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.
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.
Hard fork incoming in 3… 2… 1…
This feels like the turning point for Firefox that we all feared would come. They’ve now switched to outright gas lighting their users. They’re trying to convince us that if they take a stab at doing ads the right way, that we can have a web filled with tolerable ads that work for both the user and the business.
Ads and user data collection are the worst part of the internet. Nothing has ever gotten better because of them. And there’s already far too much focus in this area. Mozilla just wants to be another exploiter so that they can have a piece of the stolen value pie.
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.
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
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.
It’s a problem for users.
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.
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.
Surveillance advertisement was already around.
Social Media platforms simply capitalized on it.
And users sucked it up for “convenience”.
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.
The dot com bubble made the Internet explode, sure, but corporate sites weren’t the entire internet back then. There were far more niche sites, web rings, forums, etc…
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.
Burn the phoenix again.
Can one thing please not be full of adverts :( I’ll pay for the browser, I just want marketers to fuck off for a while lol
Did I miss something? I don’t think the browser is going to be full of ads?
Mozilla actually has (had?) ads in Firefox, right on its default start page.
Right and that has existed long before today. And I can’t find anything in this article suggesting that the start page, or anywhere else, is going to be reallocated towards new ads which is what it sounds like the commenter above me was suggesting.
You can easily turn them off in settings
Opt-out can never be the right answer.
Would you prefer Mozilla to not exist? They’re trying to find revenue streams other than the money they get from Google.
The current incarnation of Mozilla would not be any meaningful loss to me.
Well it would to everyone who relies on Mozilla for making the only current alternative engine to chromium. Mozilla dying would harm its forks, too, and finally give chromium a total monopoly
I would prefer Mozilla to ask. Some options:
- on first install, pick your poison - donate, accept ads, or accept negative karma
- pay to remove ads on a page - you’d pay into a bucket, and payments to remove ads would subtract from that
- more optional, revenue-generating services (e.g. push their VPN harder)
Realistically, I don’t think so either. Pessimistically, I give it until Jan 1st, 2030.
Your pessimism is more optimistic than my optimism
Not that they’ve announced yet, I just meant more broadly I am very sick of advertising and adverts
I don’t see how they think it’s a good move. I’m not speaking about people being upset. Most of the Firefox users are either people having at least some tech knowledge or people which use it because of a person with some tech knowledge.
And most of these people use an ad-blocker, know how to install a fork and so on. So, from the beginning, I don’t know who think it’s a good idea other than to kill Firefox.
Mozilla’s non-profit status needs to be revoked.
I think at this point they have a nonprofit and a company, the later being used for all their taxable income.
I know; they should not be allowed to do that.
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.
It’s either that, a subscription model of some sort, going to pay to install models, or something else to fund themselves. I’d suggest going to a donation based model, but I doubt there’s enough Firefox users willing to pay to even be able to keep it alive more than a year or two tops.
Says who?
Plenty of sites out there just run by people who want to run them, no fee, no ads.
It’s people who want to capitalize on having a website that have this problem.
And let’s be clear, it’s their problem. Not mine. If they can’t turn a profit with/without ads, that’s not my concern, that’s theirs. But they setup these web sites/services with the intention of making money through ads and surveillance, so let’s not go around acting like these orgs just won’t make it without us (there are exceptions, say archive.org, and guess what, people donate to them because they believe in the cause).
The problem is a bunch of people figured out the web was a brilliant way to data mine for profit. I actually had this discussion with a friend circa 1993. If we could see it then, imagine how many other people already had plans.
I would happily pay to download Firefox if they removed telemetry, ads, analytics. Security updates could be free, feature updates could have a small fee. Something similar.
There is a way to fund Firefox without user data and ads. Will it be as profitable, who knows, because quite simply, the vast majority do not want to make it a reality and loose what profit, control, or power they currently hold onto.
I’ve always said this about software. Let me license a specific version, with free minor updates until the next major release.
If the new version has something I need/want, I may be willing to buy it again.
I use lots of old software, on my PC and my phone. It works, why do I need the new version? And some, the new version sucks so bad I refuse to upgrade (FolderSync on Android, for example).
Universal Basic Income, ala star trek, is an option, then just let everybody make cool shit.
Hahahaha, you’re funny.
Because people suddenly become altruistic, and won’t try to fuck over the next person?
UBI won’t fix human nature.
oh no the human nature argument
Star Trek has no Universal Basic Income. It has replicators for all your basic needs.
Replicators, which are universal and basic.
But is not income
It, uh…makes…food…uh…come in…?
I think the ad model is fine as long as adblockers work. Only a small percent uses them and the normies without can watch the ads so the service stays free. Perhaps a bit egoistical but works for me! 😅
Well, do you subscribe to news sites, YouTube Premium, Kagi? The world you dream of is available to you today
I subscribe to Nebula because f*ck Google, and I’d pay for Kagi if I could just simply pay $X for Y searches with no subscription BS.
Actually, I do. I have a YouTube Premium subscription and subscriptions for two news sites. And on top of that a ton of Patreon subscriptions and offline memberships. I am the one who
knockspays.Even of they reduced everything down to just Firefox, Thunderbird, and all in infra to run those products (Mozilla accounts, addons stores, hosting, dev/build services…), as well as continuing to pay for dev time on open source they use/contribute to, and the time their employees put into w3c and other foundation/standards/steering initiatives, I don’t think you’d want to see the cost of a monthly subscription.
This stuff costs way more than people think it does, and behind the scenes Mozilla does a lot of work (with google, Microsoft, apple) on web standards, and trust me, you want them still involved seeing as each other browser group involved is well… You know… Much worse for privacy generally.
YouTube premium and kagi aren’t even remotely in the same league for comparison when it comes to the cost and value a “Firefox” or “Mozilla” subscription would be.
Right, I think people forget that Opera used to be funded by a subscription. But they had to move away from it because it just didn’t work. I think the golden age of Opera was shortly after they dropped that. And I dearly miss Opera as they were before they switched over to Chromium.
I think the history of early to mid Opera is the perfect example of actually wise and interesting and innovative software choices. They were in very early on things like browser extensions, and they had incredible innovations like Opera Unite, Opera Turbo, and all kinds of incredible customization. But I suppose in some ways they’re also a chilling tale of what could happen, because I’m pretty sure they sold to a Chinese company, switched to developing on Chromium, and seem to have abandoned the ethos of innovating. I know that some of the original developers from Opera went on to create Vivaldi but that too is based on Chromium.
Was never much of an opera user, but I have enjoyed vivaldi quite a bit. I don’t see myself using vivaldi due to the chromium aspect. I used to keep it around for the random chrome-only sites but that’s way too uncommom nowadays.
Lately safari/gnome web (i.e. WebKit engine) have gotten good enough to be my pwa installer browser depending on my OS, though i really hope firefox re-implements PWA support sooner than later.
This breaks my heart.
Frankly, I’m surprised it took them so long to say this publicly. For over a year, Mozilla has had a de facto conflict of interest when it came to their stance on advertisements, so take anything they say about their necessity with a huge grain of salt…
May 2023: Mozilla purchases FakeSpot, a company that sells private data to advertisers. Mozilla keeps selling private data to advertisers to this day.
June 2024: Mozilla purchases Anonym, an AdTech company.
In parallel to our existing consumer products, we have the opportunity to build a better infrastructure for the online advertising industry as a whole. Advertising at large cannot be improved unless the tech it’s built upon prioritizes securing user data. This is precisely why we acquired Anonym.
Catering to the ad industry is backwards thinking, imo. Securing user data is easy enough if you do not collect it to begin with.
Imo, the fact companies have changed the narrative in favor of advertisers and data collection, proves only profit matters, not the people.
Securing user data is easy enough if you do not collect it to begin with.
Bingo.
As if de-anonymizing hasn’t been demonstrated, repeatedly.
No one starts a company because they care about people
We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market. But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozilla’s history. And that willingness to take on the hard things, even when not universally accepted, is exactly what the internet needs today.
But you’re not doing the hard things. You’re doing the easy thing. Capitulation to surveillance capitalism is the easy thing.
And that willingness to take on the hard things, even when not universally accepted, is exactly what the internet needs today.
Every fucking tech corporation ever has said this.
I write this at least once a day - I fucking hate business people / CEOs
She went on to work at eBay for 13 years, followed by PayPal, Skype, and Airbnb. source
why would Mozilla choose to be directed by an ebay+paypal+airbnb experience and can somebody with that background not think like this ☞
“Because Mozilla’s mission is to build a better 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.”
Advertising will not improve unless we address the underlying data sharing issues, and solve for the economic incentives that rely on that data.
thanks to Mozilla for assuming the responsibility of improving advertising
We can’t just ignore online advertising — it’s a major driver of how the internet works and is funded. We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it. For those reasons, Mozilla has become more active in online advertising over the past few years. - MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA source
if we stay with that metaphor of “We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it”, it’s not difficult to imagine Mark and Mozilla being swallowed by the monster he’s “staring straight in the eyes” :/
i hope they can filter the shit Mozilla will include in Firefox from mull and mullvad
She’s not particularly wrong, but this highlights the problem for me.
Why does the corporate arm behind one of the last “free” browsers out there need to become involved in this clear conflict of interest?
Why does this need to be developed as core functionality in the browser codebase instead of as an addon like most of the previous experiments?
There is repeated insistence that this is key to the future of the web. I don’t neccessarily disagree. I disagree entirely that this should have any direct contact with the Firefox project. Create a separate subsidiary within Mozilla for this shit. Anything to maintain a wall between the clearly conflicting goals.
This all reads like a new CEO coming in hungry to make a mark rather than actually just be a steward to keeping business as usual going.
She’s not particularly wrong,
yes, and that’s the saddest part
