This is just a huge fuck you to their community.
I feel like I’m reading a different article than everyone else. The comments made me think the article would be adding advertisements, but it seems to be trying to find a way forward to facilitate advertisements while maintaining privacy.
Without technical details I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. I know lemmy is largely “Mozilla bad”, but I’m just not sure the comments are in line with the proposal.
I originally was one of the “FUCK FIREFOX IS FUCKED” people. However, after taking a deep breath and actually reading, yes, you are correct. There is no indication that they’re blocking adblockers or taking away firefox customization. I think they’re both looking for alternative revenue streams and trying to make the advertising business less intrusive. That being said, their communication is absolute dogshit and they deserve a lot of the shit they get. But I am not yet panicking. Firefox remains the best choice for blocking ads.
The problem for me is that I’m tired of ads at all, so while I do think that having an ad system that is less abusive than the current one is a step in the right direction, I still don’t want to see any unsolicited ads and this feels like the initial steps to try to make it more palatable to eventually try to force users to accept ads back into their lives.
Hard fork incoming in 3… 2… 1…
The only ones who will embrace it are the advertisers…
I honestly never expected the final death blow for Firefox to come from Mozilla.
Is this a response to the fact that they may not get paid for having Google as their default search engine? If so, I worry about a bunch of Linux distributions. It’s ironic that a company’s toxic virtual monopoly was paying for so much open software.
Eh, they’ve been speedrunning this for years, this is just the most efficient way to get to the end goal of complete ruin.
I have a few alternative ideas, but I honestly don’t think they’re interested in hearing them.
Maybe they’ve been infiltrated by bad actors from Google, parading around as pro-privacy frauds.
I hope so. I hope there could be a future where Mozilla is purged of these people and returned to being just a browser. Not everything has to be a “platform” with a business model for MBA’s to feast on.
Mozilla’s PPA was developed in collaboration with Facebook. While we don’t usually think of that company as advertisement centric, they are, just moreso within their own walled garden of a social network.
parading around as pro-privacy frauds.
Here’s a frighteningly accurate prediction from The Register, written back in January:
…Baker notes: “We need to be faster in prototyping, launching, learning, and iterating … This requires rich data, and so we will be moving in that direction, but in a very Mozilla way.”
Surely not slurping telemetry?
According to the report, the “Mozilla way” is all about privacy, encryption, and keeping customer data safe. Hopefully, it will also be about innovation rather than scattering AI fairy dust over its product line.
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?
Eh, I care about a third: browser engine diversity. If they drop Gecko, I’m out, there’s literally nothing left to keep me here.
Thanks but
We are targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026.
We need an alternative before that
Maybe this pushes the development a little bit. Would be a good opportunity to ask for funding and other means of help.
Because of propaganda, people find it easier to imagine the end of the world before the end of capitalism. Just the same, theres lots of commenters here that could imagine the end of the internet before they imagine the end of advertising on the internet.
Well, Thunderbird gives me hope.
Same! Check the telemetry line in about:config that still has a value in it though (I forget what it is, just that it had one)
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.
It is time to fork Firefox. Mozilla has bern hijacked by people who don’t care about its vision.
Maintaining a browser is very labor intensive
It’s already been done, LibreWolf is what Firefox originally set out to be.
It is only a soft fork
Sure, but as you pointed out maintaining a browser is hard. I don’t know that any genuine fork or new browser is on the horizon, and the day to day of using firefox is fine by me, so a fork that strips there nonsense might be plenty for me.
Burn the phoenix again.
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.
You posted this on Lemmy.
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.
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.
That’s a problem for site operators, not for browser developers.
You might be right, but I don’t think that’s a problem they’re going to solve all on their own, meanwhile the rest of users will suffer.
It’s a problem for users.
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.
Sounds like you’re forgetting about the dot com bubble. The internet wasn’t fine abck then because nobody really had a sustainable business model.
Surveillance advertisement was already around.
Social Media platforms simply capitalized on it.
And users sucked it up for “convenience”.
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.
If your product doesn’t generate enough revenue to turn a profit, you don’t have a viable business
I don’t want the internet to be exclusively business
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.
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.
I’m sure it is completely coincidental that ublock is about to die as well.
wtf are you talking about?
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.
the original ublock.
You mean the original uBlock Origin. The original uBlock has been gone for a long time.
Sorry, you are correct - I meant uBlock Origin
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.
69% of the world population doesn’t use ad blockers. Google made their billions from people clicking on ads.
Not only are we technical folks (only 5% of the population not their target audience, it seems most people don’t care enough about ads to ever try to stop them… at all.
So 31% uses ad blocking.
That’s about 1/3. Pretty impressive actually.
