I think there's been some concern that people compare the speed of Firefox with a bunch of random extensions against Chrome with none. I wonder if the 'refresh' is an attempt to get away from that at the point where someone might be giving Firefox another chance. I don't remember if the refresh offer appeared back in the xul days, when there was much more scope for extensions to hurt the experience.
it is—it uninstalls all of your bloat the suggestion that its purpose is to trick people into uninstalling their adblocker is a ridiculous one
“bloat”
Adblockers aren’t bloat; they make the web faster and more secure.
Depends on what you want. some places you can find just as high quality. There is a lot of junk out there to wage through. They also have a "allergic reaction" to the thought of an algorithm to curate feeds which throws the good out with the bad.
I would very sincerely ask what places and what quality?
More like which niche. I find transit advocates do a lot on mastodon. There are also a lot of great open source projects (the curl maintainer posts some interesting stuff). Those are niches I'm interested in though, YMMV in anything else.
> advertising as a business model is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone My favorite period in internet history was the years in which self-hosted phpBB forums dominated the social landscape. We had a diverse set of forums paid for by one or more of their participants, who made the forum available simply because they liked hanging out with the community they were hosting. Advertising-based social…
Having run one, I have to say that towards the end people were moving to social media BECAUSE posts had a like counter. I regret not adding one to my forum.
Tangentially related but I think upvote/downvote culture is one of the biggest social changes that we unleashed on the world and should’ve walked back long ago. The intent of the idea is good but I think in implementation it’s too ripe for abuse.
In those old forums, you couldn’t (easily) bury things the way you can today. We basically handed an incredibly powerful weapon to anyone interested in controlling a narrative - especially so with the centralization of everything.
(I want to be clear that I’m aware old forums could be gamed still, and I’m mostly trying to underscore how messed up I consider upvote/downvote/ratio culture).
Article in German about this from August 1: https://netzpolitik.org/2024/klage-gegen-datenschutzbehoerde... They're calculating with EUR 0.1 per user per month for targeted advertising. The "Pur Abo" (EUR 4-5 per month per site) are thus 40 times more profitable. The advertising has become mostly a mechanism to pressure readers into paying. The question is, can you convince roughly 1/40 of your readers to pay 5 bucks…
> The question is, can you convince Seen recently few sites which blocked access unless you agreed for vicious tracking - so much for convincing readers , I guess. I'm afraid that it's a new trend to paywall everything and give user a quite harmful choice of being tracked if it won't pay. Few years ago there was an agreement in Poland between major media outlets to put an unified paywall system but it was abandoned q…
Shouldn't you be happy with paywalling, and with these experiments at monetizing content in ways other than ads?
But as I've always said, the staunchly "anti-advertising"/"information should be free"/"the web would have far more high-quality information if it was fully free" people, not you specifically, but most people in this thread, just feel entitled to other people's labor, for free. Content creators know. Most of the people bitchin' about ads are willing to pay you zilch. They still very much want your content, though. Story as old as time. Just strictly regulate any data-collection and data-selling, that's the real problem.
Society is full of predators. In the beginning, people got eaten in the jungle, and today they get monitored to learn their desires and then shown pictures of things they want. How do you know you're not being manipulated? Getting you to care and be concerned about things you're powerless to change is what the system did to you. Power is focus which means people are disempowered by getting them to focus their attenti…
> Getting you to care and be concerned about things you're powerless to change is what the system did to you. I'm not sure "you should stop caring about other people" is the right message to take from...anything, really.
Which people? Anyone who tells me I should care about people in general, I always assume it's an attempt at manipulation, because it's an illogical way of thinking.
It's not a problem if you don't go to the parts of the web that have ads. I spend my time online on places like GitHub that operate as ad-free commission-free gift economies. Environments that have ads, have nothing that I want. I don't care about what happens in them any more than I care about what happens in shantytowns. Why do you care? What pulls you into those dark Internet spaces?
At this point, "those dark Internet spaces" includes most news on most subjects. GitHub is great, but it can't be my entire world.
News is a narcotic that, like ads and social media, preys on human weakness. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the purveyors of news would partner with purveyors of ads, similar to how casinos like to partner with alcohol and tobacco companies.
I'm pretty confident that without advertising, the majority of YouTube channels people love most would not exist. maybe overall that would be a good thing as there's so much trash too
Most of my favorite channels make more money from one or more of: 1. Premium subscribers 2. Direct support on Patreon 3. Direct video sponsorship (a form of advertising, but wholly tolerable IMO) 4. Direct support by joining Nebula, which has no ads
I don’t know if it’s still true, but at least up until relatively recently, #3 and #4 were the same thing; Nebula paid its creators in YouTube sponsorship. (i.e, if you were a Nebula creator, you got “paid” by Nebula buying sponsorships on your YouTube channel)
From the CEO's comments on reddit ( https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_abo... ): > we support people configuring their browser however they choose I rate this one as half true. If you leave firefox for a while and come back, it displays a bar with text like "Would you like to refresh your experience?" The first time I clicked that, it uninstalled my adblock extension. Not making that mistake aga…
I think if you a refresh it does flush all your add-ons, no? Unless you have sync turned on you’ll have fun reinstalling them again and setting them up to your liking, and that is pain for someone like me who has 11 of them. Even with sync you still lose settings if they aren’t “sync aware”
That offer to refresh always seemed a bit strange to me. It's like Microsoft acknowledging the crust in the registry and offering their own CCleaner. A lot of activity, dubious work actually being done. Perhaps the effect of profile lifecycles should be addressed if some hand-wavy refresh process may be required and instituted by the application. Said another way, that's a concern for the program. Not me. This should…
I think there's been some concern that people compare the speed of Firefox with a bunch of random extensions against Chrome with none. I wonder if the 'refresh' is an attempt to get away from that at the point where someone might be giving Firefox another chance. I don't remember if the refresh offer appeared back in the xul days, when there was much more scope for extensions to hurt the experience.
By far the biggest hog of resources for me is Dark Reader. I don’t think any other extension even comes close. I still use it though because adding 300ms to a page load to me doesn’t phase me.
>Really sad to see Firefox’s direction but also not sure how they should be funded to avoid these things. I'm not sure there is an alternative. It's not just Firefox: other big projects like this already have foundations and lots of money in funding, but then spend the money on things not at all related to the core mission. From what I've read, Mozilla won't even take your money to develop Firefox. They'll instead us…
This is the case with most software "foundation". As much as I disagree with Ayn Rand on a lot of things, she did make an important observation. Parasites will be attracted to high value things in order to extract value, not to add to it. They climb the hierarchy of the organisation and then use it for their own benefit. It is not only developers who do resume building oriented work. These people start social causes…
Yes, and it's not just non-profit foundations, or even social causes. I've seen it in big corporations too, where some "parasite" as you call them ascends the ranks and "spearheads" some new "initiative", that turns out to have really dubious value and is frequently just reinventing the wheel. For example, at a big tech company, instead of just using some ready-made off-the-shelf solution or using an established standard, pouring a ton of money into some new home-grown thing that does the same thing, perhaps with 5% better performance, but in the end isn't really worth it and cost a ton of money. But the guy who "spearheaded" it gets a big bonus and moves on to even higher roles in the company and leaving the fallout for someone else to deal with.