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Firefox search update

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox search update

#141

Post by lxgr »

wavemode wrote: post #92

I would respect the announcement more if they just came out and said it - "we need cash to keep running and Google is offering to pay us a bajillion dollars for some anonymized search data. Sorry folks."

Is that actually what's happening?

Why would Google need this information? Don't they already get all of that and more in the queries themselves?

Or is this about supplying Google with a user profile that persists beyond incognito tabs, cleared cookies/history etc.?

I read it more as "we, Mozilla, want to know what Firefox users use their browsers for" rather than "we want to hand this data to Google on a per-query level". That said, it is incredibly vaguely worded.

Re: Firefox search update

#142

Post by kjkjadksj »

lxgr wrote: post #137
bloopernova wrote: post #62

I don't want to be given a "browsing experience". I don't want to be treated as a product, sold to data brokers without my knowledge. My browsing experience is already tailored to me by my own actions. I guess I'll be migrating to LibreWolf.

How does having a browsing experience imply being a product? Is it possible to use Firefox without having a browsing experience? It is a web browser! Seems like Mozilla really is fighting a losing battle: Whenever they as much as think about doing 1% of the monitoring that their competitors do (often for user research to guide and focus their development efforts; unclear if that's what's happening here though), they…

The base they alienate just wants a web browser. You don’t need to iterate forever on a good tool that does the job. Software can be feature complete. Anyone wishing for a complete overhaul update for something like cp? Absolutely not, people want tools that work the same for years.

Re: Firefox search update

#143

Post by [deleted] »

lxgr wrote: post #137
bloopernova wrote: post #62

I don't want to be given a "browsing experience". I don't want to be treated as a product, sold to data brokers without my knowledge. My browsing experience is already tailored to me by my own actions. I guess I'll be migrating to LibreWolf.

How does having a browsing experience imply being a product? Is it possible to use Firefox without having a browsing experience? It is a web browser! Seems like Mozilla really is fighting a losing battle: Whenever they as much as think about doing 1% of the monitoring that their competitors do (often for user research to guide and focus their development efforts; unclear if that's what's happening here though), they…

[deleted]

Re: Firefox search update

#144

Post by AzzyHN »

Reading just the blog post... these feel like useless metrics. Why do you care what percentage of your users are searching about animals. What do you possibly have to gain from this? Are they planning to introduce animal-based features?

And if it's not for their own metrics, but to sell... who's going to buy? Facebook tracking pixels and other statistics cookies are so much more valuable that this kind of data

Re: Firefox search update

#145

Post by elric »

Maybe we should just go back to the 1990s where we just pay a one time fee to buy a piece software and own it forever? Without any data collection, without constant enshittification, without endless ads? Buy it, get a couple of yeard worth of security updates, and be done with it.

It's clear that libre browsers have failed. They are not sustainable. They are too big, too complex, and apparently only two organizations are really capable of keeping one going. One is an ad company, the other is a patsy for the ad company.

I don't see a way out of this that is at all sustainable.

Re: Firefox search update

#146

Post by lxgr »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #142
lxgr wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does having a browsing experience imply being a product? Is it possible to use Firefox without having a browsing experience? It is a web browser! Seems like Mozilla really is fighting a losing battle: Whenever they as much as think about doing 1% of the monitoring that their competitors do (often for user research to guide and focus their development efforts; unclear if that's what's happening here though), they…

The base they alienate just wants a web browser. You don’t need to iterate forever on a good tool that does the job. Software can be feature complete. Anyone wishing for a complete overhaul update for something like cp? Absolutely not, people want tools that work the same for years.

But a browser is never "done", for better or worse, nor are user expectations static. Stopping to iterate on a web browser is like stopping to iterate on an operating system:

It'll go well for a while (and users even might love you for it for a year or two, since you can focus your effort on fixing bugs and not introduce new ones with new features), and then you'll slowly but steadily lose users to other browser that do adapt.

Losing users for a web browser, means losing search referral revenue in the short term (literally Mozilla's lifeblood), and losing web developers in the long term, which will break the experience even further.

Just one example that almost made me switch browsers: Web site translation. I was regularly using Chrome in parallel for that, but now Firefox fortunately supports it too (and in a privacy-preserving local way at that – a true innovation), so they keep me as a user.

Re: Firefox search update

#147

Post by kjkjadksj »

not2b wrote: post #140
romanows wrote: post #11

Seems like this is in support of "Firefox Suggest", which seems to show sponsored links. I really don't like advertising so I really don't like going down that road. Can't they just take Google's yearly $600,000,000 payment and build the best browser "for the user" while also addressing technical debt and organizational issues so it can continue as an open source project if/when the money ever dries up?

Antitrust actions in the US and EU may force Google to cut off those payments (to Mozilla and Apple), and if that happens, Firefox needs to survive somehow.

Somehow open source browsers still get made without a $600 million “rich uncle.” Mozilla is pretty bloated. This can buy like 1200 good engineers. People make browsers with a couple people sometimes.

Re: Firefox search update

#148

Post by bobthecowboy »

Barrin92 wrote: post #108
salawat wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what? That's fine and good. Ask users to opt-in, and respect the wishes of those who opt-out . Anything short of that is you ignoring the concept of consent entirely, and doing whatever mental gymnastics you can to feel fine with doing so.

This has nothing to do with mental gymnastics. Consent isn't a meaningful concept when it comes to each individual setting of a piece of software. You'd have to make 500 decisions every minute if you had to actively consent to everything your software does. In fact cookie banners show this. People hate them because they force meaningless choices on them. If you make a website with tracking as an opt-out option, almos…

> In fact cookie banners show this. People hate them because they force meaningless choices on them. If you make a website with tracking as an opt-out option, almost everyone clicks "accept all". If you make a website with tracking as opt-in, almost every one clicks accept all. That shows that opt-in/out or consent does literally nothing ot reflect people's preferences, the act of making a choice completely dominates the actual decision.

I disagree with this interpretation - the banners force themselves in front of the user before accessing the content. And then the choice is almost always "Accept all" and "complete a checklist mini-game of things you don't want cookies for". It's not a shock that people when confronted with this will click the easy button, and that doesn't mean it reflects their actual interests. It's just fatigue. If the "accept our cookies" button was off to the side of the page, and defaulted to "none" unless the user did something otherwise, I wonder what the "accept all" numbers would look like then. Actually, I don't.

Re: Firefox search update

#149

Post by [deleted] »

pquki4 wrote: post #122
romanows wrote: post #11

Seems like this is in support of "Firefox Suggest", which seems to show sponsored links. I really don't like advertising so I really don't like going down that road. Can't they just take Google's yearly $600,000,000 payment and build the best browser "for the user" while also addressing technical debt and organizational issues so it can continue as an open source project if/when the money ever dries up?

> Can't they just take Google's yearly $600,000,000 payment They can do that for as long as Google is willing to pay. Without additional revenue stream, the day Google decides to cut cost and stop sponsoring Mozilla, that's the day Firefox will run into big trouble. Any additional revenue stream is going to help. I am no CEO but that seems very clear to me.

[deleted]

Re: Firefox search update

#150

Post by jimbob45 »

bloopernova wrote: post #62

I don't want to be given a "browsing experience". I don't want to be treated as a product, sold to data brokers without my knowledge. My browsing experience is already tailored to me by my own actions. I guess I'll be migrating to LibreWolf.

That's just not feasible for the vast majority of people. Being constantly behind on security updates is a sound recipe for losing your personal data unless there's nothing you care about on the machine you're using.
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