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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

#671

Post by Jenk »

MonkeyClub wrote: post #213
Jenk wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people would pay for firefox. I don't know if it's enough people to offset what advertisers are willing to pay, nor if adding that would dissuade too many users but it'd be nice to have the option to pay so we can support the development of the browser directly, and avoid adverts. Donating to the foundation feels a bit like donating to the WWF because I want to help a specific Panda I met at the zoo.

I would rather donate to avoid having random pandas appear at my window and wave manically. But I would much rather not be forced to donate by such unsolicited panda attacks. It seems it's time to find a Firefox alternative now, privacy-minded and ad-free. Pity the web is mostly unusable with w3m. Would any HNers recommend DDG's browser as a viable alternative?

You might like qutebrowser. It's GUI but with keyboard navigation its primary driver.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#672

Post by rglullis »

toyg wrote: post #653
rglullis wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know about you, but I find that abhorrent from the perspective of site owners. No, I find it amazing and I can probably write an essay about it. The "ad-supported" economy is directly responsible for a lot of content, but the majority of it is not just bad, it is also actually damaging to society. Think of all the sites that "make a living" on clickbait, content farming, fake news, SEO manipulation and outr…

> Content creators still have a way to make money from their work, but it is not just enough to plaster ads on our faces and collect a check from Google. They will have to compete for quality. That's a huge jump. Incentives are basically the same, at worst the same as subscription-supported services that are slowly becoming the standard for news websites that still care about their reputation. The Brave system simply…

> news websites that still care about their reputation.

Those with brand recognition and that can charge subscriptions are not the ones in the long tail. The rewards system is supposed to be a way to help those that are in the long tail: Youtubers with a small but engaged community, Open Source software developers that want to work on their own project, kids making Fortnite skins, investigative reporters that want to cover stories that are not getting picked by mainstream media.

- "Well, these people could use Patreon", you can respond.

Yes, some of them could. But Patreon requires people to contribute their own direct money and requires that people to have access to the global financial system. While with Brave anyone, in any corner of the world, can take whatever little amount of money they want and send as a tip.

> this is not the open web.

Do you use an ad-blocker of any kind? Over 40% of internet users do. Do you think they are "against the open web" and "abhorrent"?

Are you against ad-blockers? Are you okay with Google's push to make it difficult to run ad-blockers on Chrome? To me working actively against the interests of the users is the abhorrent thing.

> you are still creating a massive bottleneck that can potentially determine the fate of any site.

HOW??? To a site that is dependent on ads, I'm still failing to see what the brave rewards program does that is different from any other ad-blocker. That revenue opportunity is already sunk, Brave has no fault here.

> I'd rather have a browser be a browser, without any cryptocurrency bullcrap.

You started to move the goalposts. You only need to deal with "cryptocurrency bullcrap" if you decide to cash out the tokens you receive. If you just want to take the BAT token to tip for other creators, you don't even need to signup to an exchange and you don't need to give away any personal data. If Brave was able to run its revenue share program by transacting with cash, would you be okay with it?

> If that means I'll be limited to Konqueror (...), so be it.

Honestly, it just seems like you just have a bunch of misconceptions and prejudices you don't want to re-evaluate. If you don't want to use it, fine. What is not fine is to be calling companies and people "outright corrupt" without anything to actually back it up.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#674

Post by soundnote »

_8j50 wrote: post #649
soundnote wrote: post #584

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?) 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.

That is fair, but your original post basically implied that brave doesn't have a bunch of privacy features it very much has and that go beyond basically every other Chromium fork.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#675

Post by soundnote »

mnadkvlb wrote: post #146
ohgodplsno wrote: post #3

Before HN flips its shit and threatens to move to a browser that is either owned by an ad company, or use a browser that replaces all ads with its own ads, you are asked whether you want to enable it or not on the first launch. As much as it sucks, having more sources of income rather than just relying on Google is a net positive.

Firefox should split from mozilla and have its own foundation. I dont feel like donating to mozilla under the current bean counter CEO. If its an individual organization doing just firefox, i would 100% buy/subscribe to a paid version of the open source browser, which is not shilling my data for ads. I cant believe i am the only one who wants this.

Your donations go to Mozilla Foundation anyway. The Foundation doesn't develop Firefox, their subsidiary Mozilla Corp does. You can't donate to Mozilla Corp.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#676

Post by soundnote »

formerly_proven wrote: post #511
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.

Mozilla probably "needs" money much like the Wikimedia Foundation "needs" money and so desperately begs for donations ("How much is Wikipedia worth to you?"). The WMF spends like 20 % or less on Wikipedia, 80 % is unrelated stuff. Mozilla probably spends a small fraction of its money on Firefox and pisses away most of it as well in e.g. management payouts or random sidequests.

They do need non-Google sources of revenue.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#677

Post by soundnote »

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…

Edge is already eating Mozilla's lunch on the desktop and Brave is growing.

I think the big thing about VPN is that its value is predicated on others being shit. Stuff like Edge Collections, Brave's privacy respecting Search/News/Talk/Rewards(tips) stack, Vivaldi having built-in RSS and notes, and yes Pocket all provide direct value to the user. A password manager is direct value, as was Send or whatnot.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#678

Post by soundnote »

leppr wrote: post #419
SimeVidas wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

Chrome apparently already has similar suggestions in the address bar.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#679

Post by magnaton »

grey_earthling wrote: post #188
closewith wrote: post #8

Is it time to fork Firefox under a browser-focused organisation? I wish I could donate directly towards the development of Firefox to avoid this kind of deterioration, without funding Mozilla at all.

LibreWolf is a soft-fork in this vein. Notably, it's on Flathub, so it's very easy to install. => https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/ Iceraven is a similar (less mature) project for Android. => https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser It would be nice to have a single umbrella project/brand, which could essentially treat Firefox in the same way Edge and Opera treat Chrome.

LibreWolf is also available as an AppImage. After reading this news today, I downloaded that AppImage, started it up and closed it down (just to create a profile folder), and replaced the default contents of the new LibreWolf profile folder with a copy of the contents of my existing Firefox profile folder. I then started LibreWolf up and went into Edit-->Settings and inspected all of those (they didn't carry over for some reason so I had to check and edit them manually). Other than that, it's working fine so far: my old tabs / extensions / passwords are all here, and I'm writing this comment from LibreWolf! (I've kept my Firefox profile folder for now just to be safe, but have otherwise uninstalled Firefox.)

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#680

Post by timbit42 »

wheybags wrote: post #149

Am I the only one who increasingly wishes that Firefox could be detached from Mozilla? I donate to Mozilla because I care about Firefox, but all the other crap they waste time and money on is not only useless, it is of negative value to me. And then they start pulling shit like this. Why? Just make Firefox, many people will give you money for this, and stop pissing about.

I'd like to see both Thunderbird and Firefox combined with LibreOffice. It would be able to compete better against MSO.
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