I am sure all the people complaining here regularly donate to Mozilla.
Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page
71–80 of 92 posts
Re: Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page
#72I don’t get how people can defend Mozilla over this yet blast chrome for simply being a Google product. Yeah there’s concern over what Google tracks but I’d be using their search and services in Firefox anyways.
>"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…
> are constantly phoning home and mining data
This seems to sadly be also true in Firefox nowadays with things like telemetry, crash reporting, safebrowsing.downloads.remote, etc.
Re: Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page
#73Someone has to pay their programmers. It's through ads via partnership with Google or other ads.
Someone has to overpay their manager, marketing, and executive personnel with money that they receive from donations supposedly for improving Firefox.
Re: Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Chromium also syncs all your data to Google’s servers the moment you login to any Google service. You said something about Chromium and supported it with a link to a blog about Chrome. Though the terms can be confusing, it is very important to get them right if you run around making charges like this. I built a Chromium-based browser and it doesn't sync data with Google.
> I built a Chromium-based browser and it doesn't sync data with Google. AFAIK Chromium, by default, syncs data with Google as well unless you can disable it by some custom compile flags or something. Do we seriously expect (the majority of) users to compile their own browser?
I would expect at least the major linux distros to turn said flags by default.
Re: Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I built a Chromium-based browser and it doesn't sync data with Google. AFAIK Chromium, by default, syncs data with Google as well unless you can disable it by some custom compile flags or something. Do we seriously expect (the majority of) users to compile their own browser?
I would expect at least the major linux distros to turn said flags by default.
As I've just checked, Ubuntu doesn't. Don't know about other distros.
Re: Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page
#76The 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.
Waterfox has done this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfox
Re: Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page
#77Earlier 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?
I didn't say they should avoid ads, I said (in effect) that they should avoid dark patterns.
Simply announce the intention before and with the update, be clear about it and how to truly/fully enable and disable it. Doesn't even have to be a popup.
This and many of their recent interactions have avoided that transparency and been very disengenuous with their communications before and after the fact.
When you start to think that you have to be sneaky to get ads in front of users, or to monetize at all then you are already thinking of it as 'us vs. the users' and that's quite a bad position to be in. Especially for a company who has been banking on the user goodwill market lately.
How they're going about this paints a very conflicting picture of Mozilla. The organization seems bipolar at best.
Re: Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page
#78C'mon Firefox... you can do better than this
Re: Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page
#79Response from Mozilla: "This snippet was an experiment to provide more value to Firefox users through offers provided by a partner. It was not a paid placement or advertisement. We are continually looking for more ways to say thanks for using Firefox. In a similar vein, earlier this month we offered Firefox users a free opportunity to enjoy a live concert from Phosphorescent." Well, maybe it's just me but it seems ev…
I switched 100% from Firefox to Brave, once I discovered: All my Chromium extensions work great (including 1Password); they fixed pdf.js so it now works properly on PDFs behind auth (in the Beta); and the Wildvine component (which is optional and opt-in) works great with Netflix.
Re: Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page
#80Earlier 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…
> are constantly phoning home and mining data This seems to sadly be also true in Firefox nowadays with things like telemetry, crash reporting, safebrowsing.downloads.remote, etc.
fortunately it can all be disabled in about:config as needed