Is Mozilla that lacking in money that they have to do this?
Mozilla struggles with diversity of revenue sources. They make 95%+ of their income from their search deal. That's a lot of eggs in one basket.
Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page
51–60 of 92 posts
Re: Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page
#52I've never been a big fan of start pages, even (or especially?) those with supposedly personalized content. Bookmarks are fine, but tiles showing most frequently visited sites seems like a pushy way of forcing the user use bookmarks, and I'm not really into that kind of user manipulation. Like this case, these personalized start pages always seem like they're designed to give the browser creator access to the user's…
I used to use Firefox’s Recommended Stories, but eventually disabled them because they were very clickbaity, and usually when I was opening a new tab I was working on a particular task and it would distract me from whatever that was.
Re: Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page
#53Unfortunately that's inevitable given that the public expects a browser to be a free product. The money to pay software developers for keeping the product up-to-date has to come from somewhere: so it's either selling the users' data, or having a paid subscription, or something similar to what Wikipedia does.
Why does it have to come from any of these?
Companies need web browsers (and their component parts), too. They're going to pay engineers to work on them, anyway. That's how development is supported for Linux, Git, Postgres, Ruby, etc.
If every Git command started displaying ads tomorrow, would you say that that's "unfortunately inevitable" given that people expect version control to be a free product, and that the Git developers need to be paid somehow, and there's only 3 possible ways for that to happen?
("It was not a paid placement or advertisement", they say, so it's doubly strange to try to excuse it as a necessary revenue source. There is no revenue for Mozilla here.)
Re: Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are ways to go about this that are much cleaner and less suspect. By simply shoehorning this into the existing Snippets functionality and deploying it without warning they're continuing a dark interaction pattern with their users. Their response to the issue - a weird way of maybe saying they weren't paid for this and that it is purely to help users - is either a weasel words lie or a ridiculously out of touch…
What are those ways? Develop a separate search engine product where their primary revenue would be from ads there so they can release a web browser to track you more to increasse the reveneu from such ads that do not appear in your browser, but are aided by your browser?
At this point just admitting the ads are ads would be a good start.
Re: Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page
#55I can see how upsetting this is but let’s go on a hyperbole and compare it with Chrome. The fact that we have a say about the future of Firefox is a feature that no other (proprietary) browser has. Beware of your negativity bias.
Lets compare. Chrome has never showed me ads. Most developers target Chrome and you're less likely to experience issues. Chrome is also open-source (BSD) as Chromium, and I can use a fork (such as Vivaldi, MS Edge, Opera, Brave, or Ungoogled Chromium) if I have an issue with upstream.
> Chrome has never showed me ads.
Totally fair, but this alone by no means indicate that Chrome is more privacy-friendly than Firefox.
Firefox was the first browser to implement DNT (Do Not Track) alongside other major browsers in early 2011, whereas Chrome/Chromium implemented it nearly two years later at the end of 2012.[0]
> Most developers target Chrome and you're less likely to experience issues.
…and don’t you find it worrisome that interoperability might one day completely fade away?
> Chrome is also open-source (BSD) as Chromium
Yet Google still has a massive influence over the project. For example, see what I wrote about DNT above. Chromium also syncs all your data to Google’s servers the moment you login to any Google service.[1]
[0]: https://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?revision=156566&view=...
[1]: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/09/23/why-im-l...
Re: Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"Simply being a google product" which, like all Google products, are constantly phoning home and mining data across all your web behaviors. Recent changes are hostile towards privacy. Worse still, for mobile devices they don't allow add-ons given it will impact mobile ad-revenue, all the while the OS itself is mining user data. Disabling the data-mining is nearly impossible. Google makes tens of billions off this da…
I think you missed my point. I would be using google regardless so the data mining in the browser is kind of a moot point. So my choice becomes a browser with ads or a browser without.
>my choice becomes a browser with ads or a browser without.
given Chrome is pro-ads and doesn't allow add-ons for mobile devices, your choices are Firefox, or perhaps Brave
Re: Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page
#57I can see how upsetting this is but let’s go on a hyperbole and compare it with Chrome. The fact that we have a say about the future of Firefox is a feature that no other (proprietary) browser has. Beware of your negativity bias.
Lets compare. Chrome has never showed me ads. Most developers target Chrome and you're less likely to experience issues. Chrome is also open-source (BSD) as Chromium, and I can use a fork (such as Vivaldi, MS Edge, Opera, Brave, or Ungoogled Chromium) if I have an issue with upstream.
Chrome shows me ads for Google products all the time!
Re: Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page
#58Is Mozilla that lacking in money that they have to do this?
IIRC their Yahoo deal runs out in 2020, they'll be in trouble after that.
Re: Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How do we take back user privacy when the world's computing window becomes poisoned by those impassioned for money? It is deplorable behavior. Would enough users pay money for a browser?
Technically with moves like this, we already are. The question should instead be phrased: would enough users opt into giving money instead of being advertised to, and that's much trickier. You'd lose some opportunity cost with an ad or not model and having to support that, but I think a nontrivial amount of people would rather spend money than be advertised to.
Eventually paying users will get ads too.
Re: Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page
#60The more they pull stunts like these, the more i realize it's time to fork FF and get rid of all their garbage. Make Pocket optional, remove the (paid?) list of URLs that's apparently preloaded, remove all of the phone home shit.
> it's time to fork FF and get rid of all their garbage. The nice thing about Firefox is that you don't even need to fork for that. > Make Pocket optional Go to about:config and set extensions.pocket.enabled to false. > remove the (paid?) list of URLs that's apparently preloaded If you mean the stuff that's displayed on new tab pages (like the snippet in TFA), you can get rid of it by changing "Firefox Home Content"…
I think it's completely fair to judge Firefox by its defaults though, because I imagine a tiny percentage will fully tweak their about:config to more privacy-conscious settings, and that percentage will go down the more non-technical people install it.