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Firefox Suggest (address bar based ads, currently limited to US)

support.mozilla.org

61–70 of 115 posts

Re: Firefox Suggest (address bar based ads, currently limited to US)

#61
> Mozilla is a global non-profit dedicated to putting you in control of your online experience

Well, I think this is a huge misstep if that’s really your mission statement, Mozilla. Selling “my” eyeballs to ad vendors is not giving me control of my online experience.

It’s, frankly, behavior we expect from Google. From Apple. Facebook. Is this the company you wish to keep?

Re: Firefox Suggest (address bar based ads, currently limited to US)

#62
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is malicious about this? The advertisers have no access to personal information.

Advertising is malicious.

No it's not. Advertising is natural, from pretty flowers, to peacock and spider dances, to animals marking territory and making whatever mating noises they care to.

The advertising industry, which generally means the corporate owned, mass surveillance apparatus that is every authoritarians wet dream is malicious.

Re: Firefox Suggest (address bar based ads, currently limited to US)

#63
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

Fast, small footprint, highly battery life friendly. Bunch of extensions. Extensions support on desktop and mobile. Trustworthy repository of extensions. Special ad-blocking extensions API that delivers high performance and does not require extensions access to content of the page. Tab-groups out-of-the-box. Read later feature that is synchronised across devices out of the box, no third party service required. Bunch…

That sounds excellent, actually. What's the apple hide my email thing though?

Re: Firefox Suggest (address bar based ads, currently limited to US)

#64

Safari is nowadays getting ~$15,000,000,000 per year with a Google search deal. Meanwhile Mozilla has been ignoring their core user base going as far as laying off development teams working on Firefox components in the name of cost saving while they try to diversify income to support the rest of Mozilla (which makes basically nothing) yet they've retain their own Google search deal with lower user share for At this p…

I was amazed/saddened that they laid off the Servo team. That seemed like the one really worthwhile improvement Mozilla had bet on in a decade. I use and appreciate Firefox, maybe it's partly nostalgia for when FF pushed the web experience forward.

Re: Firefox Suggest (address bar based ads, currently limited to US)

#65
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fast, small footprint, highly battery life friendly. Bunch of extensions. Extensions support on desktop and mobile. Trustworthy repository of extensions. Special ad-blocking extensions API that delivers high performance and does not require extensions access to content of the page. Tab-groups out-of-the-box. Read later feature that is synchronised across devices out of the box, no third party service required. Bunch…

That sounds excellent, actually. What's the apple hide my email thing though?

When you need to register on a website, you can opt-in into a random email that is generated by Apple. Something like cooker-huskies0u@icloud.com. They then setup a relay that sends everything it receives to your email that is registered with your Apple Id. You can cancel any of those emails whenever and never hear from that website again. There's a similar offering from joint venture of Fastmail and 1Pawword if you're not into Apple.

Re: Firefox Suggest (address bar based ads, currently limited to US)

#67
post #12
post #2

I know this has been posted before, but it seems to be getting some traction and outrage on twitter and other social media today. Props to Mozilla for finding revenue diversification opportunities, but this still doesn't feel quite right since it's enabled by default.

Who would deliberately enable this, given that the Mozilla user base is the kind that would have adblocker extensions?

Running both uMatrix, uBlock and quite a few other addons isolating things further, I have enabled ads on DuckDuckGo and have allowed plausible analytics explicitly for all sites. For a browser, the right thing is still very clear: not this.

Re: Firefox Suggest (address bar based ads, currently limited to US)

#68
I am fine with this, but maybe Firefox should try something better, like at startup offer checkmarks for ways to help fund Firefox sorta like how NPR does, but way less annoying. Allow a user to select ways ads are offered to help Firefox, but have them all unchecked by default.
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