Mozilla: Ad on Firefox’s new tab page was just another experiment
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
They keep using that word 'experiment' to mean 'I can run whatever code I want on an end user's computer' which is not right. It's an ad. You're pushing ads. It's not the worst thing in the world if you just call it what it is, but using the 'experiments' mechanism to push ads is scummy and to me a violation of trust.
I've been running Firefox inside of Firejail, a sandbox, lately, primarily as a light form of exploit mitigation, and I think maybe you should too, just in case Mozilla decides to experiment with attacking your computer as well.
I think today I'm going to experiment with QuteBrowser and some other more fringe browsers that are available for Linux.
obviously you'd share info once you click on it. i don't like ads either, but this seems better than the standard track-you-out-the-wazoo ad.
Worse, it's an advertisement, for a commercial service, in a place that I didn't want it to be. The last place I wanted something like that to be, really.
i agree that we shouldn't place ads everywhere, especially in "safe" places. but i'm also concerned with the viability and longevity of firefox.
Why should that matter? It makes not a lick of difference to me whether they got paid for it or not.
I still use Firefox but it's painful sometimes. Not as painful as Chrome, but Mozilla seems determined to come up with unexpected new ways to fuck up Firefox for some reason.
There should be another organisation taking over Firefox development.
Every one of these actions is a short-term cash grab. The real amazing part is how privacy advocates let these transgressions, or what Mozilla calls "experiments", slide.
The minimum annual cash burn to have a high quality browser engine, js runtime, and UI seems to be several hundred million dollars.
FF is now utterly dependent on google for cash (and to be fair, google really needs FF to exist to pretend chrome isn't close to a monopoly). But who knows how long that will last and if/when google will exert control. One of the best things for Mozilla to do as an org is to figure out a non-google-dependent revenue stream.
Privacy respecting ads are a good compromise.
I’m making no judgement about that but there are two sides to fiscal longevity: getting more money is one, the other is to focus spending.
1. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2017/
Firefox exists partially outside the regular market, so normal strategies may not apply quite the same way.
Sure, security fixes are important, but it seems like browser developers spend more of their time on new features. Things like a new and exciting way to use asterisks in JavaScript, or another UI redesign, or an API for websites to interact directly with smart waffle irons. Maybe if Mozilla didn't develop these things, they wouldn't need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on their browser.
This is why Mozilla needs a stable source of revenue - both for the engineering work to remain competitive, and for marketing so they can persuade users to use Firefox and lessen Google's influence over the Web.
As a nonprofit, Mozilla is in a great position to lead a charge like that. But they've chosen instead to make the problem even worse. On top of everything Google does, Mozilla also creates and implements its own dubiously necessary features (WebVR comes to mind) and uses venues like the Mozilla Hacks blog to promote them to developers.
Websites? Maybe not that much (at first, at least). But from IE experience: There are many intranet-style tools that would most certainly go "well, our tool X is only supported on Chrome, deal with it"[1]. Which, of course, only further cements Chrome's monopoly because everyone would just go "well, I have to run Chrome anyway, so why bother installing another browser?"
[1]: Yes, SAP, I'm looking at you.
I see pop up messages that have to be dismissed as harassment, pure and simple.
Firefox has a chance to show it is different from Google but it harasses me just like Google and refuses to hire developers in the same 99% of the world that Google won't hire developers, why should I expect Firefox to be any different from Chrome?
Long-term the answer for us is a migration away from "The Google Platform" and towards Gopher, telnet BBSes, and anything else where hipsters fear to tread.
I consider privacy to be that it is my choice how much of my personal data I reveal to a third party not directly involved with any of the parties I am doing business with.
Showing privacy-conserving ads doesn't violate what I consider privacy, some people might object to ads in general but there doesn't seem to be a better funding model (considering Mozilla doesn't want to continue being 90% funded by deals with search engines and donations being a drop in the bucket).
Open Source needs to figure out a funding model and Mozilla seems to be making positive headway into the realm of privacy-sensitive ads. Google and Chromium on the other hand is making headway into privacy-violation ads.
I would also set the about:config options "network.allow-experiments" and "app.normandy.enabled" to false.
I guess Mozilla is confident enough not many people understand what CPA ads are to claim they are not ads.
i don't like ads either, but i'm ok with mozilla experimenting to find more privacy-respecting revenue streams and lessen their reliance on google.
Yuck, what a slimey piece of PR babble. I guess all those IE toolbars weren’t spyware after all - they were trying to provide value to their users! I guess all those unwanted flyers tucked in my mailbox aren’t ads either, they just want to provide me value...
The catch is, publishers don't seem to be signing up, presumably because they're making far more than 4c / pageview by showing ads to you. The publishers I added seem to have all abandoned the program long ago. I've been a member for over a year and have still only spent 6c.
I would gladly pay for ad-free web content (for example, NYT and WSJ) if they made it possible for me to pay them via a consumption based model instead of trying to force me into an expensive yearly subscription.
Right now publishers make zero from me because I have a couple layers of ad blockers. If I'm willing to pay X for some number of ad-free articles, which does not have to be unlimited, then publishers would be making X dollars more.
The energy spent feeling smart would be better directed at your reading comprehension.
However, looking closer at this situation there is a bit of a troubling fact that `experiments.enabled` - the configuration directive used here - doesn't appear in about:config but certainly is being used:
https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-esr45/source/browser/experim...
Looks like someone filed a bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1517147
The Wikipedia method of getting in your face begging for money seems unpleasant as well but at least that doesn't leave you questioning their motives and judgement.
moreover you can turn off snippets in the about:preferences > Home tab.
at least it's not chrome, which constantly and intrusively monitors you for advertising value.
Firefox has traditionally been the _only_ major browser that champions the traditional freedoms that many folks (myself included) associate with the web. For me personally, that involves looking at the commercial internet as a subset of the internet as a whole, which is a successful decentralized system which has reached escape velocity. The legacy of Firefox is the legacy of that system. You seem to presume that the corporation and its profitability is necessary for Firefox to be successful, and so a "decent privacy-respecting effort to find another revenue stream" rooted in advertisements is reasonable. I don't agree on principle, and I don't agree in practice, because these things take away the sole differentiator that prevents Firefox from becoming Chrome with less market share.
This is probably the central thing that might make sense for you to think about: what is the market differentiator for Firefox? Why would anyone bother to use it versus Chrome? Being less obnoxious in doing sketchy things but still doing them is not a good reason. Not doing sketchy things is a good reason.
but seriously, i don’t think it’s a big deal because
1) no personal data is shared up front
2) it's an experiment
3) you can turn it off/block it
4) some people might appreciate the discount
5) there’s a wide non-slippery gulf between complete ad blocking and complete tracking
6) mozilla might find a decent compromise between those extremes, which is sorely missing
7) i trust mozilla to course-correct if necessary, as they have in the past.
i don’t want ads everywhere either, and i applaud your principles, but please apply them to helping mozilla find non-ad and non-google revenue streams (assuming you’re not anti-revenue as well). please work through and put forth a rationale, not an emotional appeal, and refrain from condecscension.
n.b. - i've used firefox since it was called phoenix (v0.3).
I think you're proving my point by insinuating that I need to put forth a way for Mozilla to find non-ad and non-Google revenue streams, and I also think you're misunderstanding me by implying I'm putting forward an emotional appeal -- I actually could care less about whether or not Mozilla Corp chooses to uphold the open source values that propelled it to success and relevance, I merely think it's poor decision making to ignore that if they wish to survive.
This, of course, was the heart of the question I posted to you at the end of my comment, and it is also something that you still haven't answered. Let me reiterate it: what is the key differentiator of Firefox? Why do people use it? You are talking about why you don't think it's a big deal. The thing is, whether you (or anyone else) thinks it is a big deal or not is simply not directly relevant to Mozilla and Firefox (although it is a signal). The question of whether it's strategically a good decision for them is actually important. I believe that it is not. To further illustrate that, let me make some arguments by comparison.
Is Python ad-supported? Is the Linux Kernel ad supported? Ruby? Nginx? There are companies that make products which utilize Python or are greatly involved in the Python ecosystem, and those companies contribute back to the ecosystem because it serves their purposes. Likewise with the Linux Kernel, Ruby, Nginx, Python, and many other excellent pieces of open source software. Would you dilute the reference protocols and implementations for these products by diluting key parts of their functionality with advertising in a form that is essentially malware?
No. You wouldn't do that because it would compromise the trust of your core users and ultimately result in negative momentum. You wouldn't do that because ultimately, it's poor product management. Healthy businesses that operate with a division between the open source and closed source areas are well trodden territories, and one of the easiest ways to kill the healthy business line that depends on the open source product's mindshare is to dilute it. This is what you're not addressing, and based on your arguments, it may be something that you don't understand. What Mozilla Corp just did was a bafflingly poor product management decision. It was an experiment with little reward and what appears to be high risk. Time will tell. They may have lost sight of the the need to add value first in order to rake in profits long term, and the need for that to sometimes take longer, more expensive paths to result in the most lucrative circuit.
This, of course, is something that the original core contributors to all of these projects understood quite well. They produced software, but they were first and foremost constructing protocols. Protocols can be created in purely informational theoretic terms and be released into the wild, and upon critical mass of mindshare adoption, operate self-sustainably in their current form. It is certainly the case that money and other resources can scale up the rate of development and scope of these protocols as well as the ecosystem around it, but it is not a requirement. The organization and labor that construct these protocols are motivated by a variety of motivations, but often times, one of the core motivations is the desire to mutate the way that things flow in societal infrastructures by improving them. When attempting to build one of these mutations, focusing on profitability prematurely is ironically one of the easiest ways to doom it, or precluding it from ever occurring. It will get you stuck in local minima and distract you from executing correctly. Why did Google beat every other search engine? They figured out how to do search properly, better than every other competitors.
Mozilla Corporation (if it can) needs to figure out how to do the browser properly, better than every other one of its competitors. If not, it will slowly fade into obsolescence as superior forks or competitors better at its core functionality supplant it.
I find it a bit bizarre.
Maybe, but my best guess is they've been 'infiltrated' by people with absolutely no ideological commitment to what Mozilla has traditionally stood for and instead view it as "just another job". Probably people with a stronger marketing background than anything else.
I think it's the best explanation for shit like this or the "mr robot tie in." These sort of advertisements aren't the sort of ideas a software developer with a commitment to free software and privacy would think up. These are the sort of ideas that come from people with a marketing background. I doubt these were bottom-up ideas, the order almost certainly came from the top down. I hate to say it but Mozilla's upper and middle management probably need to be gutted if this kind of crap is ever going to stop, and I doubt that will happen.
Now it is a good time to show your support to the project.