Mozilla Is Moving Ahead With Sponsored Tiles On Firefox’s New-Tab Page

Until recently I felt that all the free services I am getting from different website are a blessing. I am starting to feel otherwise. Somewhat unfair, because I have the money to spend, but still. When the service is paid for, I as a customer have some voice over things like ads, or abrupt changes in product direction. For now I'll donate some money to Mozilla I guess.

If that helps them be less reliant on Google, I'm not too upset about it, as long as they leave the option for not being tracked by those ads, and they aren't too annoying. Also, we've learned NSA takes advantage of ad networks to inject malicious code into people's PCs, so I hope they would try to make them as safe as possible against that (only encrypted ad networks?)

If you released a pay-for firefox then everyone would just start using iceweasel which could still happen if the ads get too annoying.

Yes, that's obvious.

What you've missed is the overarching issue here, though.

Mozilla will strip out useful functionality from Firefox (like the status bar, for example), and anyone desiring such functionality is told to install some extension to restore the now-missing functionality.

If such an attitude is acceptable when it comes to functionality that Firefox users find useful, then it is just as acceptable when it comes to functionality that Mozilla may find useful.

Mozilla should offer this as an optional extension. If users wish to financially support Mozilla in this way, then they are free to install it and provide such financial support. Otherwise, Firefox users aren't subjected to financing Mozilla in a way that may not be considered acceptable.

I occasionally use Firefox and other offerings from Mozilla. And so I'd be very willing to directly donate money to them, as well.

However, a lot of their recent actions have seriously dissuaded me from doing so.

Desktop Firefox, for example, has gotten progressively worse over time. A lot of useful functionality has been stripped out, and the Chrome-like UI these days is much less efficient and effective than the Firefox 3.5.x UI was.

Mobile Firefox on Android doesn't exactly offer a very pleasant experience.

They basically gave up on Thunderbird.

They've wasted resources on unnecessary and unwanted efforts like Persona and Firefox OS.

Asm.js is not a very sound approach, especially compared to technology like Native Client.

Rust seems promising, but won't be seriously usable until at least Rust 1.0, which still seems a long way off. As the year progresses, I get more and more doubtful that it'll be out during 2014, like was claimed earlier this year.

As it stands now, Mozilla is now offering me far less useful products than they once were. I've also seen them squander a lot of the resources they already had on unnecessary products. And their future offerings aren't very inspiring, either. I just can't convince myself that any donation I do make would be used in a productive manner, I'm sad to say.