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Is it worth supporting Firefox?

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Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#41

Post by drb91 »

scarface74 wrote: post #17
ppeetteerr wrote: post #9

Display ads are dead. They have been dying for over a decade. Video ads have picked up some slack but they too are being commoditized. These days, publishers are turning to the paygate model and commerce. Anyone who thinks that ads can pay for publishing are fooling themselves into believing they are part of the top percentile of publishers for whom this works due to sheer impression volume.

There is also the opposite end of the spectrum where advertising works - niche publications by small teams. In the Apple ecosystem there is Daring Fireball. John Gruber charges $6500 a week for one ad that appears on Monday on both the website and RSS Feed and a thank you post at the end of the week. He also charges $5500 for three ads in each podcast.

Yes, and the recommendations are semi meaningful, even. Google and Facebook have no incentive to actually show you ads for good products, just ads you are likely to click.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#42

Post by modzu »

_jal wrote: post #33
johnchristopher wrote: post #14

> I work for a major publisher. Ad-blockers are starting to hurt our revenue big time. No. What's hurting your edit:employer's revenue is years of blinking GIFs, auto-play videos and misleading links thrown between paragraphs. That's the first reason why I started using ad-blockers 15 years ago. The privacy issue is a recent thing. > We're doing a redesign now. Manager says that we should just discourage the users of…

Just a datapoint: if you "discourage" my browser, I go away and don't come back. Same with EME - I will not need your efforts in my life. I've yet to find a site so great that I'll disable security or switch browsers to use them. (Work is an exception; somehow there's always some crappy site with needy requirements. But that's my employer's browser/computer, and the sites aren't major publishers.) So I hope your mana…

and then there are those sites that force redirect you to their app or load in some artificially disabled version of itself..

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#43

Post by floatboth »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #8
sirn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comment collapsing works fine for me on Firefox 59[1] [1]: https://i.imgur.com/rCB8npT.png

You're missing the [+] next to the up down arrows, try opening it in Chrome to see..

No, in the new design, collapsing works by clicking the vertical line.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#44

Post by chrisseaton »

sevensor wrote: post #16

Firefox is a standards-conforming web browser. If some nincompoop puts a web page out there and my browser can't render it, I'm not going back. I make an exception for restaurant websites, because I want to see the menu and they all seem to have been defrauded by the same bad designer.

> Firefox is a standards-conforming web browser. If some nincompoop puts a web page out there and my browser can't render it, I'm not going back.

Well... yeah... that's the point of what they're doing.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#45

Post by teamhappy »

This is obviously pretty weird and stupid on many levels, but there is one interesting fact hidden in one of the authors responses. They ended up in this (really just incredibly stupid) situation because they use feature detection and non-standard features only available in Chrome (or WebKit maybe).

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#46

Post by mattferderer »

johnchristopher wrote: post #14

> I work for a major publisher. Ad-blockers are starting to hurt our revenue big time. No. What's hurting your edit:employer's revenue is years of blinking GIFs, auto-play videos and misleading links thrown between paragraphs. That's the first reason why I started using ad-blockers 15 years ago. The privacy issue is a recent thing. > We're doing a redesign now. Manager says that we should just discourage the users of…

Agreed. Spend big cash on your UI if you want. I visit most sites in a "Reader Mode" or using the Brave Browser.

User Experience Tip: When I go to a site to read your article, I want to read your article. Not the pop up to subscribe to your newsletter. Not the side bar of related click bait articles. Not the ads you've sprinkled in every other paragraph. If you do this, your UI is already poor & not optimized. That's why people are using other tools to fix your UI.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#47

Post by pimeys »

_jal wrote: post #33
johnchristopher wrote: post #14

> I work for a major publisher. Ad-blockers are starting to hurt our revenue big time. No. What's hurting your edit:employer's revenue is years of blinking GIFs, auto-play videos and misleading links thrown between paragraphs. That's the first reason why I started using ad-blockers 15 years ago. The privacy issue is a recent thing. > We're doing a redesign now. Manager says that we should just discourage the users of…

Just a datapoint: if you "discourage" my browser, I go away and don't come back. Same with EME - I will not need your efforts in my life. I've yet to find a site so great that I'll disable security or switch browsers to use them. (Work is an exception; somehow there's always some crappy site with needy requirements. But that's my employer's browser/computer, and the sites aren't major publishers.) So I hope your mana…

Atlassian products such as Confluence and Jira are some of those tools where I need to disable uMatrix completely to not get a crazy redirect loop when I try to login. Luckily we're leaving Atlassian quite soon, their sites have been such a pain to use for many reasons.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#48

Post by kirb »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #8
sirn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comment collapsing works fine for me on Firefox 59[1] [1]: https://i.imgur.com/rCB8npT.png

You're missing the [+] next to the up down arrows, try opening it in Chrome to see..

The new design removed them. You click the line below the vote arrows to collapse. Not exactly the most intuitive, but it’s working as intended.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#49

Post by mkirklions »

_jal wrote: post #33
johnchristopher wrote: post #14

> I work for a major publisher. Ad-blockers are starting to hurt our revenue big time. No. What's hurting your edit:employer's revenue is years of blinking GIFs, auto-play videos and misleading links thrown between paragraphs. That's the first reason why I started using ad-blockers 15 years ago. The privacy issue is a recent thing. > We're doing a redesign now. Manager says that we should just discourage the users of…

Just a datapoint: if you "discourage" my browser, I go away and don't come back. Same with EME - I will not need your efforts in my life. I've yet to find a site so great that I'll disable security or switch browsers to use them. (Work is an exception; somehow there's always some crappy site with needy requirements. But that's my employer's browser/computer, and the sites aren't major publishers.) So I hope your mana…

>if you "discourage" my browser, I go away and don't come back.

Yep, there are lots of major news websites I dont visit at all. I know they are going to have an annoying autoplay video.

I'll skip to the comment section.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#50

Post by jasonkostempski »

Firefox isn't to blame. Users that are proactive about their web browsing (hopefully a rapidly growing number) often choose Firefox because it offers the most control. These aren't the types of users that are going to switch to a different browser to render a random site, they'll just ignore the site. If that's what the manager wants, I think they're on the right path. Seems shortsighted to me, but they're still in the online publishing business, playing the same old cat-and-mouse game, trying to live off antiquated ad-tech, so I'm guessing they're not very forward-thinking.
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