Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 56 posts

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

#41

Post by userbinator »

sheetjs wrote: post #8
rjzzleep wrote: post #4

i have a lot of little beefs with new firefox versions for example not knowing that firefox leaks dns when you hover a link with no easy way to disable it. but sponsored tiles is not one of them. out of all the browsers out there with silly home screen tiles firefox's are the easiest to disable or never actually hit in practice depending on your browser habits. it's not even really ads just someones homepage similar…

I don't think the ads were the problem. The language that bothered me was the phrase "user-enhancing" when describing ads. Call a spade a spade

The title of this article also contains some obfuscatory language: "Moving Ahead"? "Sponsored Tiles"? What's wrong with a simple "Mozilla Will Add Adverts to Firefox New Tab Page"?

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

#42

Post by Zancarius »

Pacabel wrote: post #19
chimeracoder wrote: post #12

> The problem, however, is that this doesn’t really fit into Mozilla’s brand image. It’s supposed to be an independent, mission-driven organization. Once it starts taking money from big brands, it will be harder to maintain this image. This is a rather silly statement - most of Mozilla's funding already comes from Google, and has for a while. If you want to make Mozilla less reliant on "big brands", it's very easy -…

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 Fi…

> 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.

I wasn't a huge fan of Australis under Linux (it's okay in Windows), but Classic Theme Restorer [1] helps clean things up a bit. I'd highly recommend it.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/classicthemer...

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

#43

Post by sheetjs »

userbinator wrote: post #41
sheetjs wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the ads were the problem. The language that bothered me was the phrase "user-enhancing" when describing ads. Call a spade a spade

The title of this article also contains some obfuscatory language: "Moving Ahead"? "Sponsored Tiles"? What's wrong with a simple "Mozilla Will Add Adverts to Firefox New Tab Page"?

Mozilla announced the product with obfuscatory language in the first place:

> Excited to share the launch of @mozilla @firefox Tiles program, the first of our user-enhancing programs http://awe.sm/q55cA

https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504

More generally, https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publish... oozes with doublespeak and obfuscatory language

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

#44

Post by nnethercote »

Pacabel wrote: post #19
chimeracoder wrote: post #12

> The problem, however, is that this doesn’t really fit into Mozilla’s brand image. It’s supposed to be an independent, mission-driven organization. Once it starts taking money from big brands, it will be harder to maintain this image. This is a rather silly statement - most of Mozilla's funding already comes from Google, and has for a while. If you want to make Mozilla less reliant on "big brands", it's very easy -…

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 Fi…

Oh look. It's a post about Mozilla, so it's a chance for Pacabel to air out his/her laundry list of complaints about Mozilla yet again.

> I'd be very willing to directly donate money to them, as well.

I don't believe you.

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

#45

Post by krbbltr »

21echoes wrote: post #20
Pacabel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Fi…

> Desktop Firefox, for example, has gotten progressively worse over time. by what metrics? it uses less RAM, runs faster JS, renders faster, is easier to write add-ons for, is more in line with the HTML5 feature-set... > Mobile Firefox on Android doesn't exactly offer a very pleasant experience. compared to what? the stock browser? mobile chrome? in my experience it blows both of those out of the water. > They've was…

> compared to what? the stock browser? mobile chrome? in my experience it blows both of those out of the water.

I don't use Android, but I think those two have been one and the same for quite a while now.

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

#46

Post by Pacabel »

Zancarius wrote: post #42
Pacabel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Fi…

> 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. I wasn't a huge fan of Australis under Linux (it's okay in Windows), but Classic Theme Restorer [1] helps clean things up a bit. I'd highly recommend it. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/…

On one hand, it's good that such extensions exist. But it's getting very tedious having to install so many these days to replace functionality that was removed, or to fix up functionality that has been broken or made worse.

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

#47

Post by Pacabel »

nnethercote wrote: post #44
Pacabel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Fi…

Oh look. It's a post about Mozilla, so it's a chance for Pacabel to air out his/her laundry list of complaints about Mozilla yet again. > I'd be very willing to directly donate money to them, as well. I don't believe you.

Yes, I think Mozilla has collectively made some very bad choices these last few years. And, yes, I will express my displeasure when Mozilla and their actions are the topic of discussion.

I know I'm not alone in these beliefs. Just look at how Firefox's market share has plunged, for example. Look at how Persona saw minimal adoption. Notice how Firefox OS is suffering from a very similar lack of adoption.

Mozilla has a lot of potential to do a lot of good. This was exhibited quite well during the early years of Firefox and Thunderbird. They produced useful offerings that benefited millions of people. But since then they've been acting in ways that don't help their users, and that don't help themselves. At this point, they're just going on inertia they earned years ago.

I, for one, would really like to see them return to their former glory as a true leader, rather than an imitator and a maker of bad decisions.

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

#48

Post by Zancarius »

Pacabel wrote: post #46
Zancarius wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I wasn't a huge fan of Australis under Linux (it's okay in Windows), but Classic Theme Restorer [1] helps clean things up a bit. I'd highly recommend it. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/…

On one hand, it's good that such extensions exist. But it's getting very tedious having to install so many these days to replace functionality that was removed, or to fix up functionality that has been broken or made worse.

> But it's getting very tedious having to install so many these days to replace functionality that was removed

Click the link, click install. That's about as tedious as it gets. I've actually been using fewer addons as time goes on and the Classic Theme Restorer addon has some additional UI tweaks that I find interesting.

That said, I generally use two Firefox profiles: One for general browsing, one for documentation. The former is configured to use Australis more or less as packaged while the latter is configured to appear as closely as possible to classical Firefox (minus the FF button). Although there are some things I don't especially like about Australis, it's grown on me, and I'm someone who likes his tabs below the address bar. Thus, as someone who's been using both, I can't help myself from thinking that you're either not giving the new UI a fair wrap or you're being unnecessarily harsh. Some of your earlier comments in this thread strongly point toward the latter, but I suspect I'm just reading too far into your apparent disappointment. Or your disappointment is coloring your opinion more than you might realize. The point is that there are solutions to rectify what you perceive as significant drawbacks in the direction of Firefox's development.

> or to fix up functionality that has been broken or made worse.

To be honest, the only glaring issue I've found with FF29 is the rather horrid behavior of the print dialog. I like the direction it's going, generally, but under KDE, it doesn't allow printing a selection of text unless I re-enable the menu bar and print from there (maybe this works under Windows, I haven't tried). Otherwise, I can't think of any other issues that have been "broken or made worse." Compared to Chromium with 50+ tabs open, Firefox is exceptionally light on system resources, and I've since switched my browsing habits to use FF instead. I'm glad I did. It works well for me.

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

#49

Post by pcwalton »

Pacabel wrote: post #24
21echoes wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Desktop Firefox, for example, has gotten progressively worse over time. by what metrics? it uses less RAM, runs faster JS, renders faster, is easier to write add-ons for, is more in line with the HTML5 feature-set... > Mobile Firefox on Android doesn't exactly offer a very pleasant experience. compared to what? the stock browser? mobile chrome? in my experience it blows both of those out of the water. > They've was…

Well, after each desktop Firefox update I ask myself, "Am I better off now than I was with the last version?" In the Phoenix, Firebird and Firefox pre-4 days, I'd quite often find myself answering with "Yes". Since Firefox 4, though, I'm not sure if I've answered with "Yes" even once. Sometimes I'm not any better or worse off, but most times I'm worse off. For example, extensions would break very frequently for a lon…

> I think the Rust crew could have pulled off Rust 1.0 by the end of the year had they stabilized the language and standard library a few months back. But that didn't happen, and we're still seeing relatively significant breaking changes happening to this day. It just doesn't leave them much time all to freeze the language and libraries, and to then give it the significant amount of testing and bug fixing required of a respectable 1.0 release, before the end of 2014.

Yes, according to you, we should have frozen the memory-unsafe design decisions in a language whose entire selling point is memory safety, defeating the entire point of the language in an effort to reach 1.0.

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

#50

Post by pcwalton »

Pacabel wrote: post #26
pcwalton wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Asm.js is not a very sound approach, especially compared to technology like Native Client. Yes, it is. NaCl is not portable. PNaCl is tied to the nonstandard and Chrome-specific Pepper APIs, to say nothing of all of the issues of LLVM bitcode. > 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'…

What's the current roadmap for getting Rust 1.0 out the door? Last I saw, there were over 1500 issues in the project's GitHub issue tracker. Even assuming a lot of those may no longer be relevant, and assuming minimal growth, that's still not a small number of potential problems to deal with. And we're still seeing disruptive/breaking language and library changes, like the box-related ones recently. I know, I know, I…

> Last I saw, there were over 1500 issues in the project's GitHub issue tracker.

A tiny fraction of which are marked blocking 1.0.

> I know, I know, I've heard the "let's break it now rather than later" argument from you guys before.

And that's invalid why, exactly?

> 2014 is nearly half over. I know that production-grade programming language implementations don't just happen over night. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of thorough testing, and many bug fixes to result in a truly stable release. All of that takes a lot of time.

Backwards incompatible language changes don't set us back in terms of the 4 years of compiler stability and bug fixes that have been going on. Believe it or not, you can change the way a keyword is spelled without affecting compiler stability.

Anyone who has used Rust for a long time knows that ICE's are far less common now than they used to be.

Post reply on HN