application I expect to see a blank slate, not ads.)
Not necessarily at the same time as the download of the browser, but yes, the tile matching is done on the client side so the history doesn't leak out.
Imagine that Adsense worked this way: instead of tracking you through cookies everywhere, each site sends a list of advertisers. The browser then inspects that lists, matches locally against your history, and picks an ad to show.
This gives advertisers targeting without invading user privacy. I think that's Mozilla's goal here.
Deleted comment
That is not exactly true. We do not obtain the list if top sites.
What we receive is the list of non-history tiles that has been shown to the user. i.e. if the Tile is a "known" tile, we'll capture the impression, or click. If it's not, we will receive an almost empty placeholder for that site, barring for the frecency score.
This is along our philosophy of least amount of actionable data collected.
For instance, if a user had one Tile we know about at the 5th position, we'd get something like:
{"tiles":[{"score":42},{"score":32},{"score":22},{"score":8},{"score":3},{"id": 500, "score":2},{}],"locale":"ja","view":6}
The id allows us to count impressions, clicks and whatnot for that Tile, the "score" allows us to gauge frecency, i.e. how important is the tile for the user, together with the position in the array.
It's not nothing, but it's not your top sites.
Edit: formatting
Source code available at:
https://github.com/mozilla/onyx
Directory Tiles are a static list periodically downloaded by Firefox from Mozilla and everyone gets the same list. The other tile types are fetched via cookieless HTTPS requests to Mozilla.
One of our core tenets is "user agency", or putting the user in control. The user should always have the choice. That option will not go away.
Revenue is not our primary objective. We really want to change how the industry works. At the moment, revenue is our way to say that we can make something that is viable and will work for everyone else.
It is something that is hard to condense into blog posts, because the topic is so touchy. That said, our primary goal is really to make a big change and to prove that it can be viable for others.
We're rethinking how digital advertising works. It is what makes the internet free for everyone. We're hoping to make a system that is effective, yet less annoying for users, and does not violate their right to privacy.
More on my reply on another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9588451
This still creates an incentive to meet the needs of the advertisers (instead of the users) or you risk losing your new source of revenue. This conflict of interest in not theoretical - titling a blog post[1] "Providing a Valuable Platform for Advertisers, Content Publishers, and Users" already suggests where your priorities are. There is no middle ground here - users and advertisers have conflicting requirements.
> We really want to change how the industry works.
You are doing no such thing, and you (Mozilla/Firefox) don't have anywhere near the influence you would need to accomplish such a thing. Giving the ad industry a new place to put ads is not going to get them to stop (or even slow down) their current methods; you're just expanding the surface area they can utilize.
At best, the strategy at Mozilla appear to be appeasement, Neville Chamberlain style. Assuring us th "it is privacy for our time" further demonstrates who you really work for.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2015/05/21/providi...
[2] and DRM
Users hate ads. An increasing amount of more technical-savvy users are learning how to remove ads from their internet experience. The more intrusive and prevalent you try to make ads - the harder we'll try to get rid of them.
I consider ads on my new tab page to be intrusive. Luckily I created my own new tab page so this won't be an issue for me.
I do not want my browser to support the ad industry at all.
"The internet" isn't free for everyone, so saying that advertising is what makes it that way is quite mistaken.
Once you've paid to get on the internet, some of the content is free-of-(additional)-charge, and some of that free-of-(additional)-charge content is subsidized by advertising.
It’s been 18 months since we started working to improve digital
advertising experiences for the Web.