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Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

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Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#501

Post by boomboomsubban »

toyg wrote: post #432
boomboomsubban wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? The contract is constantly renegotiated, and the only recent one that Baker was in charge for saw the same terms after the previous contract dropped over a hundred million dollars a year.

The point is that the whole system was thought out and initiated before exec salaries spiralled. There is no visible correlation between exec compensation and this type of negotiation.

The amount the execs negotiated is reflected in their salary, the last year we have the CEO salary was shortly after they negotiated a new deal with Yahoo worth over a hundred million dollars more per year seeing them get a raise. I doubt that Baker is getting anything near Beard's salary given she negotiated it right before the layoffs.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#502

Post by toastal »

jeroenhd wrote: post #447
my123 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also have Safari (and GNOME Web on Linux) using the WebKit engine, developed by Apple as an alternative... But that's not available on Android or Windows (the WebKit port exists there, but no good UI frontend as far I know)... which are the two big platforms. (because Apple doesn't care enough about those I guess?)

GNOME WebKit definitely isn't Safari. A lot of websites that work in Safari were broken in WebKit last time I tried it. It does replicate a lot of buggy behaviour in Safari so from what I can tell you can be reasonably sure that your website works in Safari if it works in WebKit, but that's the only use I've found for it so far. As for a good UI on Windows, I think you should be able to compile GNOME's WebKit browser…

Recently I've found the opposite to be true. I've on more than one occassion chased bugs that weren't reproducible on Epiphany and I don't own an Apple device to test Safari. The end up back-burnered because the testing situation is bad.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#503

Post by tomrod »

Darn. I really enjoy Firefox. I left Ubuntu over their Amazon integration.

First comes ads, then the seductive siren call of selling user data to advertising partners, then the irresistible funding for selling that user data in a more packaged format. We've seen this story play out. The only thing that keeps/kept you above the others has been your drive to be user focused, and I hate that you feel your niche can't be performant without adopting a third party advertising model.

Au revoir, Mozilla. May you find sense and abandon this model.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#504

Post by Tom4hawk »

RocketMan9999 wrote: post #293

Mozilla FYI, the people here represent only a minor portion of 6% of the whole web browser user base, just ignore them and leave some subtle ways for them to disable whatever they hate, and everything will be fine. People here aren't living in the same world where your usual users live.

And yet, they are probably responsible for 50% of users. My parents, my sister and some of my friends are using Firefox not because they did research but because I recommended/installed it and told them that if they use something else, they are on their own in case of any problems.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#505

Post by 0des »

genrilz wrote: post #462
0des wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is, you can't, unfortunately. You can have relevant ads that encroach on your privacy, or you can have possibly irrelevant ads that don't. If we are considering all possibilities, they could have precomputed some magic to do it all locally, but I have doubts about that because it seems more difficult to do that than just slap an identifier on your keystrokes and consult their ad-partner API.

Based off TFA, it looks like they don't send any sort of identifier to adMarketplace. By relevant they mean relevant to whatever you typed into the search bar this time, not relevant to your browsing history or things you previously typed into the search bar.

They should be more direct about what they mean, because to me, an engineer, that was not readily apparent without your interpretation of it.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#507

Post by protomyth »

xfitm3 wrote: post #398
jacquesm wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly that. If they got rid of their hobbies then this sort of scam wouldn't be necessary. Yes, it's a scam: bait and switch.

Remember Mozilla is ultimately a non profit and must spend a healthy percentage of their income every year. Mozilla is just representing the collective self interest of those it employs. People wanting to keep their cushy job.

Remember Mozilla is ultimately a non profit and must spend a healthy percentage of their income every year.

And Harvard has a multi-billion dollar endowment that they hoard. Mozilla is doing it wrong.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#508

Post by chatoyance »

eCa wrote: post #4

As someone who has used Firefox since v0.* I really, really, really dislike the language they have used lately. > relevant suggestions from our trusted partners The suggestions are not relevant to, and the partners not trusted by, me.

They're being bullshit artists trying to put lipstick on a pig.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#509

Post by dotancohen »

andrepd wrote: post #458
cabalamat wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not just tell it like it is. Indeed. Mozilla should be honest. That's what builds trust. We all know they need money, so if this gives them money to improve FF, fine by me. But they need to quit the marketing bullshit-speak.

They need money to improve FF so they will get it by fucking up FF? Sounds counterproductive to me.

No, they need money to pay for their CEO. She had to fire 250 engineers to pay her salary last year, she might not have another 250 left to fire this year.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#510

Post by pixelgeek »

cxr wrote: post #417
silvestrov wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

> 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).

This is true but it also has nothing to do with anything Mozilla is currently doing. It is actually a business maxim of Jim Barksdale [1] (and others probably) who used to be an executive at Netscape. Barksdale said that you could move into a market with a large concentration of users and steal a percentage of them away by just offering an alternative.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_L._Barksdale

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