Despite its emphasis on protecting privacy, Mozilla is moving towards integrating ads, backed by new infrastructure from their acquisition of Anonym. They claim this will maintain a balance between user control and online ad economics, using privacy-preserving tech. However, this shift appears to contradict Mozilla’s earlier stance of protecting users from invasive advertising practices, and it signals a change in their priorities.
I’m not interested in my computer striking a balance between my needs and the needs of people seeking to manipulate me into buying things.
I paid for my computer, it serves my needs. Yes I do run Linux, how did you guess?
But that isn’t the balance that’s being struck. Mozilla is trying to balance between useful services being available for free and people’s right to privacy. If you’re using any websites that has staff employed, they’re more likely than not being paid for by advertising.
The model for most the content on the internet doesn’t work without advertising. The people who are “zero tolerance” on ads are going to prevent possible compromises from being made and just encourage an arms race. I don’t think we win that arms race, we get more insidious forms of tracking and brazen advertising.
Whatever compromise anyone tries to come up with will be ignored and exploited as hard as advertisers possibly can.
A compromise that actually works would depend on advertisers actually complying. The advertisers that do will be vastly outnumbered by the advertisers that don’t.
So we’re getting the arms race either way.
Honestly, despite the crypto, good on Brave browser for trying to subvert the advertising model by providing an actual monetization alternative
What does this even mean? Brave didnt find something to “subvert the advertising model”, they have a subscription lol. Mozilla is trying to keep its browser free and safe, especially now that it’s losing its billion dollar google funding.
You haven’t heard about the Brave ads that let you slowly accumulate tokens that you can then use to tip creators or websites? I’m not saying it was a good plan, or an ethical plan, but it was… You know, something.
Unlike what Mozilla did, Brave didn’t enable this by default, but they heavily marketed it as a feature.
If Mozilla implemented some kind of tipping system, that could be interesting. Apparently, such a system already could exist under GNU Taler too.
brave also used it to scam people by taking tips for creators who weren’t on the platform. if the creator never signed up, they kept that money.
and they had an adblocker that replaced ads with their own, making the browser money instead of the site.
they have actively contributed to making the web worse. saying “at least they’re doing something” is like praising the hard work and entrepreneurial spirit of a mugger.
You’re 100% right about Brave being scummy.
And I hope my point didn’t come across as a defensd of Brave, but rather, “how is it that Mozilla is doing this thing in a worse way than a company that is infamously disreputable?”
Brave can make micro payments to content creators based on the number of views to the site, directly supporting content creators without ads or the need to join the patreon for each creator. It’s a fully optional system, off by default but prompted upon opening the browser for the first time. It’s a cool idea but they kind of spoiled it by making it be a crypto wallet with ads to earn the crypto.
Also, Brave doesn’t have a subscription…?
Chromium shill
Lol chill, I use Firefox. I can still call out good things in other browsers even if I don’t like the browser as a whole for other reasons. None of what I said there was in support of chromium.
Adverts are visual and psychological pollution. Get fucked.
Mozilla sold out a long time ago, they are nothing like they used to be. Everyone should be ditching Firefox for forks if possible. Yes, Firefox is still miles ahead of anything Chromium-based but we can’t trust Mozilla to not screw over their users anymore (and it’s been apparent for YEARS…Pocket, “Sponsored” shortcuts and links, Mozilla VPN popup ads, this behavior is hardly new). What can we trust? Firefox forks with the bullshit stripped out, mostly. I’ve been using LibreWolf for several years on my Linux, Windows, and MacOS systems now. I originally switched because of the Mozilla VPN popups but at the time, complaining about those popups was met with a bunch of Mozilla apologists going “it’s not that bad” “they’re a big company and they need their precious monies”…no. That was ADVERTISING front and center, and it was in Firefox years ago. So was Pocket. So was having Amazon links auto-filled on the new tab shortcuts. Go to something that isn’t run by money. Go to a community-maintained and sanitized fork.
You do understand those forks do 1% of the work required to keep the Firefox codebase performant, standards compliant and technically sound?
If Mozilla disappears those forks will too.
Hopefully Mozilla employees will kick out their money sink CEO with double legs before the browser disappears for good.
I don’t know if it’s the CEO, the board or the wider leadership team but I agree they haven’t been laser focused on building a better browser and that isn’t good enough.
It’s the board and the wider leadership who are controlled by Google and intent on destroying Firefox. The current CEO is pretty new, and replaced a heavily criticized CEO that spent years overseeing the decline of Firefox. The new CEO is a former McKinsey consultant.
Been called an idiot for saying that I wouldn’t trust Firefox as far as I can throw it like 2 months ago after they made telemetry opt out.
I can’t believe that someone who is privacy conscientious would just stick to their guns rather than watching out for their privacy.
I just hope someone else picks up the shards and runs with it and then we can all just focus on making them better instead of getting riled up over a god damn browser lol.
This is such an ignorant take, this preserves privacy, did you even read the fucking article??? Like seriously this comment is purely false assumptions
I did, and I disagree with their decisions.
I can condense their article down to “we need money, and we can get it through ads, so we built our own ad network to preserve privacy”.
But I don’t like that. This decision does not exist in a vacuum. This comes after a number of other decisions leading me to believe they are shifting priority to making a profit. Telemetry being opt-out, pocket, selling ads on home screen, …
This is the icing on a shit cake and I’m sorry, Mozilla destroyed their value proposition about half way into their chain of bad decisions.
If you still wanna use Firefox, fine. I don’t care about that. I don’t understand why, but that’s ok, it’s your god damn decision. But I wanna alert everyone else that Mozilla is not who they used to be and it’s time to reevaluate why you use the browser you do.
Saying this is an ignorant take is invalidating all the experiences I’ve had configuring Firefox back to being privacy friendly, and I don’t appreciate you calling me ignorant for that. If you disagree, that’s fair, but you can do it without attacking my credibility. And doing so by giving actual reasons would definitely help your case.
It’s crazy how for me the worst thing about Firefox is how much people complain about it online, never had a single issue with it
Firefox hate has become more and more rampant as Google tries to tighten their fist around chromium challengers
It’d be cool if Mozilla could just stick with one thing for more than a couple months. Even if that thing is terrible. Right now it’s like some physical embodiment of ADHD is running the company.
fuck it
just going to print out the man pages for wget and study it like a religious text
we maintain the same goal – to build digital advertising solutions that respect individuals’ rights
Does it include the right to be able to choose not to be advertised to?
Yes, advertising enables free access to most of what the internet provides
What does this even mean?
I don’t read their blog posts but seems like they have fully embraced startup lingo.
At the end of the day web sites cost money. There needs to be a way to fund them.
People 100% aren’t going to pay to access every random website they want to visit. So what you’d end up with in a world without ads is only the big corporations being able to run a website.
Back in my day (lol) ads were based on the website not the user. When you set up ads you selected keywords for your website and those were used to select ads.
Like you’d visit a programming blog and get ads for computer games and porn. Made total sense. You’re still targeting your target audience just not the individual.
Targeted ads are obviously way more effective and therefore generate more money. But it’s not the only way.
The alternative is to set up some system where you pay a monthly fee and it’s divided amongst the websites you use. But that seems like an equally bad privacy nightmare.
Targeted ads are obviously way more effective and therefore generate more money. But it’s not the only way.
I’m not so sure this has turned out to be all that true
People 100% aren’t going to pay to access every random website they want to visit. So what you’d end up with in a world without ads is only the big corporations being able to run a website.
I’m not so convinced. I run a website with zero ads or tracking and I’m not a big corporation.
I’ve been sticking with FF proper since it has the sync stuff that’s easily used. But it sounds like it’s about time to set up a sync server and run a FF fork.
I will never ever accept any ad technology except maybe
<a href="company_url"><img src="funny_picture.gif"></a>Would you look at that, privacy preserving advertisement!
Let’s take it one step further and go really crazy with a/b testing
<a href="company_url/campaign1"><img src="funny_picture.gif"></a> <a href="company_url/campaign2"><img src="different_picture.gif"></a>
I need to send an email to Mozilla soon. The fact that I’m highly convinced that these three Linux youtubers would do a better job than the current management should tell you a lot about what’s happening at Mozilla (yes, it’s that bad).
Daily reminder that Mozilla’s new CEO is a former McKinsey consultant.
Please do, that email will totally change everything
We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market. But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozilla’s history. And that willingness to take on the hard things, even when not universally accepted, is exactly what the internet needs today.
Out of touch with reality…
I’m so glad that Libre Wolf fork exists, that doesn’t change a fact of Mozilla foundation goes in a really wrong direction :/
Edit: typo
The fork is not maintained by LibreOffice.
Yes, thanks - autocorrect messed up my post (I meant Libre Wolf). it’s fixed now
Don’t quote me on this but if I remember correctly, Mozilla foundation has nothing to do with Firefox development and was also kind of shady for some reason.
Thanks for pointing this out - I’ll do some research on this topic in a free time (as I don’t know much facts about Mozilla foundation) :)
I hope everybody criticizing the move either do not use products from Mozilla or, if they do, contribute however they can up to their own capabilities. If you don’t, if you ONLY criticize, yet use Firefox (or a derivative, e.g. LibreWolf) or arguably worst use something fueled by ads (e.g. Chromium based browsers) then you are unfortunately contributing precisely to the model you are rejecting.
So just to be clear, people aren’t allowed to criticize ads in Firefox unless they’re open source developers actively contributing to Firefox or they only use… What, Opera?
I thought saying
contribute however they can up to their own capabilities
was actually very clear but seems I wasn’t clear enough so that means… literally doing ANYTHING except only criticizing. That can mean being an open-source developer, yes, but that can also means translation, giving literally 1 cent, etc. It means doing anything at all that would not ONLY be saying “this is good, but it’s not good enough” without doing actually a single thing to change, especially while actually using another free of charge browser that is funded by advertisement. Honestly if that’s not clear enough I’m not sure what would be … but please, do ask again I will genuinely try to be clearer.
Mozilla could have focused on being user-supported through fundraising like Wikipedia. Instead they chose the comfortable path of being funded by their biggest competitor, who is an evil monopoly spyware ad business, which has been compelling Mozilla to kill Firefox and become the badies on the way down.
You can donate to Mozilla.
Perhaps they should’ve put that more front and center. But if they add a prominent donate button the people on here would probably lose their shit too.
What on earth would that do? The poisonous leadership would not use it to improve the browser nor would they start working for donors instead of Google.
My point is that there is a funding model that they could have pursued when they still had goodwill and trust. And my hope is if the government finally puts the boot in with Google, then this current version of mozilla will collapse, the rats will leave the ship and hopefully a good browser will emerge the way firefox emerged from netscape.
But you just said
Mozilla could have focused on being user-supported through fundraising like Wikipedia.
It is an option.
Clearly it isn’t working well enough for them.
They would have had to build that infrastructure. I’m not saying fundraising is easy. But it’s possible as proven by wikipedia. They could have cut Google loose 10 years ago and said "we’re going to use our runway to try to put together a wikimedia foundation style fundraising operation. I don’t think they can do it now because the trust, goodwill and quite frankly, userbase is gone.
If you were implying that I said being funded by Alphabet/Google was a good thing then let me be explicit, I did NOT say that nor believe it to be the case. Now, once again, cf my actual comment about pragmatic better alternative we can rely on and support today. If you meant to suggest better and are supporting that, please do share.
So, blaming the victim.
Would you look at that yet another anti Mozilla post in this community. Go ahead and scroll thru the posts and you’ll find at least 4 from the last week or two alone
