This is just a huge fuck you to their community.
I feel like I’m reading a different article than everyone else. The comments made me think the article would be adding advertisements, but it seems to be trying to find a way forward to facilitate advertisements while maintaining privacy.
Without technical details I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. I know lemmy is largely “Mozilla bad”, but I’m just not sure the comments are in line with the proposal.
Yes, that’s the same thing every time Firefox is mentioned here. It’s like people here WANT to be angry.
I originally was one of the “FUCK FIREFOX IS FUCKED” people. However, after taking a deep breath and actually reading, yes, you are correct. There is no indication that they’re blocking adblockers or taking away firefox customization. I think they’re both looking for alternative revenue streams and trying to make the advertising business less intrusive. That being said, their communication is absolute dogshit and they deserve a lot of the shit they get. But I am not yet panicking. Firefox remains the best choice for blocking ads.
There is no indication that they’re blocking adblockers or taking away firefox customization.
Yet.
We don’t know that after they are deeper and deeper into the advertising industry, that they don’t just go ahead and do it.
Remember how Google wasn’t always evil? Money changes companies (and people). Advertising money could very well change Mozilla. Plus, remember, these statements are them telling you the public version, things that they are claiming will happen. Often times what goes on behind the scenes is very different.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be concerned by this.
The problem for me is that I’m tired of ads at all, so while I do think that having an ad system that is less abusive than the current one is a step in the right direction, I still don’t want to see any unsolicited ads and this feels like the initial steps to try to make it more palatable to eventually try to force users to accept ads back into their lives.
Yea that’s likely what it is. Hopefully I can remain in the 1% of people who go out of their way to block ads. As long as I can do that I’ll welcome the industry as a whole being more privacy friendly (if that’s even possible)
Yeah, that might be the best case scenario. Have ad blocking but add in some technical hurdles so that not enough people do it for it to be worth stamping out.
Though that makes me wonder if this will be effective at all because the technical hurdle to get Mozilla’s new ad system is only slightly less than the technical hurdle to install ublock origin. I’m guessing advertisers will either ignore it entirely and continue with what they are doing (because the data means profit for them) or maybe put some portion of their bandwidth towards it while continuing to do what they are doing with other providers.
The only ones who will embrace it are the advertisers…
You’re forgetting about the people in the office building that sit around the big table. They embrace it too.
Hard fork incoming in 3… 2… 1…
I honestly never expected the final death blow for Firefox to come from Mozilla.
Is this a response to the fact that they may not get paid for having Google as their default search engine? If so, I worry about a bunch of Linux distributions. It’s ironic that a company’s toxic virtual monopoly was paying for so much open software.
Eh, they’ve been speedrunning this for years, this is just the most efficient way to get to the end goal of complete ruin.
I have a few alternative ideas, but I honestly don’t think they’re interested in hearing them.
Maybe they’ve been infiltrated by bad actors from Google, parading around as pro-privacy frauds.
I hope so. I hope there could be a future where Mozilla is purged of these people and returned to being just a browser. Not everything has to be a “platform” with a business model for MBA’s to feast on.
Mozilla’s PPA was developed in collaboration with Facebook. While we don’t usually think of that company as advertisement centric, they are, just moreso within their own walled garden of a social network.
parading around as pro-privacy frauds.
Here’s a frighteningly accurate prediction from The Register, written back in January:
…Baker notes: “We need to be faster in prototyping, launching, learning, and iterating … This requires rich data, and so we will be moving in that direction, but in a very Mozilla way.”
Surely not slurping telemetry?
According to the report, the “Mozilla way” is all about privacy, encryption, and keeping customer data safe. Hopefully, it will also be about innovation rather than scattering AI fairy dust over its product line.
Oh you mean one of the only two reasons I use this fucking thing? Ad blocking and privacy?
You’re shitting on both. That’s like… Idk, Craftsman making tools out of plastic and removing the lifetime warranty… Wtf do I even need you for then?
Eh, I care about a third: browser engine diversity. If they drop Gecko, I’m out, there’s literally nothing left to keep me here.
Thanks but
We are targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026.
We need an alternative before that
Talk is cheap, get contributing! Donate, translate or code. That way we’ll have a proper way out of Mozilla sooner
Maybe this pushes the development a little bit. Would be a good opportunity to ask for funding and other means of help.
Because of propaganda, people find it easier to imagine the end of the world before the end of capitalism. Just the same, theres lots of commenters here that could imagine the end of the internet before they imagine the end of advertising on the internet.
And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet, and the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.
I’m afraid they aren’t wrong. The majority of people aren’t going to pay for access to random blogs etc. So we’d end up with only the big players having usable sites.
People kick off about ads but rarely suggest an alternative to funding the internet.
Back in the day ads were targeted based on the website’s target audience not the user’s personal data. It works fine but is less effective. Don’t see why they couldn’t go that way.
You posted this on Lemmy.
I don’t believe a web browser should be designed specifically for one business model, period.
There are plenty of free sites. Truly free, with no ads.
There are plenty of paid sites, supported by subscribers.
There are plenty of sites funded by educational institutions, nonprofits, or similar.
There used to be plenty of sites that were supported by non-invasive ads.
I don’t give a damn if everyone uses Facebook and Google. That doesn’t mean we need to cater to their business model at the technical level.
That doesn’t mean we need to cater to their business model at the technical level.
From what I have seen, it does… if you want to have a popular site that stays running well, and don’t charge your users for access.
That’s a problem for site operators, not for browser developers.
You might be right, but I don’t think that’s a problem they’re going to solve all on their own, meanwhile the rest of users will suffer.
It’s a problem for users.
Internet was fine in the early 2000s before the rise of social media platforms resulted in surveillance advertisement complex.
It was a different place, but worked ok.
Sounds like you’re forgetting about the dot com bubble. The internet wasn’t fine abck then because nobody really had a sustainable business model.
Surveillance advertisement was already around.
Social Media platforms simply capitalized on it.
And users sucked it up for “convenience”.
More effective is a massive understatement. Now they can precisely measure effectiveness and adjust their strategy in real time to maximize output. They have increased effective effectiveness several fold. The cat is out of the bag, even if we try to roll this back the googles of the world know the data is there and can’t not harvest it. Our best strategy has to combine regulation and monopoly busting, break these companies into smaller ones that have less power to comb through big data.
For a good read on this, check out The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuniga.
If your product doesn’t generate enough revenue to turn a profit, you don’t have a viable business
I don’t want the internet to be exclusively business
Well, Thunderbird gives me hope.
Same! Check the telemetry line in about:config that still has a value in it though (I forget what it is, just that it had one)
It is time to fork Firefox. Mozilla has bern hijacked by people who don’t care about its vision.
It’s already been done, LibreWolf is what Firefox originally set out to be.
It is only a soft fork
Sure, but as you pointed out maintaining a browser is hard. I don’t know that any genuine fork or new browser is on the horizon, and the day to day of using firefox is fine by me, so a fork that strips there nonsense might be plenty for me.
Maintaining a browser is very labor intensive
Burn the phoenix again.
Wow, utterly shocked that a company with a shit CEO that takes most of its money from Google would have these viewpoints.
I’m sure it is completely coincidental that ublock is about to die as well.
I think the bigger issue is them potentially losing their Google income.
They’ve failed to diversify their income with a bunch of failed subscription services, Google is in hot waters because of anti-competitive behaviour; they’re going to need something.
Which isn’t to say I like it. But “this is happening because they take Google money” is parroted beneath every slightly negative thing Mozilla does.
I’m sure it is completely coincidental that ublock is about to die as well.
wtf are you talking about?
Not in Firefox specifically, but many chromium based browsers are about to lose access to the original ublock. I’ve been planning on switching to Firefox when this goes through for a while now.
the original ublock.
You mean the original uBlock Origin. The original uBlock has been gone for a long time.
Sorry, you are correct - I meant uBlock Origin
rockbottom: NOBODY wants to see the ads you throw in our faces. doesnt matter that, as you claim, those ad views pay you for your content. there is no good way to make those ads palatable.
69% of the world population doesn’t use ad blockers. Google made their billions from people clicking on ads.
Not only are we technical folks (only 5% of the population not their target audience, it seems most people don’t care enough about ads to ever try to stop them… at all.
So 31% uses ad blocking.
That’s about 1/3. Pretty impressive actually.
I kept giving Mozilla the benefit of the doubt and telling myself things weren’t so bad.
I was wrong.
I’ll continue using Firefox because it’s the least bad option, but I can’t advocate for it in good faith anymore, and I don’t expect it to last long with this orientation.
So it goes.
Ok sure, what do you want them to do instead then? 80% of their income is reliant on a tech giant’s grace and is seemingly more and more likely to be cutoff soon. They need to survive somehow, and every monetised service they tried flopped thusfar.
Ideas:
- directly ask for donations, and actually use those donations to fund browser development
- build an add-on to pay sites instead of seeing ads - Mozilla could take a cut here
- push harder on existing, optional add-ons that generate revenue, like their VPN
But the article here reads like, “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas. Have ads…”
How about not have a multi-million-dollar-costing CEO? Seems a bit rich (pun intended) for a supposed non-profit org.
Yeah I’m not defending that but CEO pay only rounds to like 1% of their total expenditures. Developing a browser is expensive.
only 1%? That’s about on par with a fortune 500 company, which supposedly Mozilla is not.
What makes you think that developing a free web browser needs to grant anyone any income?
Do you think developers don’t have to eat? or pay rent? And donations alone do not cut it.
Being a developer myself (with no ads in his software), I don’t think you understand my point. The software I write in my free time does not pay my bills. That’s why I also have an actual job.
You are aware that there are full-time developers working at Mozilla, yes? Developing a browser is not a hobby-project that you can pull off with some volunteers in their free time. You need professionals that work on such a giant project with their full attention.
Developing Firefox is their job. And of course they want to get paid for that (and deserve it). Just like you get paid for your actual job.
(and deserve it)
Please enlighten me: how do they deserve to be paid for a non-profit product?
Non profit does not mean what you think it means
People who work at non-profits aren’t volunteering.
How does someone deserve to be paid for work done? Is that your question?
Is this some kind of pathetic troll attempt?
I will not reward that with further attention.
Non profit means their earnings must match their expenses or be used to actually improve the product/service, not that they earn nothing at all
Non-profit doesn’t mean that there’s no employees. They’re still organizations that have a cash flow, seek to raise funds, and employ people to serve their mission. Most non-profits have paid employees.
I could see them trying to take themselves away from Google which wouldn’t be a bad thing as that’s where most of the money comes from for them … Unless that’s changed recently…
I’m afraid it won’t last long without it. That’s the key problem.
People hate ads, as do I, but what’s the alternative?
Ideas:
- donations - these need to actually go toward Firefox development, they don’t, so I don’t donate
- paid services (e.g. their white-labeled VPN, they could also white-label Tuta or Proton services)
- and add-on that pays sites to not see ads (my preference)
- funding of privacy-oriented startups - they have something like this, so do more of it
No ads?
People need money mate. Not everyone can afford to run a website.
Pay executives less. Focus on grants and PBS-style ‘underwriting’. Subscription services like email and VPN.
Getting into advertising is just jumping into an intractable conflict of interest.
