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Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

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641–650 of 721 posts

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#642
post #459

It's sad to see Mozilla go down this road, one time after another. I don't mind it if they need the money (they don't, look into their finances and come tell me with a straight face that this non-profit isn't making the ends meet), it's comparable to default search engine placement and search suggestions, can be turned off etc. What I have a problem with is the dark-pattern-esque language, like "relevant suggestions"…

Their finances show almost all their funding is from their biggest competitor.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#643
post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft maybe, they seem to be the tech bubble darling right now. Google is officially "The Evil(tm)" right now.

Says who? Seems like neo-EEE with their current porfolio of GitHub, Copilot, Codespaces, Sponsors, NPM, Azure, VS Code, and WSL.

I do agree and do not trust Microsoft one inch. But I've read a lot of "Windows 10 + WSL + VSCode is the ideal dev environment" sentiments on this very site. Along with "Microsoft has changed" vibes.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#644
post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 oth…

This is worded like a contradiction or a correction, but that is in fact exactly my point. On offer is the implicit suggestion that Mozilla needs half a billion a year to maintain its current position. But Mozilla's numbers are so low and Barksdale's maxim is well-founded enough that you don't have to take a huge leap in logic to see that that argument doesn't hold up. That it would be possible for a nobody to appear…

The two things are different though.

Maintaining a position is not the same as building a position. If Barksdale is right then the existing players in a market need to work to ensure that they can't lose market share from new entrants.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#645
post #2

I've been looking for an alternative recently anyways. Haven't quite found the right catch yet. Sad to surrender to Chromium after all these years, but Firefox seems to get worse and worse.

Vivaldi and Brave are the best picks, IMO. Both default to a lot of privacy-friendly settings, try not to track you, and run their own sync stack that's end to end encrypted by default.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#647
Dear Dang, Semaphor,

To label a thread with 671+ comments a dupe and kill and abandon it for one with 81 comments is dubious. It should be the reverse. Not accusing, but this almost appears protectionism against scrutiny of Mozilla. Regardless, it's odd.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect if Mozilla made opt-out a paid feature, then all that would happen is that Firefox would be forked without ads, and the general public use Chrome or Edge anyway.

Nobody asked for or wants that. Just let people donate directly to Firefox development, instead of towards a bloated foundation funding millions in exec salaries and project nobody wants.

That is the situation already.

Evidently they're not attracting enough donations to not consider advertisements.

https://donate.mozilla.org/

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#649
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave is based on Chromium, it lacks some of the privacy centric features that are found in Gecko browsers. 1st party isolation,tracker blocking, containers, anti fingerprinting measures and SNI encryption are some things I can think of right now (maybe chrome as caught up now?) Plus, Google controls Chromium and Firefox is literally the only alternative now. They push changes that are against or in in ignorance of o…

> Brave is based on Chromium, it lacks some of the privacy centric features that are found in Gecko browsers. 1st party isolation,tracker blocking, containers, anti fingerprinting measures and SNI encryption are some things I can think of right now (maybe chrome as caught up now?) What? One of the main points of the project is to build a browser with a whole bunch of tinfoil like tracker blocking and anti fingerprint…

I use both brave and firefox daily. Nothing against brave, it has privacy protections as you mentioned, but ff also has privacy centric features that are not in brave. I have not made an empirical evaluation to measure which is better. That said there is a ton I normally configure in about:config that I just can't in Chromium. I only use brave because Firefox isn't good at handling memory intensive sites.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#650
post #608

I honestly do not understand why people hate this idea. Mozilla have found perfect place to put ads, they do not cover screen space, are not annoying or always visible. Not that different from Google paid search results, honestly even better. YouTube has 1,500,000,000 monthly users and 50,000,000 YouTube Premium subscribers. 1,500,000,000 users 50,000,000 subscribers That is how much people want to pay for what they…

> YouTube has 1,500,000,000 monthly users and 50,000,000 YouTube Premium subscribers.

That is actually about 3.3% which is much higher than ad-click conversion raters (0.77% for display ads). So a premium model is a superior way to monetize long term from a standpoint of what users prefer.

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