The original developer has a great blog, and has commented on this
He seems to only have been involved during roughly the first year of Mozilla's existence.
They've decided who their customers are, and it's not you
Since FF is free - isn't that a given?
Google was recently successfully sued for being anit-competitive by paying third parties to set Google as the default search engine.
That payoff by Google is like 90% of Mozilla's income, which is probably disappearing. So yeah, they're in full panic to fill that gap.
Literally no one but advertisers like ads. Anything that leads to more ads being shown is a negative to your community. Some might understand the need to make money, but that doesn't make anyone like ads.
Maybe if we support firefox we could reach the same amout of money than google
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.
Thank you for breathing a bit of sanity into this thread. Same here. Some commenters were like "oh there's already too many adds" and I was like wait, what? They're not adding more adds to Firefox, are they? The article doesn't suggest that.
The "Mozilla bad" crowd echo chamber has gotten completely out of control in my opinion, and it's an avalanche of low effort comments, dozens of upvotes, and it's kind of a self sustaining echo chamber that exists because it exists.
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.
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.
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.
Right, there's still a slippery slope issue here. I actually think it was a good thing that Mozilla was coming up with add-on products to create a revenue stream. I would love to, for instance, pay for a 2TB Mozilla Drive over Google Drive. I would rather do that than the ads.
I'd love a subscription-based privacy review service. Hell, combine it with a full product review where the consumers of the reviews are paying for it, rather than ad revenue, commissions from selling what they are reviewing, free products from the makers, or being outright fronts for marketers.
Like that report about all car companies selling cars that are spy machines was very good to know, as much as it sucked to see confirmation that that was indeed the case.
If there's enough easy visibility on who is doing privacy right and wrong, then there might actually be more economic incentive to make good products instead of trying to sell out their own customers to make an extra buck.
Yes, that's the same thing every time Firefox is mentioned here. It's like people here WANT to be angry.
It's like people here WANT to be angry.
Outrage addiction is absolutely, 1000% a thing.
This is just a huge fuck you to their community.
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?
Did you read the article?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What if we could have a world that wasn't powered by ads? I'd like to get past this "only one way to run the internet" train of thought.
I'm just so tired of ads, commercials and advertising in general. It's exhausting.
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.
Firefox
A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox