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For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

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Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#411

Post by MrAlex94 »

itscrush wrote: post #317
MrAlex94 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few criticisms of LibreWolf: * There is no legal entity behind the project. Should anything ever happen with the project (it can happen, even if unlikely), there are no legal ramifications. * The binaries aren't signed. Yes, code signing is a bit of a racket, but there is some merit in it. * There is no auto-update mechanism. Might not seem like a big deal, but IMO it is, especially on Windows where you're recommen…

Have you spent time with Waterfox as an alternative or have some thoughts when comparing against Librefox? In app update prompts work for me, they have a TOS / Legal Entity it seems. They broke away from Startpage in recentish years. Plenty of feature trade offs to compare though with Librefox.

Yes, I'm the developer of Waterfox :-)

> Plenty of feature trade offs to compare though with Librefox.

Yes, for sure. Definitively different goal alignments.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#412

Post by dgb23 »

remedan wrote: post #142
qwertox wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most users just accept the defaults they’re given, and framing the issue as one of individual responsibility is a great way to mollify savvy users while ensuring that most peoples’ privacy remains compromised. Cookie banners are a good example of where this thinking ends up. The problem we currently have with cookie banners is thanks to the browser vendors not caring about it. An API could exist which a page can qu…

This was already tried with the Do Not Track header. Websites simply ignore it. They don't want an easy way to get the user's preference. Because they know that most users would set it to decline tracking. Sites would rather annoy every visitor for the chance that they click 'accept'.

This could easily be enforced now. I don't get how it isn't.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#413

Post by anon264523645 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #377
lolinder wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla has tried experiment after experiment to try to earn money. Let's try forcing Pocket down people's throats. Let's automatically install Mr Robot. You know what people will love? Full-page ads for a VPN! No one has seen enough VPN ads! The one funding model they haven't experimented with at all is actually asking people to pay for Firefox. Donations or subscription, they haven't even tried it once. And yet peo…

>And yet people will over and over again insist that that would never work. Because it won't. And there is mountains of data to back it up. People will not pay if they don't have to. Some people will, for sure, but to get those some people to carry the weight of "all the people" is totally untenable. Besides, Chrome is "free".

Wikipedia has mountains of $$$ to back up that a lot of people do pay, even when it's not necessary at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#414

Post by jillesvangurp »

doctor_eval wrote: post #106
jillesvangurp wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which will lead to counter moves by alterative browsers and websites and Google risking the loss of browser market share. If you think this is unthinkable, just look back at Microsoft's dominance of the browser market twenty years ago. Exactly like Google is doing they were pushing through all sorts of user hostile stuff via internet explorer. Before Chrome came along, Firefox was one of the few holdouts against them…

I don’t disagree with you in principle, but this history is not quite right. IIRC the IE6 team was shut down. Basically only Mozilla and Apple were building browsers at scale until Chrome came along. I might be misremembering?

Yes, you are definitely missing a decade here. The internet explorer/edge team was shut down long after Google grabbed most of the market share.

Chrome was launched 2008; Safari had its first release in 2003. And I was using the early Phoenix builds (later the name change to Firefox happened) in 2001. The version of internet explorer around the time Chrome launched was v7. IE 6 was already old news by then. And IE 8 launched soon after the Chrome launch. 9, 10, and 11 followed. And then the switch to Edge happened; which was a complete rewrite of their browser engine. Only in 2020, MS announced switching to Chromium. So, that's about 12 years of MS trying to hold on before they finally gave up.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#415

Post by setopt »

xk_id wrote: post #374
CalRobert wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will begrudgingly admit he has a point here. In a few years I imagine almost all sites will refuse to serve anything without WEI, and the "open" web will be the preserve of a few hobbyists. Annoyingly you'll still need to use a compromised browser (or worse, app) to do anything with your bank, etc.

> the "open" web will be the preserve of a few hobbyists. And maybe that will be the Web healing. If all the value extraction moves elsewhere, we might finally have a sane web of hypertext documents again.

Unless that is labeled the new darkweb and blocked by the firewalls of ISPs and govs.

I hope enough mainstream things remain on the open web for it to be unrealistic to fully block.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#416

Post by zztop44 »

hobs wrote: post #397
zztop44 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People used to have a dozen different instances of IE6 open. It was a pain to switch between them and it made your computer run slow. Firefox had tabs. And it had AdBlock. Those were things people wanted. But these days, Chrome is plenty good enough for most people. Even if Firefox had a perfect privacy story and focused on their core users’ every whim, I don’t think their market share would grow.

Well then they need to close up shop or think of something else, because adding more ad tracking isn't a feature to anyone but predatory advertisers, and they will only keep paying you if users keep showing up.

For what it’s worth, I agree. Adding more tracking definitely isn’t going to help. But I don’t think there are any easy solutions. I definitely don’t envy the people in charge of Firefox’s product strategy.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#417

Post by SebastianKra »

_heimdall wrote: post #233
SebastianKra wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My perfect world would have a law against advertising in general. If someone's paying you to say something, it's a conflict of interest and illegal. Hopefully, the vacuum of people needing to know things would result in better independent Product reviews. And the vacuum of not spending 30% of your company budget on advertising would hopefully lead to sinking prices and people being more willing to spend on things tha…

> If someone's paying you to say something, it's a conflict of interest and illegal. That already misses a huge problem though, I don't pay Mozilla for Firefox and I don't pay most online sites and services that gobble up my data and sell it off.

That's what my third paragraph was for.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#418

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

Klonoar wrote: post #335
phicoh wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is because Mozilla has consistently moved Firefox in the direction of a Chrome clone. When Firefox started is was not a copy of existing browsers. There is no reason it would have to be now. But they have rejected their core users. So now the only option left is a Chrome clone because that is what people are used to.

Even if it was a credible idea, how exactly do you think that Firefox - the browser that the minute anything changes, the internet blows up over - would significantly alter their product in a way to differentiate themselves from Chrome? This isn’t even getting into base level stuff like available engineering resources, or the scenarios where the other vendors often control or have deals to give them favorable distrib…

> Even if it was a credible idea, how exactly do you think that Firefox - the browser that the minute anything changes, the internet blows up over - would significantly alter their product in a way to differentiate themselves from Chrome?

You're presenting it as though any change would be met with hostility, but the alternative is that they're only met with hostility because they keep making changes that hurt the users. A little while ago they announced that they were working on properly supporting vertical tabs and tab groups; that wasn't met with any hostility. Of course, in the same announcement they said they were planning to dumb down the rest of the interface even more, which was. But the point stands; they can get a positive reaction by making changes their users actually like, they just don't do that as often as they do the other thing.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#419

Post by cesarb »

phicoh wrote: post #298
Klonoar wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One reason is that the people who would be promoting Firefox aren't. Individual promotion of Firefox worked very well when the browser(s) it was trying to displace were effectively frozen in time. Chrome (et al) and Safari are not those browsers. The average user isn't going to get a markedly different experience by switching to Firefox.

That is because Mozilla has consistently moved Firefox in the direction of a Chrome clone. When Firefox started is was not a copy of existing browsers. There is no reason it would have to be now. But they have rejected their core users. So now the only option left is a Chrome clone because that is what people are used to.

> When Firefox started is was not a copy of existing browsers.

IIRC, when Firefox started, it was very similar to the full Mozilla Suite with some features removed (which is not surprising, since it started as a Mozilla Suite derivative and they shared a lot of code). It has a long lineage going back to the old-school Netscape Navigator.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#420

Post by mardifoufs »

Piraty wrote: post #113

If 1% of regular Firefox users just donated the equivalent of 10USD per year to mozilla, they would not have the need to find ...eyebrow-raising... ways to earn money.

0% of donations go towards financing the Firefox project. Donations to Mozilla are explicitly not used for Firefox, they say so in the donation page.
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