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Is it worth supporting Firefox?

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Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#101

Post by sveme »

627467 wrote: post #60

How hard is it to sell a fixed tag or any block of text within an article? Sell it as "this content will stay there for as long as the page is published". The problem is that every major publisher has bought into centralized ad brokers. Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content b…

Natural Language Processing could definitely allow for some context-dependent ads within an article. When reading something on the new C# 7, I'm most likely not interested in some tupperware I decided not to buy on Amazon a couple of weeks ago, but I might be interested in a couple of books on C# and might find these ads acceptable. Don't track me, track and machine learn content people consume.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#102

Post by 627467 »

juliangoldsmith wrote: post #86
627467 wrote: post #60

How hard is it to sell a fixed tag or any block of text within an article? Sell it as "this content will stay there for as long as the page is published". The problem is that every major publisher has bought into centralized ad brokers. Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content b…

>Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content business online. Publishers should know their audience better than ad servers. Part of the problem is that Google and Facebook actually can know the audience better than the content creator. A content creator only knows that the reader i…

I'd like to push back on "Google and Facebook actually can know the audience better than the content creator".

This is the idea that has powered online businesses in the last 10 years, but I'd argue that just because conceptually Google can know me better than NYTimes the raise in ad blockers has shown that the ad distribution ecosystem doesn't really know their users that well.

I must be living in a very different world from the one where "Google and Facebook ads are so effective" that no other strategy is possible.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#103

Post by sevensor »

chrisseaton wrote: post #44
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.

I don't think it is. I don't use ad blockers, but I also don't come back to websites where I've had a bad experience. If you do something hostile, like auto-play video, I'm gone and I'm not coming back. It makes for a fairly serene web browsing experience.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#104

Post by annabellish »

the_af wrote: post #79
slezyr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It is absolutely worth using a different browser on mobile.

Firefox Focus makes a great "default browser" for opening random links from apps, as it's always in incognito mode, very lightweight, and supports content blocking. Only real downside for me is that you are still contributing to webkit dominance, as it's chromium-based. Full fat Firefox on android is great too, though.

As a fully featured browser which supports extensions and has a good UI, Samsung's browser is astonishingly good and I believe open for anyone to use now, though again chromium-derived. I fear at this point the battle may be lost for alternate rendering engines on mobile, though.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#105

Post by amluto »

juliangoldsmith wrote: post #86
627467 wrote: post #60

How hard is it to sell a fixed tag or any block of text within an article? Sell it as "this content will stay there for as long as the page is published". The problem is that every major publisher has bought into centralized ad brokers. Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content b…

>Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content business online. Publishers should know their audience better than ad servers. Part of the problem is that Google and Facebook actually can know the audience better than the content creator. A content creator only knows that the reader i…

Why do you think this increases as value? Back before targeted advertising, if I saw an ad for a kitchen gizmo on a reputable publication, I would know that the maker of the gizmo was serious and cared about the publication. Now the the ads are targeted, all I know is that the maker paid a shady ad network a couple bucks and I got caught up in their profile.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#106

Post by ethagnawl »

the_af wrote: post #79
slezyr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Firefox for Android, paired with uBlock and PiHole/DNS66 makes for a great mobile web experience.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#107

Post by pritambaral »

yosito wrote: post #83

This discussion makes me wonder why I haven't seen more server side ad solutions that render ads into a page in a way that's harder to detect or block. Of course, advertisers could find ways to abuse that too and then adblockers would have to up their game. I think the best strategy is to render a fallback into your page that looks like an image related to your content and then replace that image on they fly with uno…

There have been attempts to render ads with the page. For example, Facebook and some news sites do it. It's just that it is bad UX to not clearly mark ads as ads. When Facebook launched sponsored ads and posts embedded in its feed, it was only a short while before DOM-manipulating ad blockers could block it because Facebook had to mark those "posts" as "sponsored".

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#108

Post by cesarb »

floatboth wrote: post #98

> 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 Good luck with that. You could render an article into a DRM'd video, and utterly destroy SEO, accessibility, readability, and the website's whole reputation. "DRM for news articles" makes zero sense. Movie DRM works because HDCP decrypts the video on the display . ("works" - pirates…

> Movie DRM works because HDCP decrypts the video on the display.

No, it doesn't. The movie is decrypted on the player, uncompressed, and encrypted again with HDCP for the display.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#109

Post by annabellish »

juliangoldsmith wrote: post #86
627467 wrote: post #60

How hard is it to sell a fixed tag or any block of text within an article? Sell it as "this content will stay there for as long as the page is published". The problem is that every major publisher has bought into centralized ad brokers. Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content b…

>Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content business online. Publishers should know their audience better than ad servers. Part of the problem is that Google and Facebook actually can know the audience better than the content creator. A content creator only knows that the reader i…

I'm honestly not sure how true this really is. I don't do anything intentionally to screw with advertisers, aside from standard ad blockers, and the targeted ads I get from things which aren't ad blocked are just... eh?

I give Google a tonne of data, they know everything I search for, they know where I live and where I shop, they know how long I spend in a shop before buying something through android pay, et cetera. My targeted ads are still just junk.

Ads for websites I've visited because I've done work for them, products I've already bought, and stuff that seems completely unrelated seems to make up 99% of it. I guess the first category works as a "let's remind people the things they've used exist" in a coke kind of way, but why have Google been able to trick people into believing that this is 'effective targeted advertising'?

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#110

Post by majewsky »

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…

> 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.

Anyone told them yet that Chromium is open-source, so distributions can just flip that bit in the code?

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