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In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

wired.co.uk

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Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#351

Post by fnord77 »

> The block might appeal to users, but is potentially worrying to publishers

Yes, let's have pity on these poor publishers who are relentless infiltrating and measuring our online lives so they can squeeze a few more bucks out of the data grab.

Trackers have gotten insidious. I have privacy badger and on one particular news site there were 36 distinct trackers. And somehow they're still getting around the blockers because I'm getting ads and suggestions correlating to some activity I did on a completely different device.

This business model is toxic and I really hope all the companies using it either pivot or go bankrupt.

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#352

Post by jancsika »

newscracker wrote: post #306
jancsika wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure: pay money directly to one of a thousand developers to implement missing functionality or fix pressing bugs in Firefox and make a pull request on it. For example: I see that Firefox still hasn't yet made all SVG elements attributes into presentation attributes per the SVG 2 spec. So right now in Firefox you can't do 'rect.style.width = "12px"' but in Chrome you can. Not sure you could easily get full coverage (e…

I'm sure that funding for "a tiny feature" or fixing "one tiny bug" would be beyond what most users can pay for at an individual level and still have the developer make a decent living. All the work that's desired to be done needs collective donations to be pooled and used since individual donations would be very small by nature.

I'm addressing a single HN poster who seems genuinely puzzled about how to target their support directly toward improvements to the FF codebase.

You've jumped to discussing an imagined general purpose digital payment pooling system that works at scale.

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#353

Post by johnchristopher »

Won't publishers just outright block Firefox from displaying their websites and suggests chrome or others for "enhanced and better experience" ?

Firefox has a market share small enough that publishers and the ad industry could try to just reduce ff usage with a coordinated campaign.

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#354

Post by jancsika »

bytematic wrote: post #289
jancsika wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure: pay money directly to one of a thousand developers to implement missing functionality or fix pressing bugs in Firefox and make a pull request on it. For example: I see that Firefox still hasn't yet made all SVG elements attributes into presentation attributes per the SVG 2 spec. So right now in Firefox you can't do 'rect.style.width = "12px"' but in Chrome you can. Not sure you could easily get full coverage (e…

I like the approach but I don't think I could individually fund a dev, or really do much more than buy them a few meals

Hell, just start by filtering the open bugs for stale pull requests. Find the handful that look relatively self-contained and get in touch with the dev who wrote the patch and go from there. A lot of times they just assumed nobody gave a shit and will quickly revise the patch if there was a problem with it.

Better yet-- buy a few meals for a dev to write a tool to generate this data for you.

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#355

Post by Ensorceled »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #288
Ensorceled wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thread I'm replying to has moved on to implying Mozilla is being misleading by using funding or social development.

Are you saying Mozilla does _not_ have social development projects? A specific comment on part of this thread seems to indicate it's part of their charter. (or something, not sure what to call it)

It is explicitly part of their charter, that's why claiming that they are spending donations on things like diversity is "misleading" are not correct.

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#356

Post by Spivak »

martin_a wrote: post #336
jshowa3 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem with restricted fund is that the organization is forced to put it in a place where it may not be needed and they cannot use it elsewhere, even in the case of emergency. So lets say you donated specifically for development of module X. What if a server died and it was in desperate need of repair? What if they need to hire Y person that had good talent for module X? People could construe the funding for intervi…

Those are made up reasons. If you have a solid definition of what is needed and what not, this is no problem at all.

Except for every large non-profit charity that employs entire teams to navigating restricted funds.

Not made up example: nobody wants their donation to go to marketing. It’s not very sexy. But (to a point) money spent on marketing has a non-zero return. Basically every charity pays for their marketing out of their general fund and it’s always strained because it feels like pure overhead but it actually fuels their growth.

Talk to anyone who works in development and they’ll tell you that unrestricted donations have the largest impact.

For Mozilla their diversity campaigns are the same way. They’re banking on bootstrapping a large undervalued talent pool as a long-term growth strategy and social good.

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#357

Post by Ensorceled »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #322
oarsinsync wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla explicitly states that they have social development projects. Mozilla is not misleading anyone. The commentor you're replying to explicitly posted[0] this a few comments up as well: > "The direct work of the Mozilla Foundation focuses on fueling the movement for a healthy internet. We do this by supporting a diverse group of fellows working on key internet issues, connecting open Internet leaders at events li…

Thanks, that was the comment I recalled. You seemed to imply that Mozilla was being up front about where the money was being spent. Do you have any documentation on the budget inside Mozilla? Because I think this would solve the issue of transparency for many people here. If only a tiny fraction of the money went to social programs, maybe more people wouldn't care. But if it's a significant portion, then maybe they a…

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/about/public-records/

As a foundation (charity/NFP) its records are, by law, very transparent. Any issue of transparency has been invented.

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#358

Post by SolaceQuantum »

martin_a wrote: post #300
SolaceQuantum wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want Mozilla to build a browser and a mail program. Nothing else. It's easy as that. Then buy Mozilla, the company, or buy FF/mail server devs to do it. By donating to mozilla you are actually supporting at least one effort Mozilla is participating in. If their revenue goes down after pursuing Pocket, then Mozilla will understand in general their donors don’t approve of pocket. On another coin, by not donating to…

> Then buy Mozilla, the company, or buy FF/mail server devs to do it. Stupid argumentation. If you don't like the new Apple MBP keyboards, you don't buy Apple itself, but just another notebook from another vendor. Same thing applies here, just that I don't need to "not buy" something but can just decide not to donate. > On another coin, by not donating to Mozilla one also is fine with not funding FF/Mail because mone…

"No need to make me feel guilty."

There's no guilt here. It's strictly true. Not donating to Mozilla because they might use the funds in a way the donator doesn't like is also saying the risk of the funds being used for other initiatives is not worth participating in the funding of things they do like.

Donations with conditions lessen the good that the nonprofit could do with them, because then they cannot use those funds to keep the nonprofit alive, much less use those funds to fund the things they do.

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#359

Post by gnode »

jshowa3 wrote: post #270
skocznymroczny wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there some way to ensure the donation money will actually go to Firefox and not to some sort of "diversity" campaign?

In most donations, you're donating to the product as a whole. There's no way to ever know where your money explicitly goes. At least I've never seen a charity operate that way. Even if you did donate to development, development is not averse to administration, marketing, hiring, and diversity. And developers are not spending time at Firefox getting the product in the hands of people so it can get better with feedback…

That's unfortunately often how it is, but it doesn't need to be that way. As an example, Ubuntu's donation page allows you to select how you wish your contribution to be allocated: https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop/thank-you

FOSS foundations should (and typically do) accept code contributions that aren't restricted to their leadership's agenda, so why should they not accept financial contributions beyond their agenda?

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#360

Post by llampx »

0xfffff wrote: post #100
elcomet wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can't always do this if you need to use the site for your company (like hangouts for meetings, or other services used like managing expenses).

Exactly, welcome back the good old Internet Explorer days!

Microsoft bad, Google good.
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