lmorchard

Not to be too snarky, but we have more than a couple thousand users these days. You can round up any given thousand users and they will all give you different answers as to what "making a good browser" means.

It looks simple, but it actually does a lot of communication behind the scenes via JS with an add-on installed in the browser. Also, someday, this whole web app may end up embedded in Firefox itself.

Apropos of that, if you think hard enough in Russian at the front page, you might be able to activate our super-secret easter egg.

(oh wait, no, we had to cancel that one for licensing reasons)

Yeah, I can't speak for everyone, but I think Test Pilot is in part a reaction to the Pocket thing. Even among Mozilla employees, there were folks who thought it was a great addition and there were folks who thought it was a huge mistake.

Either way, it was a surprise, and not entirely pleasant. Test Pilot will hopefully be a way to reduce surprises of this nature.

A few reasons, among which is that the addon needs an account on the Test Pilot site to work. It's not a standalone add-on, so we didn't want to distribute it that way. And we may eventually even migrate away from using an AMO compatible add-on.

That said, we are also contemplating AMO hosting as an interim step. At the same time, we're having a conversation about how alarming those warning messages look. We were also trying this way to kind of dogfood self-hosted addons outside of AMO. So, lots of things converging on this one thing :/

I think they're anti-gravity generators.

That, or the atmosphere's just really thin up in the experimental altitudes.

Yes, all of that. Also, there are legal disclaimers and privacy notices and all kinds of thing beyond my IANAL ken that are wrapped up in agreeing to participate in Test Pilot. Nothing sneaky, just mainly we want to get lots of feedback while you're in, be totally up front about that, and clean up after ourselves when you leave.

Although, actually, the experiment installs are per-browser-profile and not necessarily sync'd if you haven't turned that on in your sync prefs. So if you wanted, you can try experiments in one release channel / profile, but not in another.

They work for now. But these and future experiments are going to start talking more to the main Test Pilot site, and will possibly break / disable themselves without that connection. Going out-of-band to install these will likely lead to sadness eventually.

Also, I think you're pointing to older demo versions of some of those add-on and not the current Test Pilot releases. We're trying to work more in the open on this stuff, so you'll likely find things like this here and there.

FWIW, we're also working to make these things remove themselves cleanly - and if you uninstall the initial Test Pilot add-on, it pulls out all the experimental add-ons along with it and disables any metrics we might have enabled along with it. Bug reports very welcome if this doesn't work as expected

That's because a) we want to make it easier for folks to try these features out without switching to another release channel, and b) we want to get feedback on how they work in the browser that folks normally use day-to-day

Yeah, we're mainly targeting release Firefox, and Dev Edition has a couple of rough edges (mostly cosmetic). But, feedback from all release channels will be useful & welcome.

Well, some of the proposals flip the relationship on ads. For example, rather than getting access to fine-grained personal data about readers, a marketer gets some coarse data like general location (eg. midwest US) and language. Using that, they propose a set of ads to the browser, and the browser decides which might be relevant based on what it knows about you. The browser keeps the personal data to itself, though. Marketers get some analytics on the response to their ads, but not full-on tracking.

I need to do more specific digging on this to have a good answer. From the bits I know, mobile browsers offer more conservative support for caching & hardware acceleration. Phones are way more sensitive to battery use & heat than a plugged-in laptop. You can't really directly compare a phone to a laptop, even if they seem to have similar hardware numbers. The form factor & use cases matter.

So I'm back to what I used to do 13 years ago - build my own little scrapers and adaptors to generate RSS feeds for myself :) WHEEEEEE!

I've seen folks give Apple a lot of credit for this, but they're not building an ad blocker.

They're offering the APIs that can be used by developers to build ad blocking extensions. Not much different than what you can do in Chrome & Firefox already. Same held-at-arms-length thing.

Thanks for all these details! My rant was largely based on guessing what's going on with all the stuff.

Inferior in what ways, and for what purposes?

For the most part, I haven't seen a technical superiority between web & native for most of what folks want to do. It seems more a practical superiority because we haven't been allowed to / found a need to crap up the native experience quite as much.

App stores & in-app purchases go a lot way toward obviating the need for so much cruft. Too much JS framework cruft is a self-inflicted injury. These are addressable issues, not inherent to the web.

Huh. Interesting that mine is so bad. The PageSpeed report is fair, though. I didn't optimize images, set expires headers, etc.

Weird that Amazon isn't serving things up gzip'd - oh, interesting, I have to gzip the stuff in my build script and deploy it compressed.

FWIW, my post is not a rant against advertising in general. It's about doing it with such a large volume of code & third parties involved, leaning on my bandwidth & CPU to cover for a lack of coordination.

Toward the end of the post I say something like "what if we actually accepted the fact that ads are a way of funding the web at large" and mention some Mozilla efforts in that direction

Yeah, I'm a lazy bastard. My blog's all static files on Amazon S3 with no server side smarts, and I wanted comments. Disqus doesn't suck completely. There's a Google Analytics tag in there, as well as some Twitter code to embed a tweet.

Actually, FWIW, I'm using pairNIC.com for DNS. I do host on Amazon S3, though.

FWIW, I work at Mozilla, but I don't work on this particular project. But, I care because I <3 the web.

What I think a lot of folks are missing here is that this is an attempt to change how ads are done. Whether you like it or not, ads are how most of the web gets funded right now.

Yes, funding Mozilla would be nice. Even better would be if ads on the web in general were less intrusive and better respected privacy.

One of the things this does not do is send your browsing history to remote servers. Instead, the remote server sends you a pile of ads roughly based on your location & language. The browser decides locally what to show. That's a big change, shifting the bulk of the sensitive stuff to your own computer instead of black boxes in the cloud.

This isn't just your usual "slap a banner on it" ad network used in all the free mobile apps. And, if the model works in the browser, it might work on the web too.

Great, here you go! https://sendto.mozilla.org

The Corporation isn't really for-profit, either, as it dumps any money it makes back into the Foundation.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. The way to reduce ads on websites is to pay for websites. But, so far, that's proven less practical and acceptable to users than just putting up with the ads. But, ads are getting annoying and intrusive. So, if we're stuck with ads because folks won't pay, maybe it makes sense to try to make that situation better?

Mozilla cares about funding itself, yes. But digital advertising is also how most of the web is funded - and Mozilla cares about that, too, because it directly impacts everything else under the Mozilla mission.

As a user, you might prefer no ads when asked - but an enormous majority of people have endorsed the ad-supported free-of-charge model on the web through their daily actions. So, practically speaking, we have to find a way to deal with it and make it better.

Unless you personally are paying for everything you're using on the web, you should care about the state of digital advertising.

I wonder what's the positive effect of sharing the same internet with you? I never visit nor do I even know you

Your browser is an "automated HATEOAS client". You can toss it any old HTML doc and it knows what to do with things described in the HTML content-type spec such as links, forms, images, scripts, etc.

Everyone writing a web page with links you can click on to navigate through a web site understands HATEOS.

It's just that, for some reason, when you shift to imagining a robot interacting with your site rather than a person, people get confused.

Though, really, I know that the reason is that they're trying to shoehorn an existing set of APIs into this cool REST thing they've heard about. In reality, you need to look at it from the other direction. Or, don't try wrestling with REST.