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Is it worth supporting Firefox?

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Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#71

Post by lakechfoma »

Steltek wrote: post #59
lakechfoma wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

From my POV, it's a race to the bottom. One publisher offered video ads so other publishers felt pushed to do the same. There was a medium post here a few days ago about the eponymous extension "Adblock". Adblock offered advertisers a paid program ("Acceptable Ads") where their ads would be vetted and whitelisted. The blog post focused on the ethical and legal quandry of double dipping income (users and advertisers)…

I get that it's a race to the bottom, but lets redefine the bottom I guess. I'm afraid that as publishers react to the public being anti ads, we'll all forget the reasons ads became such an issue. We'll get more paywalls where self regulated respectable advertising may suffice.

Maybe that model won't work for some reason, I'd like to see some publishers talking about it though! It's either full on the google/fb tracking train or expensive monthly paywall.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#72

Post by phyzome »

> Ad reinsertion solutions exist for Chrome, but they also dont support Firefox.

"Ad reinsertion". You're trying to bypass the user's self-determination on the web. Good luck, bozo.

> They are even going to approach google and ask them to introduce new API's that allow us to determine if browser really chrome or just chromium, so that we block chromium.

And now we see the real question: "Is there some way to lock our users into browsers that give more control to us than the users?"

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#73

Post by some_account »

Computer savvy users are never going to accept the web flashing, blinking, popping, interrupting, lagging.... And there will only be more of us in the future when the new generation grows up.

Your revenue model is dying and you are trying to save it by making the web even worse. Its a race to the bottom.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#74

Post by syntheticnature »

mcherm wrote: post #66
_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…

> 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?

Depends on whether you share the links to others who run without ad blocking in place.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#75

Post by devit »

This is one of the problems with making decisions based on "data".

Obviously, the benefit of having users is not only in the profit from ads, but rather from having your site be popular, recommended to friends, posted in links in discussions, training Google's algorithms by people clicking on their search results, having people willing to subscribe to future paid services or buy future products, etc.

But since those things aren't measurable in the short term, they get completely discounted by naive businesspeople, with bad results like this.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#76

Post by squarefoot »

wheaties wrote: post #27

Yes, it's worth "supporting" Firefox. Just like it's worth it to "support" a standards compatible web browser. I swear we're going backwards in time to IE6 days when everyone built for just one browser and forgot that others existed. Do you really want Google to dictate how the web works? I don't. When Microsoft did this we lost _years_ of meaningful improvements and just recently got the ability to vertically center…

"I swear we're going backwards in time to IE6 days when everyone built for just one browser and forgot that others existed."

It's even worse than that. The Internet grew in the hands of engineers who cared about functionality and compatibility first, then about profitability. About two decades ago the industry started turning tables (and later the smartphone boom helped to achieve that goal even more). Now every big player is looking to build its own proprietary environment to get the most users on so that they're forced to use that player resources; this is precisely the mindset the world wide web openness fought against. Sadly they're now fighting back: if yesterday a browser could help to surf 10 sites, today you need 10 apps, each one closed source and doing who knows what under the hood. And this monstrosity is slowly sneaking into the non mobile world hidden behind catchy buzzwords and fancy graphics. Using "the cloud" to store documents and important data seems so cool, but is not that different from going back to the 60s world of dumb terminals and big mainframes where the mainframe owner decided if, how and when the user could access to his/her own data. Both engineers and users are losing control and quite frankly I have no idea of what to do.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#77

Post by computerfriend »

foobarchu wrote: post #53
taneq wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could this finally be the end of every user-agent string starting with Mozilla/?

No, because the parent comment here is incorrect. They stated that they are using feature detection, and specifically mention user-agent as something they don't use.

The above comment was a joke about user agent strings.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#78

Post by ppeetteerr »

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.

It works for some, there is no doubt. I would believe that industry publications (transportation, forestry, etc.), and popular blogs, still make decent coin on selling print ads or sponsorships on the web.

It's different to the original post's comments. They are looking at a public audience with ad blockers.

Podcasts are a different affair altogether. I would love to see the numbers for those as I'm never in front of my computer when I listen to a podcast and I don't remember the ads long enough to followup even when I'm interested in the product.

Also, thanks for sharing that Gruber has a podcast!

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#79

Post by the_af »

slezyr wrote: post #31
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…

> But that'd just bring chrome users who use ad-block. There is no ad-block on _mobile_ chrome. Maybe they talk about mobile clients here?

Every time I read something on Chrome for Android I cringe. The web on my laptop and the web on my cellphone are completely different universes. One is enjoyable and usable. The other is a nightmare of blinking GIFs and misleading layout-breaking ads. I'm reminded of this fact every time I try to read something while commuting to/from work. If I ever felt any guilt about using ad blockers (hint: I don't), this would help erase it forever.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#80

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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