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Is it worth supporting Firefox?

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Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#211

Post by floatboth »

gruez wrote: post #118
floatboth wrote: post #98

> 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 Good luck with that. You could render an article into a DRM'd video, and utterly destroy SEO, accessibility, readability, and the website's whole reputation. "DRM for news articles" makes zero sense. Movie DRM works because HDCP decrypts the video on the display . ("works" - pirates…

>You can't DRM software on a general purpose computer. You can with SGX

Well, that's not exactly a general purpose computer anymore :)

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#212

Post by dorgo »

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.…

If I buy a smartphone on amazon, guess what they try to sell to me next? I'm constantly disappointed by tech giants ability to do their job: selling things to me. They don't even need these fancy machine intelligence stuff. A "switch case" could make bettere recomendations than the state of the art. But the highlight in recomentdation business is still: buyers who bought x also looked into y.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#213

Post by giancarlostoro »

sirn wrote: post #20
giancarlostoro wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the [+] next to the up down arrows, try opening it in Chrome to see..

I don't have Chrome installed but I tried in Vivaldi (based on Chromium) and couldn't see the [+] either. Maybe they were A/B testing the collapse UI?

If that's what that is, I'm not a huge fan of that change. But it's hard to tell, I tried it from Firefox under Linux from different machines and get the same result.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#214

Post by evangp »

dorgo wrote: post #195
sowbug wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, they probably should. Until internet publishers reach that conclusion themselves, is it OK to force a different business model on them? To be clear, that "business model" is "I don't like the form of payment this business is asking for, so I'll take the merchandise for free instead." When a business has high prices or a poor experience, it's customary to shop elsewhere, not to raid the store.

Amazon makes 1000€+ revenue from me bying stuff there and still shows ads and tries to sell me credit cards.. Do you mind if i hide all this shit while bying stuff on Amazon? I use about 5 non-commercial services which may show ads (don't know whether they do or not and not gonna disable adblocker to check). I would happily pay 10€-15€ per month for this services, if there would be good save annonymes payment service…

Might I suggest the brave browser?

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#215

Post by rsoto »

FRex wrote: post #116
rsoto wrote: post #32

> Extension cannot mimic everything. There are far too many features. NaCl, other css values. Also we use obfuscated js to resist reverse engineering. There are like 100 features, and more in future that'll be chrome specific. Average time to reverse engineer a 10mb obfuscated js file is like a 1 month. We're safe for 10 years. I'm against this shit tho. Not to be dismissive, but this sounds like he's trolling. One t…

I agree. One time he (or she) is against that, another time he acts cocky like saying they'll now sabotage opera too (after being told it has a built in ad blocker) or bringing up existing DRM in a tone that is less like being sad those ideas are getting into web and more like he wants the same in html. It also starts reasonably with just focusing on chrome and then goes to asking google for a html drm, asking google…

Haha, I didn't get to read that much, but that sounds hilarious! Now I'm sure he's just trolling.

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#216

Post by pasbesoin »

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…

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.

This is where I fear EME is going.

Getting it in at all was the first step -- the sharp end of the lever.

My concerns regarding "locking up" the Web:

- Security. Ad networks continue to shovel exploits as well as a panopticon of data mining that gets sold off to dark patterns, commercial and governmental.

- History. We already have disappearing news and other content that is leaving increasing holes in the historical record. Who would have thought with this ever-increasing capacity to record and store "everything", we are becoming more blinded to recent events and public conversation.

(This goes for commercial media, as well. Seminal TV shows no longer available in their original format (music "rights"). Movies no longer so available (just leave it the fuck alone, Lucas). What happens when all you consume comes from central, centrally-controlled servers that can be "revised" at the behest of central authorities?)

- Usability. The other problem I have with ads et al., is that they do their utmost to grab all the attention. I find them too distracting to actually or effectively consume the content.

I remember back the the "early days" of the Web, most ads were static in appearance, and I actually clicked on a fair amount of them. Yes, given the nature of the Web, then, they were more technical. They also described things I was actually interested in. I'd read the article, notice an interesting ad along the way, and click it when I was done -- or maybe immediately, if it was of higher interest than what I was reading.

Now, ads do everything they can to make me look a them. I can't even pay adequate attention to the page, until I scroll them out of the viewport or otherwise obscure them.

That makes for a miserable user experience.

(And all too often, they play a game to "intrigue" me, instead of just telling me what they're about and why I'd be interested in that.)

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#217

Post by rosege »

pimeys wrote: post #67
rosege wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what will you replace Confluence with?

We'll change our whole business model and do 100% open source, so I guess it'll be Github.

We use confluence for internal documentation that we wouldnt want public. Can that be done with Github or is your confluence used for public documentation?

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#218

Post by slavak »

juliangoldsmith wrote: post #86
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…

>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…

This is great in theory, but the potential never seems to have come to fruition in practice. Google tries to figure out what I'm interested in globally, but what it tends to end up with are ideas that are either irrelevant, outdated, or inappropriate for my mood at the moment. In the best case, Google has figured out that I'm currently in the market for a new smartphone, but right _now_ I'm looking at car reviews, and what I want to see are good deals for the cars I'm interested in, not the new Samsung Galaxy model.

Compare this to a popular car review site I use, which seems to manage their own ads. You know what ad I'm shown when reading a review for a car? A deal on purchasing or leasing that car. This is something I'm highly likely to be interested in _now_, and if the deal is good- there's a decent chance I'll click on the ad.

When I'm reading a magazine, ads are often not just NOT an annoyance, but are actually part of the experience, because they're advertising things that are really interesting to the target audience of the magazine. There is a very small handful of websites where I will even glance at the ads not by accident, and none of these are using Google's ad network...

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#219

Post by [deleted] »

nukeop wrote: post #82

This is a totalitarian publisher's wet dream, to strongarm users to pay them or look at they ads whether they like it or not. If somebody's using adblockers, they're not going to be converted by your ads either way. If you introduce bothersome mechanisms preventing me from interacting with your website on my terms, I'm just going to leave and never come back. This is exactly why we need Firefox and other browsers, so…

[deleted]

Re: Is it worth supporting Firefox?

#220

Post by _jal »

mcherm wrote: post #66
_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. If the site is supported by ad revenue and you actively refuse to permitany ad revenue is it really a loss to the publisher if you leave?

That's apparently the manager's goal. Another way of stating it is that the manager apparently believes browser choice is a good proxy for identifying "bad" cattle.

I have serious doubts that it works out that way, but hey, they are free to use whatever signal they want for whatever purpose they choose. And we don't know their identity - who knows, perhaps running a low-pass filter on their audience's technical sophistication actually makes sense for them.

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