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Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

support.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#411
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of those five, and I'm not switching. Chromium is tainted, Brave is outright corrupt, and IceCat is seriously unpractical (they don't even build Windows binaries, because ideology beats practicality for them). Do I hate the current exec team? Fuck yes. Do I have any serious alternative? Effectively, no. Am I a hostage? Sadly, a bit. I hope people with the power to influence this state of thing will, sooner or…

> Brave is outright corrupt I am sure I will regret asking... but why do you think that?

For me at least, all the language Brave uses seems to indicate something similar to a pyramid scheme to me. I dunno, something about the whole thing sets me on edge.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#412
It says that when this is enabled, "Mozilla receives your search queries".

This is a real shame as I was hoping it would be more privacy focused. Maybe it could just download a list of advertisers locally and then locally compare the search text to the ads but instead everything typed in to the address bar will get sent to someone else's servers. I might have had it on if it was all done locally (but I guess there is too many flaws in doing it locally for Mozilla).

Still very sad they are doing this, but at least it seems an easy opt-out/not opt-in.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#413
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And eventually, Mozilla's 'telemetry' will tell them that 95% users never opt out, and that'll justify removing the opt out option entirely.

There's still a Preferences option to opt out of "Play DRM-controlled content", even though I'm sure <5% of people opt out of that. Some options stick around for the sake of principle.

It's disabled by default. Enabling DRM installs a non-free binary from Google, and the user is prompted to install it when a website attempts to play DRM media: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RELEVANT suggestions The fuck with this? How can they make _relevant_ suggestions without spying on my (s/browsing history/activity/), profiling it and phoning back to the mothership? (Edited, "browsing history" -> "activity")

> How can they make _relevant_ suggestions without spying on my browsing history, profiling it and phoning back to the mothership? If you search for "hotels", they'll show you suggestions that match "hotels". Doesn't seem that complicated to me.

But I don’t want Mozilla to know what I’m searching for?

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#416
Oh for fuck's sake.

We (users of the free web) desperately need to prevent complete takeover by Google's Chrome ecosystem. But when I see Mozilla wasting valuable resources on integrating advertising...

Mozilla, set up a 'Firefox supporters' program. I will gladly chuck you $10 a month to ensure Firefox remains viable. I'm sure I'm not alone!

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really, really, really dislike the language they have used lately. That is exactly the problem I have with it - weasel words and euphemisms; FF is scoring an own-goal here and eroding trust. Why not just tell it like it is. "We need funding and are lining up deals with third parties to display their ads/messaging in the address bar search. We vet these third parties by holding them contractually to these standard…

> Why not just tell it like it is. Because they don't want to say: "we want a lot of money to all kinds of projects irrelevant to the browser". They should focus on their core product and cut everything else away. Instead they are an organization that tries to save the whole world. It seems like they think the jobs created for themselves by "saving the world" is the core business and Firefox is just a cash-cow for th…

Damn it would be nice if this meme would die.

The first of its sins is the tacit agreement that Mozilla is doing this because, as the parent comment says, they "need funding". Mozilla needs funding now like Wikipedia needs funding: they have more of it than they've ever had, but by all appearances, you'd think they're really strapped for cash or something, because their pleas have gotten steadily more intrusive and desperate.

Second is the "focus on their core product" remark. There's so much wrong with this sentence. First, it's the tacit acceptance that Mozilla is and should be a classic Valley tech company—a bit player with a product competing in the market, rather than the way mozilla.org operated in its heyday—you know, when it was actually a force for good and were winning hearts and minds. This is another case where the trend does not support the thesis. Mozilla _has_ steadily gotten more focused on Firefox compared to its historically diverse interests (to the exclusion and chagrin of many of its volunteers and advocates), and by most measures we're worse off for this Corporation-centric mindset. At its height, Mozilla was accomplishing way more, had greater influence than it has today, and did it on a fraction of the budget. Today, Mozilla has half a billion in annual revenue but the Firefox team claims that keeping a menu item around that lets you jump to a site's RSS feed is too much of a maintenance burden.

Where do you think all the money is going? It's not Thunderbird or developer.mozilla.org that are sucking hundreds of millions away. And as bad as Mitchell's leadership has been over the last 5+ years, her new salary in the low single-digit millions has pretty much nothing to do with it. For comparison, Mozilla has something like a 50+ million dollar marketing budget. This is classic cost disease. Ten years ago, it was a common quip that Chrome's effective marketing budget (i.e. in imaginary dollars) was greater than Mozilla's entire annual revenue. Well guess where we are today? A well-funded contender in the browser wars could almost certainly appear tomorrow and grab as much market share in the next 3 to 5 year period as Firefox currently has and do it on total operating costs that measure half of Mozilla's marketing spend (in actual dollars).

So please stop doing this. Every time you feed into this meme that you heard on social media and that sounded good to you because it wrapped things up in a nice, simple narrative, at best it's going to have no effect, and at worst you encourage Mozilla to lean in and do _exactly_ the things that have led to present situation. If you want to provide encouragement, encourage Mozilla to overhaul its entire leadership, to live by the principles they purport to care about (how about starting with removing opaque clicktracking links from emails?), to put a real content blocker in the browser, to stop hawking VPN snake oil, and to open source Pocket like it was promised over 4 years ago. Demand that they make falsifiable claims that can be evaluated for success or failure on well-defined criteria. Campaign for them to either cap the marketing budget to $1 million or actually do something effective with it (like writing a check to Wikimedia and then blogging about how the reason that there are no overlays on Wikipedia this year nagging you for funding this year is because Mozilla decided to foot the bill and so you're welcome—which would be way more effective than _anything_ the marketing department has done to date).

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try just installing base Brave - "Sponsored" backgrounds (often crypto ads or credit cards!) - "Cards" with more weird Crypto ads! - Brave "news" - Brave "rewards" Yes I can turn all that of, and I have, but hard to recommend to normal users that dont spend 10min turning all the shit off. They also did some weird link shit a while back.

also while we're on the topic of dark patterns, the cards, the sponsored backgrounds and the crypto crap seem to be curiously enough the only settings that don't sync. on every machine you have to turn it all off manually again.

Not to mention they got caught rewriting your URLs to add their own affiliate codes, which is even worse than traditional tracking imo.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/privacy-browser-brave-busted-f...

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and eroding trust. This is exactly the point why I left Google Chrome back then and considered FF as a good alternative. I didn't trust Google anymore. But now I face the same problem again, because I don't want these "features and trusted partners". I also don't want to have to justify over and over again why I don't want them. I just want a well-functioning and secure browser that people can trust.

> I just want a well-functioning and secure browser that people can trust. You can't trust any of them. The real question is, who do you trust more ? Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, Brave. You can't trust any of them, but you have to pick one.

Mozilla might be the best out of this, but they're also in the weaker position. Ads, whether they respect privacy or not, give off a scummy feel to users. The clean Chrome UI, even if it tracks you in a hundred ways, "looks" more trustworthy to users than a browser riddled with ads.

It's bad enough to have to instruct people how to disable the New Tab ads, now you have to add one more step. At this point it becomes pretty awkward:

"Don't use Chrome browsers, they don't respect your privacy and are bad for the web! Use Firefox instead. Oh but wait you have to disable integrated ads first, just do this and that and this and I swear it's fine!"

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