But advertising is the source of funding that many content creators rely on to make a living... Of course I don’t want Meta and Google profiting from mind-manipulating ads, but where is better business model? Crypto micropayments?
Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker
101–110 of 290 posts
Re: Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker
#102Blocking ads wholesale is a terrible idea and unnecessary. What needs to be blocked is ads that execute client-side javascript (consuming your memory and cpu), ads that consume too much network bandwidth and so on. Ads are necessary so that content producers can generate income, without it they won't produce quality content. When you block abusive ads (as opposed to all ads), advertisers are encouraged to make their…
I care about having a general purpose web content blocker. I use it for blocking all kinds of things that aren't ads, like YouTube comment sections, random noisy useless cruft I don't care about, etc.
Re: Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker
#103Blocking ads wholesale is a terrible idea and unnecessary. What needs to be blocked is ads that execute client-side javascript (consuming your memory and cpu), ads that consume too much network bandwidth and so on. Ads are necessary so that content producers can generate income, without it they won't produce quality content. When you block abusive ads (as opposed to all ads), advertisers are encouraged to make their…
No. We need to think in other ways than the ad economy. I’d gladly pay for good content if there was a decent system set up for it.
Re: Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker
#104Blocking ads wholesale is a terrible idea and unnecessary. What needs to be blocked is ads that execute client-side javascript (consuming your memory and cpu), ads that consume too much network bandwidth and so on. Ads are necessary so that content producers can generate income, without it they won't produce quality content. When you block abusive ads (as opposed to all ads), advertisers are encouraged to make their…
> When you block abusive ads (as opposed to all ads), advertisers are encouraged to make their ads less abusive.
Ads were made abusive, malicious, and dangerous WELL before ad blockers existed. Ad blockers are a response to abusive, malicious, and dangerous advertising. Sadly there are very few reliable ways to whitelist trustworthy advertising. Google and Facebook et al. have all served harmful advertising at some point.
It's too late to turn this around. All trust is lost with advertisers, and to be honest, I'm not sure a system based on trust was ever going to work anyway. Content creators must now create new ways to derive value from their work. Perhaps we go back to an internet where people wrote blogs and posted pictures not for money, but as a hobby. I think that was a better internet.
Re: Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker
#105Blocking ads wholesale is a terrible idea and unnecessary. What needs to be blocked is ads that execute client-side javascript (consuming your memory and cpu), ads that consume too much network bandwidth and so on. Ads are necessary so that content producers can generate income, without it they won't produce quality content. When you block abusive ads (as opposed to all ads), advertisers are encouraged to make their…
No. I will not discriminate between which ads I block when neither the site operators nor the ad networks discriminate on what they host. The moment i turn off my ad block I’m up to my eyeballs in lies and scams and garbage. No. Thanks.
This ad funded internet needs to die. It is rotten to the core and advertising is the source of almost all the evils of the modern web. As long as enough of the general public continues to not Adblock I’ll enjoy my free ride.
Re: Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker
#106But advertising is the source of funding that many content creators rely on to make a living... Of course I don’t want Meta and Google profiting from mind-manipulating ads, but where is better business model? Crypto micropayments?
With AI I am reconsidering my stance on micropayments.
I recently loaded up a few dollars on Deepseek to try it out, and the value I got out of it far surpassed my balance lost (tens of cents). If this is a sustainable business model for Deepseek (I'm not sure yet), then this shifts the economics: in this scenario I feel totally fine paying pocket change for something valuable.
We already know google's searches cost orders of magnitude less than serving an AI model, so there is no reason to believe micropayments couldn't work there too. Of course, advertisements make Google a lot more money than micropayments, so they never tried it, but I suspect that while they might not work in all scenarios they are underexplored as a monetizing strategy.
I feel like website owners could band together and along with search engines figure out tiers for people viewing their content (free, minimal fee, larger fee, etc).
And some publishers would choose that, others would form different coalitions and say: get a subscription and you get access to xyz content, just like with streaming etc. It would need cooperation, so maybe the idea is already dead in the water, but the web being the realm of advertising is not set in stone.
Re: Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker
#107> Firefox does not block: > Ads shown on search engine results pages, including Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and other search providers > Sponsored content on the Firefox Home or New Tab page So block ads unless it impacts their revenue sources.
The correct way to avoid ads is to not visit pages that use them.
Is this actually feasible? How do you tell when a page uses ads? How do you find pages without ads when you search for something?
Re: Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple themselves do not allow using anything other than WebKit unless you move to the EU or Japan: https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi... Firefox addons target gecko, not webkit. What Orion's doing is horribly hacky and prone to cause issues with a multitude of addons, and of course Mozilla shouldn't bow to Apple's incredibly anti-competitive behavior. You pay apple for a phone that can act m…
> unless you move to the EU or Japan Not only that, but the "entitlement" (Apple lingo for code-signature flag that grants capabilities) needed to publish a browser effectively requires to be an established company, ensuring hobbyists can't really get there with an open-source project even though the sources of Firefox are available and could technically be ported.
It goes well beyond requiring an established company. It's so onerous that no company has yet successfully navigated all the gates required - even Google. Apple is maliciously complying with the EU's Digital Rights Act, and many years later, the EU has not concluded its investigations. I am incredibly disappointed.
Re: Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker
#109I hope, i will be see gecko engine at IOS
https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/issues/19063#i...
Re: Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker
#110If you haven't been using Firefox, what are you even doing with your life?
A chrome version of Firefox is Brave. A chrome version of Opera is Vivaldi. A chrome version of MSIE is MS Edge. After FF kept breaking extensions with their switch to XUL, I stopped using them.
Except now you can just install standard extensions in Firefox.
I don't want a chrome version of something. I want an independent browser that isn't effectively some version of adware.
I'll never understand why people don't get on board with migrating away from adware.