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Is it worth supporting Firefox?

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Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#181

Post by dingo_bat »

gsnedders wrote: post #93
josteink wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And a DRM for website instead of only video DRM that exists, so that user cannot view source code, and no extension can block the ads. Other publishers are doing the same thing. Expect new DRM for HTML5 too. I mean noone, absolutely -noone-, foresaw this coming nor warned about the slippery slopes of letting stuff like this into the standard in the first place. Nope. Absolutely noone. This was a genuine surprise to…

I still don't see it happening, outside of silos. There's no precedent for DRM'd content outside of silos (like much of the digital publishing ecosystem, especially with ADEPT and whatever Amazon use), unlike with video and audio (through plugins like Flash). Unlike EME, there's a far stronger argument of "the web has survived without this for 25 years" (and yes, for better or for worse, I consider a plugin with over…

> I still don't see it happening, outside of silos.

For mobile, the only remaining options are silos.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#182

Post by ravenstine »

sevensor wrote: post #16

Firefox is a standards-conforming web browser. If some nincompoop puts a web page out there and my browser can't render it, I'm not going back. I make an exception for restaurant websites, because I want to see the menu and they all seem to have been defrauded by the same bad designer.

I also intend on quitting web development if the web turns into a big DRM mess. Life's too short to conform to all the wants of ad tech and IP lawyers.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#183

Post by gkya »

I don't use an ad blocker. I have JS turned off, thus don't see ads. When I encounter a website that's interesting enough to browse even though it does not work w/o JS (rare), I open it up in Chromium (which I actually keep around to use a couple web apps that I have to use). And every time I do that I realise what a huge piece of shit online publishing has become. Almost all websites that publish professionally are just overengineered crapware, viable only because the bubble that's the ads business. Luckily there's a sane subset of the internet that I can use without thouching all this crap most of the time. If their business model is failing due to us not turning around and bending over, let it be so. Who cares, apart from them?

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#184

Post by rasz »

wvenable wrote: post #154
627467 wrote: post #60

How hard is it to sell a fixed tag or any block of text within an article? Sell it as "this content will stay there for as long as the page is published". The problem is that every major publisher has bought into centralized ad brokers. Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content b…

> How hard is it to sell a fixed tag or any block of text within an article? Ad blockers will block that as well. Ad blockers will even block regular old HTML text on the page if it looks like an ad.

Only if its annoying enough for someone to write adblock rule for that particular website and push it into popular lists (EasyList, Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list, etc).

Personally I only do it when my Mum asks me ;-) and never block native (siglent banner on eevblog)/regional relevant (small town website with static ads for local businesses) ones.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#185

Post by RestlessMind »

ahoy wrote: post #158
RestlessMind wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the first reason why I started using ad-blockers 15 years ago. The privacy issue is a recent thing. So you are on board with Google's acceptable ads initiative then? What I find frustrating is that people (in aggregate, not individually) keep moving goalposts. First, it's about annoying ads and how they will accept good ads. When presented with good ads, it becomes about tracking and how they will pay for th…

Companies shave costs and they're seen as shrewd, individuals do the same and they're seen as "cheap".

Trying to shave costs is very reasonable, both for companies and individuals. Let's just be honest about it.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#186

Post by mywittyname »

_jal wrote: post #33
johnchristopher wrote: post #14

> I work for a major publisher. Ad-blockers are starting to hurt our revenue big time. No. What's hurting your edit:employer's revenue is years of blinking GIFs, auto-play videos and misleading links thrown between paragraphs. That's the first reason why I started using ad-blockers 15 years ago. The privacy issue is a recent thing. > We're doing a redesign now. Manager says that we should just discourage the users of…

Just a datapoint: if you "discourage" my browser, I go away and don't come back. Same with EME - I will not need your efforts in my life. I've yet to find a site so great that I'll disable security or switch browsers to use them. (Work is an exception; somehow there's always some crappy site with needy requirements. But that's my employer's browser/computer, and the sites aren't major publishers.) So I hope your mana…

That's the point: they don't want you because you cost them money to serve.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#187

Post by pas »

annabellish wrote: post #109
juliangoldsmith wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content business online. Publishers should know their audience better than ad servers. Part of the problem is that Google and Facebook actually can know the audience better than the content creator. A content creator only knows that the reader i…

I'm honestly not sure how true this really is. I don't do anything intentionally to screw with advertisers, aside from standard ad blockers, and the targeted ads I get from things which aren't ad blocked are just... eh? I give Google a tonne of data, they know everything I search for, they know where I live and where I shop, they know how long I spend in a shop before buying something through android pay, et cetera.…

> Google been able to trick people into believing that this is 'effective targeted advertising'?

Because there was nothing before Google (or if there was it was even worse shit than what G was peddling).

And the game is still that. G doesn't have to do much, just beat/buy the next one.

And that's how FB got them, sort of blindsided them by that one trick, Sergei and Larry now hate them! You won't believe which one! Google lost the walled garden social network game. Users spend a lot of time with other users instead with content directly, so the network effect dominated.

Also, you're probably not the lowest common denominator, you're not the target audience for the usual ads.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#188

Post by pas »

sveme wrote: post #101
627467 wrote: post #60

How hard is it to sell a fixed tag or any block of text within an article? Sell it as "this content will stay there for as long as the page is published". The problem is that every major publisher has bought into centralized ad brokers. Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content b…

Natural Language Processing could definitely allow for some context-dependent ads within an article. When reading something on the new C# 7, I'm most likely not interested in some tupperware I decided not to buy on Amazon a couple of weeks ago, but I might be interested in a couple of books on C# and might find these ads acceptable. Don't track me, track and machine learn content people consume.

> track and machine learn content people consume.

It's being done. The whole recommendation systems market/community is growing at an enormous rate.

There are a few basic types:

- new user (no cookie/session), lands on the main page: show the most popular stuff - new user, lands on a concrete product page: item to item recommendation (others who bought this also bought this) - user with active session: try to match to previous sessions, try to figure out what's next for this session (and optimize for time spent on site, or total cart value, or max clicks, or who knows)

And of course there are simple text based algorithms, like a full text search engine combined with scoring/ranking, and then there's the new fancy DNN stuff, and matrix factorization in between.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#189

Post by cpeterso »

JepZ wrote: post #159
wvenable wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How hard is it to sell a fixed tag or any block of text within an article? Ad blockers will block that as well. Ad blockers will even block regular old HTML text on the page if it looks like an ad.

How does an ad look like?

The ad blocklists are maintained by humans so they can block whatever elements that can be matched by the ad blocker's filter rules.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#190

Post by dorgo »

mkirklions wrote: post #49
_jal wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a datapoint: if you "discourage" my browser, I go away and don't come back. Same with EME - I will not need your efforts in my life. I've yet to find a site so great that I'll disable security or switch browsers to use them. (Work is an exception; somehow there's always some crappy site with needy requirements. But that's my employer's browser/computer, and the sites aren't major publishers.) So I hope your mana…

>if you "discourage" my browser, I go away and don't come back. Yep, there are lots of major news websites I dont visit at all. I know they are going to have an annoying autoplay video. I'll skip to the comment section.

I have an extension (Block site) which stops me from visiting some sites by accident (SERPs or links).
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