• Asafum@feddit.nl
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    11 minutes ago

    Oh you mean one of the only two reasons I use this fucking thing? Ad blocking and privacy?

    You’re shitting on both. That’s like… Idk, Craftsman making tools out of plastic and removing the lifetime warranty… Wtf do I even need you for then?

  • o_d [he/him]@lemmygrad.ml
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    3 hours ago

    This feels like the turning point for Firefox that we all feared would come. They’ve now switched to outright gas lighting their users. They’re trying to convince us that if they take a stab at doing ads the right way, that we can have a web filled with tolerable ads that work for both the user and the business.

    Ads and user data collection are the worst part of the internet. Nothing has ever gotten better because of them. And there’s already far too much focus in this area. Mozilla just wants to be another exploiter so that they can have a piece of the stolen value pie.

  • erenkoylu@lemmy.ml
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    4 hours ago

    It is time to fork Firefox. Mozilla has bern hijacked by people who don’t care about its vision.

  • GetOffMyLan@programming.dev
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    4 hours ago

    And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet, and the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.

    I’m afraid they aren’t wrong. The majority of people aren’t going to pay for access to random blogs etc. So we’d end up with only the big players having usable sites.

    People kick off about ads but rarely suggest an alternative to funding the internet.

    Back in the day ads were targeted based on the website’s target audience not the user’s personal data. It works fine but is less effective. Don’t see why they couldn’t go that way.

    • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org
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      2 hours ago

      I don’t believe a web browser should be designed specifically for one business model, period.

      There are plenty of free sites. Truly free, with no ads.

      There are plenty of paid sites, supported by subscribers.

      There are plenty of sites funded by educational institutions, nonprofits, or similar.

      There used to be plenty of sites that were supported by non-invasive ads.

      I don’t give a damn if everyone uses Facebook and Google. That doesn’t mean we need to cater to their business model at the technical level.

      • refalo@programming.dev
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        2 minutes ago

        That doesn’t mean we need to cater to their business model at the technical level.

        From what I have seen, it does… if you want to have a popular site that stays running well, and don’t charge your users for access.

    • Pulptastic@midwest.social
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      3 hours ago

      More effective is a massive understatement. Now they can precisely measure effectiveness and adjust their strategy in real time to maximize output. They have increased effective effectiveness several fold. The cat is out of the bag, even if we try to roll this back the googles of the world know the data is there and can’t not harvest it. Our best strategy has to combine regulation and monopoly busting, break these companies into smaller ones that have less power to comb through big data.

      For a good read on this, check out The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuniga.

    • erenkoylu@lemmy.ml
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      4 hours ago

      Internet was fine in the early 2000s before the rise of social media platforms resulted in surveillance advertisement complex.

      It was a different place, but worked ok.

  • Sam_Bass@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    rockbottom: NOBODY wants to see the ads you throw in our faces. doesnt matter that, as you claim, those ad views pay you for your content. there is no good way to make those ads palatable.

  • datavoid@lemmy.ml
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    5 hours ago

    Wow, utterly shocked that a company with a shit CEO that takes most of its money from Google would have these viewpoints.

    I’m sure it is completely coincidental that ublock is about to die as well.

      • datavoid@lemmy.ml
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        1 hour ago

        Not in Firefox specifically, but many chromium based browsers are about to lose access to the original ublock. I’ve been planning on switching to Firefox when this goes through for a while now.

    • tb_@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      I think the bigger issue is them potentially losing their Google income.

      They’ve failed to diversify their income with a bunch of failed subscription services, Google is in hot waters because of anti-competitive behaviour; they’re going to need something.

      Which isn’t to say I like it. But “this is happening because they take Google money” is parroted beneath every slightly negative thing Mozilla does.

  • moitoi@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 hours ago

    I don’t see how they think it’s a good move. I’m not speaking about people being upset. Most of the Firefox users are either people having at least some tech knowledge or people which use it because of a person with some tech knowledge.

    And most of these people use an ad-blocker, know how to install a fork and so on. So, from the beginning, I don’t know who think it’s a good idea other than to kill Firefox.

  • Rayquetzalcoatl@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    Can one thing please not be full of adverts :( I’ll pay for the browser, I just want marketers to fuck off for a while lol

  • Majestic@lemmy.ml
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    7 hours ago

    My problem with this in spite of the dire situation they face if Google is forced to cut funding by anti-trust court rulings (or not even forced but they make paying off Mozilla a moot point so they stop) is that they become an ad company. Ads become tied to their CEO compensation, to the salaries of the people who develop it.

    They claim they’re making a better kind of ad network, a privacy respecting kind. The problem is the ad industry doesn’t want less data, they want more. There are no looming laws that would force the ad industry to adopt a more privacy respecting alternative or die and without that the ad industry is going to shun this and it’ll be a failure and then they’ll have a failed ad network that they can either discard entirely or adapt to industry standards of privacy invasion and abuse and continue to exist and then they’ll make another “hard choices” post about having to do that.

    And I can see it now. This experiment will fail and after some pressure from the ad industry and some devil-on-shoulder whispering Mozilla will begrudgingly start to enshittify. Their ad network will become less privacy respecting by tiny little steps, by salami-slicing or boiling the frog, the whole privacy-preserving measurement thing will be thrown out BUT they’ll still claim they respect you more than Google and will at first perhaps but that will erode. Maybe they’ll just implode at some point after that which given Google is being found a monopoly works just fine for Google and the rest of big tech who want a more centralized, locked down browser company that wants to help implement DRM that can’t be circumvented, that wants to help lock down everything on the web to restrict users freedoms to choose what is displayed or if they can save it or record it or copy it to say nothing of blocking ads.

    • EnderMB@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      I used to work in a marketing agency, and had a few clients that heavily used advertising data.

      I’d go as far as to say that while more data is nice, good data is much better. If Mozilla can somehow produce an advertising platform that is not intrusive, is opt-in, and has a wide enough reach to satisfy advertisers, they’re on to a winning strategy. Furthermore, they would need to codify any changes into Mozilla itself to ensure that advertising never gets to intrude on privacy or the browser experience - with the removal of the CEO and entire exec team as the cost for triggering this.

      With all that said, I think the threat of doing this is probably a good thing. Mozilla’s track record of products is, frankly, piss poor. The thing is, everyone seems to be good at advertising, so there’s no reason why if Google leaves they can’t just say “fine, we’re an advertising company now” and eat their lunch.

      • abbenm@lemmy.ml
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        5 hours ago

        I don’t see how eating their lunch would happen. Something like 85-90% of Mozilla’s income every year is from their Google search partnership. Google does some sort of revenue sharing thing where a portion of the value of search ads clicked through Firefox goes back to Mozilla, but the payment for search partnership itself, well, if that goes away, there’s no lunch to eat, metaphorically. There’s nothing to replace it with. Maybe Bing takes it’s place but I’m not sure that would happen.

        I think the elephant in the room here is that Mozilla has 0.2% of the revenue that Google has, but is sustaining market share orders of magnitude higher than that. But unfortunately, at this point there’s a growing echo chamber of extremely low effort comments assuming that if you could just run back the clock, and not focus on “distractions” like their VPN or Mozilla.social, or the Mr. Robot Easter egg, that they would have overtaken Chrome in market share.

        Like it was this easily achievable thing that just slipped through their fingers, rather than an inevitable consequence of Google’s disproportionate finances and monopoly power.

        • EnderMB@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          It’s probably more on the lines of Google losing advertising share to every other company (Meta, Amazon, Unity, Microsoft) that has gotten into the ad business in recent years - all with minimal experience in ads, but either data, infrastructure, or visitors to sell. Mozilla definitely will have the infrastructure and visitors, even if opt-in.

          I don’t agree that they’ll overtake Google, or could have overtaken Chrome with their product tie-ins/offerings. Google is a beast, whereas the average person probably couldn’t tell you who makes Firefox (or maybe even what Firefox is).

  • modulus@lemmy.ml
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    8 hours ago

    I kept giving Mozilla the benefit of the doubt and telling myself things weren’t so bad.

    I was wrong.

    I’ll continue using Firefox because it’s the least bad option, but I can’t advocate for it in good faith anymore, and I don’t expect it to last long with this orientation.

    So it goes.

    • Redex@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      Ok sure, what do you want them to do instead then? 80% of their income is reliant on a tech giant’s grace and is seemingly more and more likely to be cutoff soon. They need to survive somehow, and every monetised service they tried flopped thusfar.

      • doleo@lemmy.one
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        2 hours ago

        How about not have a multi-million-dollar-costing CEO? Seems a bit rich (pun intended) for a supposed non-profit org.

        • LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world
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          52 minutes ago

          Yeah I’m not defending that but CEO pay only rounds to like 1% of their total expenditures. Developing a browser is expensive.

      • IHave69XiBucks@lemmygrad.ml
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        2 hours ago

        Maybe im a dumbass, but im currently using an entire operating system that is community funded, and made. How is it that its possible to do it with linux, and all the things that go with linux, but a web browser can’t do it without getting into ads? Why are web browsers so special that they just need oogles and oogles of money to function?

      • rhabarba@feddit.org
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        6 hours ago

        What makes you think that developing a free web browser needs to grant anyone any income?

        • Metz@lemmy.world
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          6 hours ago

          Do you think developers don’t have to eat? or pay rent? And donations alone do not cut it.

          • rhabarba@feddit.org
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            6 hours ago

            Being a developer myself (with no ads in his software), I don’t think you understand my point. The software I write in my free time does not pay my bills. That’s why I also have an actual job.

            • Metz@lemmy.world
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              6 hours ago

              You are aware that there are full-time developers working at Mozilla, yes? Developing a browser is not a hobby-project that you can pull off with some volunteers in their free time. You need professionals that work on such a giant project with their full attention.

              Developing Firefox is their job. And of course they want to get paid for that (and deserve it). Just like you get paid for your actual job.

              • rhabarba@feddit.org
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                5 hours ago

                (and deserve it)

                Please enlighten me: how do they deserve to be paid for a non-profit product?

                • Metz@lemmy.world
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                  5 hours ago

                  How does someone deserve to be paid for work done? Is that your question?

                  Is this some kind of pathetic troll attempt?

                  I will not reward that with further attention.

                • abbenm@lemmy.ml
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                  5 hours ago

                  Non-profit doesn’t mean that there’s no employees. They’re still organizations that have a cash flow, seek to raise funds, and employ people to serve their mission. Most non-profits have paid employees.

    • GetOffMyLan@programming.dev
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      4 hours ago

      I’m afraid it won’t last long without it. That’s the key problem.

      People hate ads, as do I, but what’s the alternative?

    • Joeffect@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      I could see them trying to take themselves away from Google which wouldn’t be a bad thing as that’s where most of the money comes from for them … Unless that’s changed recently…