Come on Mozilla, stop spreading this bull! Is LWN.net not part of the web? Is tagesschau.de not part of the web? Are my personal pages not part of web? None of them have advertising as their business model. This statement really shows how derailed Mozilla is thinking.
Mozilla should just make themselves honest, turn into a pure for-profit cooperation and do their business at least a little bit more honestly.
There are many projects that need money to survive and don't sell their users.
Mozillas need for money does not excuse in the slightest their choices, or is machiavellianism all the sudden accepted?
I mean, your comment says that if you need millions to sustain your sites you are free to act shadey. Sorry, but no, that wouldn't make it okay. In the case of Mozilla it would just show their hypocritical inconsistency.
Mozilla is clearly saying these things are important to them and will be central to their mission so what's the problem here? It's not like they'll inject ads from Google or Facebook.
Instead of dissing at their attempts to make themselves self-sustainable, we should be supporting them by giving them a chance. May be they'll do ads right, may be they'll fail but one thing I'm sure of is that if they fail to make it work without compromising the user, they'll just give it up.
Mozilla is our biggest if not the only hope of an open and healthy web. I don't mind supporting them by seeing a couple of ads every now and then as long as I'm in control and they respect my privacy.
But you don't necessarily need the brain scans to see that advertising preys on human psychology and emotional weakness, because of how effective those kinds of ads are. If advertising was just "Here's my product. Here's what it can do. Here's why you might want it." I don't think we would have gotten to where we are now -- where advertising is basically just a mix of exposure therapy and negging.
It inherently shades into malware.
First, all advertising platforms are malware distribution platforms, because the people who run ad platforms have every incentive to push through all the ads submitted to them and negative incentive to stop the ones which are malware. Nobody in the ad industry wants people to talk about this, but as long as the malware authors are using them to distribute malware, they can't pretend it never happens and they shouldn't be allowed to ignore people who say it does.
Second, advertising requires data to be effective, which leads to tracking, which is, itself, a form of malware.
For a couple hundred years the newspaper functioned as the prime media distribution system and generated revenue off of advertisements. Now that we've shifted that over to electronic means I find it almost humourous how advertising and partnering is suddenly considered evil. Like staff and servers are magically free because journalists and printing presses must have been in the 1920's.
Like it or not, unless you're charging a subscription, the only viable model for the Internet at scale so far is finding someone who will pay to piggy-back on your service.
Because newspaper ads didn't track us, didn't bounce and shake, and didn't execute malware on our computers.
Because newspaper ads weren't audio-video presentations that jumped over the text you were trying to read and prevented you from reading it, among numerous other differences between modern web ads and classic print ads.