Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions • Hacker News Board

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#701

Post by boomboomsubban » Thu, Oct 07, 2021, 11:17 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #696

boomboomsubban wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>See: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html but it's on wikipedia too. See how the last year on that graph is 2018? Baker became interim CEO when Chris Beard stepped down in December 2019, officially hired around April of 2020. It also never reaches $3m. Additionally, look at the ~2015-2018 revenue. That is when Mozilla was with Yahoo and making ~$500 million a year as opposes to the ~$300 million now. That is when th…

Somebody didn't read the actual text. "Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's top executive, was paid $2.4m in 2018, [...]" He goes on to mention how he scavenged the figures from reports. Wikipedia links an article that states she was paid over $3m in 2019. And before then, she's been on the various boards since forever, so she approved the salary rises for her, Beard, and friends. So let's drill this home: Baker or Beard, the w…

I've read the texts, and further I've actually read the Mozilla financial reports. Yes, Baker had a high salary in 2017/2018 after the Yahoo deal where they improved revenue by over a hundred million dollars a year, though she wasn't "Mozilla's top executive." Her 2019 salary is not public yet, just a sum total paid to "management and administration."

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#702

Post by leppr » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 4:57 AM UTC

ghoward wrote: post #629

leppr wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're not wrong. This is why I use Ungoogled Chromium and build it myself.

Well that's more effort than just disabling the New Tab ads on Firefox and you're clearly technically inclined so this doesn't go towards my argument.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#703

Post by melomal » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 5:36 AM UTC

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #373

melomal wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 user at $4.16 per month is not going to help, support and develop a competitive browser or search engine. 1mn users paying $4/m is going to be just over $40mn per year. There's no way any company can compete with MS or Google on that revenue stream. Get investors and they will enforce whatever it takes to build revenue = ads.

Get your facts right, FF has 870 million YAUs. You're off by several orders of magnitude. This whole argument that only ads can save FF is weak and unfounded. Also I don't want a "competitive browser", I want a simple browser that is customizable and that if needed, developers can run more complex addons on top of it. That is it. I am sure I am not alone in this. And I most certainly don't want FF to spend money/time…

Wait a minute. Are you saying that FF users are all going to pay? How many free Versus paid users are on Youtube Premium? There are billions of Youtube users I would imagine, certain they are not paying.

>> Also I don't want a "competitive browser", I want a simple browser that is customizable and that if needed, developers can run more complex addons on top of it. That is it. I am sure I am not alone in this.

Get your wallet out, hire some developers, build it, share it. You want a lot and make demands but I don't see how what you said is economically viable.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#704

Post by ayushnix » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 5:41 AM UTC

soundnote wrote: post #640

ayushnix wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're looking for a privacy friendly fork of Chromium, the only option that's worth considering is Ungoogled Chromium on Desktop and Bromite on Android. https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/bromite/bromite Brave has crypto ads and a lot of other unnecessary stuff built in. They've also made questionable decisions in the past, like inserting referral codes in links. If anything, Brave i…

Unnecessary like a native adblocker that won't get fucked over by Manifest v3, tracker blocking, anti-fingerprinting tech and defaulting to privacy friendly search engines?

> native adblocker that won't get fucked over by Manifest v3

neither is uBO on Firefox and uBO is more effective than anything else out there including Brave's adblocking

I'd also be interested to know exactly how Brave intends to bypass Manifest v3 since it's a change in Chromium itself which is what Brave is based on.

> tracker blocking

also built in to Firefox, gets even better with uBO

> anti-fingerprinting tech

Any article or blog post to show how effective it is? Most anti-fingerprinting tech ends up making a browser even more fingerprint-able. The only browser that successfully achieves anti-fingerprinting is Tor Browser and it relies on a lot of people using an exactly same config of Tor Browser

> defaulting to privacy friendly search engines?

Changing search engines is trivially easy in Firefox.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#705

Post by jamienicol » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 6:38 AM UTC

skinkestek wrote: post #686

jamienicol wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with pocket?

Pocket is fine I think. The problem is mostly the way they introduced it.

What do you mean by that?

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#706

Post by DoingIsLearning » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 7:42 AM UTC

melomal wrote: post #703

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get your facts right, FF has 870 million YAUs. You're off by several orders of magnitude. This whole argument that only ads can save FF is weak and unfounded. Also I don't want a "competitive browser", I want a simple browser that is customizable and that if needed, developers can run more complex addons on top of it. That is it. I am sure I am not alone in this. And I most certainly don't want FF to spend money/time…

Wait a minute. Are you saying that FF users are all going to pay? How many free Versus paid users are on Youtube Premium? There are billions of Youtube users I would imagine, certain they are not paying. >> Also I don't want a "competitive browser", I want a simple browser that is customizable and that if needed, developers can run more complex addons on top of it. That is it. I am sure I am not alone in this. Get yo…

> You want a lot and make demands but I don't see how what you said is economically viable.

FF _is_ already what I "demand" they just need to stop copying every UX feature of chromium under the ilusion that it will make them "competitive" with Chrome. And they need to stop spending money on all these side projects and focus on the core products FF and TB.

These corporate people need to step aside and stop chasing an impossible goal of FF market share growth. They can never compete with behemoths like Google or Microsoft or Apple. The funding disparity and they way the competition setup mottes and baileys is just not realistic.

Google paying Mozilla for default search engine privilege is just a way for google to go CYA, in case they get into anti-trust litigation ("we even fund the small players"). The moment FF actually make a dent in market share is the moment that Google closes the tap on funding.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#707

Post by hnbad » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 8:03 AM UTC

piokoch wrote: post #566

hnbad wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not just tell it like it is. Given the massive salaries and bonuses paid out to upper management[0], I think their problem would be not sounding like that dril tweet about budgeting[1]. After the massive layoffs and cuts to vital web platform projects this move just feels consistent in their move from their old "quirky nerd charity" image to a new, more corporate one. I'm not saying that this is a good thing. […

Huh, information in https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html are, delicately speaking, disturbing. One thing surprised me as well: "Firefox barely exists on phones, with a market share of less than half a percent. This is baffling given that mobile Firefox has a rare feature for a mobile browser: it's able to install extensions and so can block ads." Yes, indeed, FF is pretty great on the phone, it looks like someone fai…

The problem is that Mozilla's profits are tied less to their market cap than to their ability to raise funding. Historically Google contributed the lion's share because Firefox was useful to mask the increasing market domination of Chrome, which would have caused some upset so shortly after Microsoft got into trouble for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. This role is becoming less relevant with Microsoft reviving its browser efforts and Apple heavily pushing Safari, and of course Opera, Brave and others riding on Chrome's coat tails via Chromium (like MS for that matter).

Ironically Netscape itself became "something like Yahoo or Commodore": AOL bought Netscape (which led to the Mozilla foundation being created), then proceeded to sell discount services under the name "Netscape ISP" and eventually renamed the original Netscape company. As far as I know the original company (now non-operating) eventually ended up being owned by Facebook and the Netscape brand somehow ended up being owned by Yahoo.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#708

Post by tomrod » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 1:07 PM UTC

jamienicol wrote: post #658

intelMgmntEnema wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No more about:config So few realize the importance of this. Some say "well only in Android" or "use nightly". The plan is clearly to incrementally erode freedom to a final state of dysfunction under the guise of gaslit improvements and false switches. They actually argue that removing about:config was for our own good. Printing webpages to PDF is also something we're supposedly better without. But we shouldn't compl…

> The plan is clearly to incrementally erode freedom to a final state of dysfunction under the guise of gaslit improvements and false switches. That's quite the accusation, and completely baseless. about:config was removed from the stable version on android to prevent users breaking their installations. It's interesting you mention privacy.resistFingerprinting, as it alone is the cause of countless bug reports and su…

The base is the removal of about:config. Whatever got written up into the release notes, it was received by many users as stated above.

Also note that an ulterior motive doesn't need to exist for the path towards centralized, user-hostile control to happen. It starts with "the developer knows better what the user wants than the user themselves" sort of attitudes.

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#709

Post by NelsonMinar » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 2:24 PM UTC

exar0815 wrote: post #85

By the love of all thats holy, I still don't understand how the development of an entire operating system can be reasonably coordinated by a (admittably singlularly competent) sole finnish guy in a bathrobe from home, while a comparably simple webbrowser needs a foundation, a company, a ceo, a code of conduct, all those outreach and social-action programmes etc... Or maybe, is all that cesspool of ineffectiveness and…

What a ridiculously disingenuous comment. You realize there's a whole Linux Foundation, right? And multiple enormous companies and a whole open source community that are the actual developers of the entire operating system?

Re: Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions

#710

Post by smoldesu » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 11:31 PM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #476

soundnote wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Brave system is pretty simple, though? They sell ad space, people buy ad space. Brave shows you ads and keeps a cut, they give their users a cut. Brave has a tipping service which lets users tip sites they like. End result is advertisers can advertise, and people making content get some of the ad money, the setup's just built to not track people. The big concern there is that ads that don't track are generally le…

It's incredible. I think Brave/BAT is pretty much the only project in the crypto space that has a straightforward answer to "how do you guys plan to make money?" question, yet it is called "outright corrupt" and implied they are stealing from users somehow. I really wonder why there is so much cognitive dissonance.

Just speaking personally, but every time I've ever confronted a Brave dev online it's been among the worst experiences I've ever had. Every time I try to espouse an issue that I have with the design or architecture, I get lambasted for sharing it and then they insist that I'm objectively wrong. Browser preference is ultimately subjective, like your choice of editor or operating system: the least you can do is explain your mentality in a way that isn't ostracizing to technical users, otherwise you're no worse than Apple with pocketing your 30% and leaving the users out to dry.