Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is it worth supporting Firefox?

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 224 posts

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#61

Post by DanBC »

There's a bunch fo websites (Atlantic being notable) that tell me I'm using an ad-blocker and ask me to turn it off. I'm not. I'm using stock Firefox.

So, I guess their conversation goes:

> We block Firefox (but don't know that we do so)

> We don't see many Firefox users

> Why do we optimise for Firefox?

It's mildly frustrating that they block users for dumb reasons. (Again, I'm not blocking ads). But it's only a mild frustration - there are a gajillion places to get news that are better than Atlantic.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#62

Post by rosege »

pimeys wrote: post #47
_jal wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

what will you replace Confluence with?

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#63

Post by H1Supreme »

mattferderer wrote: post #46
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…

> Not the pop up to subscribe to your newsletter.

This is so annoying. Especially on sites where I already subscribe.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#64

Post by dhimes »

lakechfoma wrote: post #29
Steltek wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if this publisher never did that? Ad blockers are taking off because of Internet-wide abuses (malware, privacy, gross obnoxiousness). It's a tragedy of the commons. Publishers never got together to regulate themselves so users are now doing it for them.

Why can't we have content based ads that are non-intrusive like television and old print media? Yeah they still interject in the middle of content, but not with the same level of deceit as what some ads and sponsored links do on web media. I would disable my adblocker for sites that have ad campaigns not based on "gross obnoxiousness", privacy intrusions, and disregard for if an advertising party is serving up malwar…

Exactly. In the old days of the web, the ads were banners on sites that had related content. Just like newspapers. Clickable is actually good.

Google had the idea to monetize search based on the hypothesis that if people are searching then they're looking to buy something. That didn't really work out: conversion rates are super low, even for free stuff- apparently less than direct mail. So things got more and more intrusive. And spammy. It's time to stop. It's really really time to stop.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#65

Post by pimeys »

anc84 wrote: post #56
pimeys wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are the bug reports on uMatrix for this?

Don't really know what's going on with this. Now when I just disable uMatrix and ublock origin, I still get that redirect loop and I'm just not able to use Jira/Confluence. Luckily I don't need to use these products that often, so when I read something I just use our Slack bot to see the ticket.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#66

Post by mcherm »

_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.

If the site is supported by ad revenue and you actively refuse to permitany ad revenue is it really a loss to the publisher if you leave?

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#67

Post by pimeys »

rosege wrote: post #62
pimeys wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

what will you replace Confluence with?

We'll change our whole business model and do 100% open source, so I guess it'll be Github.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#68

Post by pjmlp »

lakechfoma wrote: post #29
Steltek wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if this publisher never did that? Ad blockers are taking off because of Internet-wide abuses (malware, privacy, gross obnoxiousness). It's a tragedy of the commons. Publishers never got together to regulate themselves so users are now doing it for them.

Why can't we have content based ads that are non-intrusive like television and old print media? Yeah they still interject in the middle of content, but not with the same level of deceit as what some ads and sponsored links do on web media. I would disable my adblocker for sites that have ad campaigns not based on "gross obnoxiousness", privacy intrusions, and disregard for if an advertising party is serving up malwar…

> non-intrusive like television

In which country?!?

I hardly see any regular TV because in 30m show, 20m are advertisements, and the remaining 10m have lots of product placements.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#69

Post by josteink »

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…

> And a DRM for website instead of only video DRM that exists, so that user cannot view source code, and no extension can block the ads. Other publishers are doing the same thing. Expect new DRM for HTML5 too.

I mean noone, absolutely -noone-, foresaw this coming nor warned about the slippery slopes of letting stuff like this into the standard in the first place.

Nope. Absolutely noone. This was a genuine surprise to all of us.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#70

Post by icebraining »

option_greek wrote: post #52
bansheehash wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're on Android, try a firewall-based system-wide adblocker like Blokada ( https://blokada.org/index.html ). It's very effective at blocking ads, including on mobile Chrome, and it's grandma-friendly (doesn't need root, nothing to maintain)

Is it really true that they are not allowed on play store because it interferes with googles business model ?

Google does ban apps that block ads in other apps: https://www.androidpolice.com/2016/03/01/google-explicitly-b...
Post reply on HN