What if we could have a world that wasn't powered by ads? I'd like to get past this "only one way to run the internet" train of thought.
I'm just so tired of ads, commercials and advertising in general. It's exhausting.
It's either that, a subscription model of some sort, going to pay to install models, or something else to fund themselves. I'd suggest going to a donation based model, but I doubt there's enough Firefox users willing to pay to even be able to keep it alive more than a year or two tops.
I would happily pay to download Firefox if they removed telemetry, ads, analytics. Security updates could be free, feature updates could have a small fee. Something similar.
There is a way to fund Firefox without user data and ads. Will it be as profitable, who knows, because quite simply, the vast majority do not want to make it a reality and loose what profit, control, or power they currently hold onto.
I've always said this about software. Let me license a specific version, with free minor updates until the next major release.
If the new version has something I need/want, I may be willing to buy it again.
I use lots of old software, on my PC and my phone. It works, why do I need the new version? And some, the new version sucks so bad I refuse to upgrade (FolderSync on Android, for example).
Universal Basic Income, ala star trek, is an option, then just let everybody make cool shit.
Star Trek has no Universal Basic Income. It has replicators for all your basic needs.
Replicators, which are universal and basic.
But is not income
It, uh...makes...food...uh...come in...?
Hahahaha, you're funny.
Because people suddenly become altruistic, and won't try to fuck over the next person?
UBI won't fix human nature.
oh no the human nature argument
Says who?
Plenty of sites out there just run by people who want to run them, no fee, no ads.
It's people who want to capitalize on having a website that have this problem.
And let's be clear, it's their problem. Not mine. If they can't turn a profit with/without ads, that's not my concern, that's theirs. But they setup these web sites/services with the intention of making money through ads and surveillance, so let's not go around acting like these orgs just won't make it without us (there are exceptions, say archive.org, and guess what, people donate to them because they believe in the cause).
The problem is a bunch of people figured out the web was a brilliant way to data mine for profit. I actually had this discussion with a friend circa 1993. If we could see it then, imagine how many other people already had plans.
Well, do you subscribe to news sites, YouTube Premium, Kagi? The world you dream of is available to you today
Even of they reduced everything down to just Firefox, Thunderbird, and all in infra to run those products (Mozilla accounts, addons stores, hosting, dev/build services...), as well as continuing to pay for dev time on open source they use/contribute to, and the time their employees put into w3c and other foundation/standards/steering initiatives, I don't think you'd want to see the cost of a monthly subscription.
This stuff costs way more than people think it does, and behind the scenes Mozilla does a lot of work (with google, Microsoft, apple) on web standards, and trust me, you want them still involved seeing as each other browser group involved is well... You know... Much worse for privacy generally.
YouTube premium and kagi aren't even remotely in the same league for comparison when it comes to the cost and value a "Firefox" or "Mozilla" subscription would be.
Right, I think people forget that Opera used to be funded by a subscription. But they had to move away from it because it just didn't work. I think the golden age of Opera was shortly after they dropped that. And I dearly miss Opera as they were before they switched over to Chromium.
I think the history of early to mid Opera is the perfect example of actually wise and interesting and innovative software choices. They were in very early on things like browser extensions, and they had incredible innovations like Opera Unite, Opera Turbo, and all kinds of incredible customization. But I suppose in some ways they're also a chilling tale of what could happen, because I'm pretty sure they sold to a Chinese company, switched to developing on Chromium, and seem to have abandoned the ethos of innovating. I know that some of the original developers from Opera went on to create Vivaldi but that too is based on Chromium.
Was never much of an opera user, but I have enjoyed vivaldi quite a bit. I don't see myself using vivaldi due to the chromium aspect. I used to keep it around for the random chrome-only sites but that's way too uncommom nowadays.
Lately safari/gnome web (i.e. WebKit engine) have gotten good enough to be my pwa installer browser depending on my OS, though i really hope firefox re-implements PWA support sooner than later.
Actually, I do. I have a YouTube Premium subscription and subscriptions for two news sites. And on top of that a ton of Patreon subscriptions and offline memberships. I am the one who knocks pays.
I subscribe to Nebula because f*ck Google, and I'd pay for Kagi if I could just simply pay $X for Y searches with no subscription BS.
I think the ad model is fine as long as adblockers work. Only a small percent uses them and the normies without can watch the ads so the service stays free. Perhaps a bit egoistical but works for me! š
Frankly, I'm surprised it took them so long to say this publicly. For over a year, Mozilla has had a de facto conflict of interest when it came to their stance on advertisements, so take anything they say about their necessity with a huge grain of salt...
May 2023: Mozilla purchases FakeSpot, a company that sells private data to advertisers. Mozilla keeps selling private data to advertisers to this day.
Good thing we can fork, I guess, but it's kinda sad to watch a previously good org die
Fork, blah, blah, blah.
When one of these forks doesn't depend on Mozilla to do all the heavy lifting of security updates and compatibility fixes, then maybe we can talk seriously about forks. But no fork does fuck-all towards the hard part of maintaining a web browser engine. So forks mean nothing.
So just stick with firefox?
Well, if users don't the source of the actual work, then none of the forks survive. I don't know what people think are going to happen.
Shitting on Mozilla seems to be a competitor sport around here sometimes, and it's fucking self-defeating. In 5 years, there will only be the Chromium engine, and then Google will shut down the opensource side like they pretty much did with Android. And then we're truly fucked.
I've been using librewolf over the last week. Honestly.... It's a drop in replacement for me
Does it support containers and sync settings between installs on multiple systems? If so Iām in without hesitation.
Yeah
Thanks. Just set it up on one of my computers. Iāll be doing the rest as time allows. Thereās a lot I love about it already, familiar but with better defaults, and including search engines like SearXNG. I hope enough of us can switch and send a message to Mozilla, though that feels very unlikely to stop the enshittification.
oh they're full on corpo now it sounds like, which is too bad. They should have gone the proton route and go full non-profit org controlled, but here we are.
It's basically hardened Firefox, you can do all the same things here too. Alas using it with an account kind of defeats the purpose. However you can use your account once to sync everything.
The problem with those sorts of forks is they still require moz to do most of the heavy lifting.
If Firefox stopped being developed they'd all pretty much freeze in place.
I agree to a point, I think some people would pick up the development. Idk if it'd be librewolf or if someone would fork off that, but if Firefox completely shit the bed I think someone would pick up the mantle a bit. We wouldn't have nearly the release cadence of firefox though.
Does anyone?
I don't want to see Mozilla shutdown because Google no longer pays them, or due to the loss of another funding source.
Diversifying their income sources is a good thing.
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.
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.
How about not have a multi-million-dollar-costing CEO? Seems a bit rich (pun intended) for a supposed non-profit org.
Yeah I'm not defending that but CEO pay only rounds to like 1% of their total expenditures. Developing a browser is expensive.
only 1%? That's about on par with a fortune 500 company, which supposedly Mozilla is not.
Ideas:
directly ask for donations, and actually use those donations to fund browser development
build an add-on to pay sites instead of seeing ads - Mozilla could take a cut here
push harder on existing, optional add-ons that generate revenue, like their VPN
But the article here reads like, "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas. Have ads..."
What makes you think that developing a free web browser needs to grant anyone any income?
Do you think developers don't have to eat? or pay rent? And donations alone do not cut it.
Being a developer myself (with no ads in his software), I donāt think you understand my point. The software I write in my free time does not pay my bills. Thatās why I also have an actual job.
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.
(and deserve it)
Please enlighten me: how do they deserve to be paid for a non-profit product?
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.
There is exactly no single reason to make this personal. What I meant is that writing a free piece of software does not necessarily have to be paid work. A variety of popular software tools, including a few web browsers, by the way, is written and maintained in the developersā free time.
āDoing stuffā is not the same thing as ādoing paid workā.
You simply cannot have a project the size of firefox without paid employees, why do you think chromium, webkit and gecko are the only three webengines
What's making it personal?
Stop being a sophist, you'll have more meaningful conversations.
Non profit means their earnings must match their expenses or be used to actually improve the product/service, not that they earn nothing at all
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.
People who work at non-profits aren't volunteering.
Non profit does not mean what you think it means
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..
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?
Pay executives less. Focus on grants and PBS-style 'underwriting'. Subscription services like email and VPN.
Getting into advertising is just jumping into an intractable conflict of interest.
No ads?
People need money mate. Not everyone can afford to run a website.
Ideas:
donations - these need to actually go toward Firefox development, they don't, so I don't donate
paid services (e.g. their white-labeled VPN, they could also white-label Tuta or Proton services)
and add-on that pays sites to not see ads (my preference)
funding of privacy-oriented startups - they have something like this, so do more of it
At this point, I don't see many other options to keep everything going for Firefox. If they somehow lose the go*gle money they use to keep themselves going, they need another revenue source and I severely doubt there are enough Firefox users willing to pay enough to keep it going as it currently does. Don't like it, but I'm gonna at least play devil's advocate.
It would be nice if they at least allowed for even being able to donate to the browser itself. All the options that I am aware of are either the paid extra stuff they have, or to the overall company. Which is annoying since I imagine that the current "donation" option means that the money is being used mostly for the upper execs and routed to the extra shit that already has options for paying subs.
They could try not having an overinflated budget?
I don't know a thing about their budget, so I'm not qualified to make any comments about how good or bad they are doing at managing it or make any comments.
I mean I don't love it, but I'm also not sure what the argument is supposed to be about how this ties to browser market share. Mozilla made $593 million from their most recently released financials. The CEO made $6.9 million. My calculator tells me that's 1.16%.
So is the argument that Mozilla that if they set the CEO salary to $0, used it all on more developers, that would spin up a browser experience that's so improved it would lead to more market share? A 1% change in Mozilla's spending will bring them to 50% market share? 40%? 20%?
What's the cause and effect here? Do we even actually know that that's true, that it even has anything whatsoever to do with development choices at all? I get that the CEO is an easy target but I think assuming that is explaining market share ignores things like Google's dominance of search and ads, and how those piles of cash drive initiatives like Android and Chromebooks, which helps propel Chrome to dominant market share. Those are the drivers of market share. I don't even think people have even tried to begin to think through this argument in real terms, it's just a lot of knee-jerk reaction to news stories disconnected from any specific idea of cause and effect.
The CEO is for a good reason an easy target: Show me another company where this level of incompetence is rewarded with steady salary increases?!? (I am afraid you'll be able to. ;-))
Given your calculation is correct, you are correct that paying the CEO nothing would not make a big difference for Mozillas income. Although it would hopefully open the road for a better CEO.
Your argument that hitting at the CEO ignores the whole context of market dominance of Google could IMHO also used against your argument: If the CEO is so powerless that she cannot take the responsibility for the decline of Mozilla, than why does she get payed at all. If all is a function of the environment and the tides of the market, we can easily replace her with ChatGPT and have the same results w/o wasting money.
At the end of the day, we are exactly where we have been literally a decade ago: Finding a sustainable business model for Mozilla/Firefox.
Once more: This core problem of Mozilla/Firefox has been well known for over a decade by now, and again the CEOs only answer is advertisement. Why do we pay money for the bullshit every first semester MBA student would come up with a brainstorming within the first 3 minutes.
Mozilla survives thanks to Google and their (rightful) fears of being outed as a monopoly.
The discussion is always if Mozilla could survive on donations. I do not now if they could. I still think there are a lot of actors with an interest of an independent browser, even whole governments. What I know for sure is, I won't donate to Mozilla as long as incompetent CEOs are payed.
Your argument that hitting at the CEO ignores the whole context of market dominance of Google could IMHO also used against your argument: If the CEO is so powerless that she cannot take the responsibility for the decline of Mozilla, than why does she get payed at all.
That's my argument? I don't recall supporting the CEO pay. Pretty sure I said I don't like it. And just to be clear, I am finding it hard to justify that much for a CEO. So that's not turning my argument against me, because that was never my argument.
What it would really look like to, as you say, "turn my argument against me" would be something that speaks to Google's search monopoly, ads monopoly, and hundredfold advantage in revenue, and why, in light of those facts, they would imply that Mozilla should have more market share. Like if I forgot to carry a two somewhere in my math, or why they are actually proof of a synergy that Mozilla is benefiting from that I'm not accounting for. Those would be examples of turning the arg against me, and I'm happy to hear it if there is one.
Not sure if it s a language issue (non native speaker), but seems we have the same goals.
So sorry, if I misunderstood your position/point!
My point is mostly, that it seems every browser is mostly US controlled directly or transitively, and it should be in the interest of every other country/nation to have a free, open source, not US controlled browser on the market... but given the sad reality in my country, I'll probably be long dead before corruption/lobby-ism and sheer stupidity of the the government will come to this conclusion. :-(
So it looks like the CEO of mozilla is bleeding firefox to pad his salary. Thats disappointing. Are we sure firefox wasn't simply taken over by a private-equity firm?
It's 1.16%. I don't love it but claiming it's bleeding them to death is, I think, not what we're looking at. I think they just recognize their exposure because any given year 80 to 90% of the revenue is coming from their agreement with Google, and they're screwed if they can't diversify their income a bit more.
Any where more substantial to address the shortfall expected without Google default money?
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.
The dot com bubble made the Internet explode, sure, but corporate sites weren't the entire internet back then. There were far more niche sites, web rings, forums, etc...
The reason I mentioned the dot com bubble is because a lot of the companies back then failed because they couldn't figure out a sustainable business model. It was mostly hype-driven with the idea of getting users first, then figuring out monetization later.
That's why we have ad-supported sites today. It was the main business model that was the most sustainable.
There were a lot of small sites, sure, but a lot of them were hosted on services with no real business model. Even back then, not a lot of people self-hosted.
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 canāt 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 doesnāt generate enough revenue to turn a profit, you donāt have a viable business
I don't want the internet to be exclusively business
In parallel to our existing consumer products, we have the opportunity to build a better infrastructure for the online advertising industry as a whole. Advertising at large cannot be improved unless the tech itās built upon prioritizes securing user data. This is precisely why we acquired Anonym.Ā
Catering to the ad industry is backwards thinking, imo. Securing user data is easy enough if you do not collect it to begin with.
Imo, the fact companies have changed the narrative in favor of advertisers and data collection, proves only profit matters, not the people.
No one starts a company because they care about people
Securing user data is easy enough if you do not collect it to begin with.
Bingo.
As if de-anonymizing hasn't been demonstrated, repeatedly.
Mozilla's non-profit status needs to be revoked.
I think at this point they have a nonprofit and a company, the later being used for all their taxable income.
I know; they should not be allowed to do that.
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.
She went on to work at eBay for 13 years, followed by PayPal, Skype, and Airbnb. source
why would Mozilla choose to be directed by an ebay+paypal+airbnb experience and can somebody with that background not think like this ā
"Because Mozillaās mission is to build a better internet. 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."
Advertising will not improve unless we address the underlying data sharing issues, and solve for the economic incentives that rely on that data.
thanks to Mozilla for assuming the responsibility of improving advertising
We canāt just ignore online advertising ā itās a major driver of how the internet works and is funded. We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it. For those reasons, Mozilla has become more active in online advertising over the past few years. - MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA source
if we stay with that metaphor of "We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it", it's not difficult to imagine Mark and Mozilla being swallowed by the monster he's "staring straight in the eyes" :/
i hope they can filter the shit Mozilla will include in Firefox from mull and mullvad
She's not particularly wrong, but this highlights the problem for me.
Why does the corporate arm behind one of the last "free" browsers out there need to become involved in this clear conflict of interest?
Why does this need to be developed as core functionality in the browser codebase instead of as an addon like most of the previous experiments?
There is repeated insistence that this is key to the future of the web. I don't neccessarily disagree. I disagree entirely that this should have any direct contact with the Firefox project. Create a separate subsidiary within Mozilla for this shit. Anything to maintain a wall between the clearly conflicting goals.
This all reads like a new CEO coming in hungry to make a mark rather than actually just be a steward to keeping business as usual going.
She's not particularly wrong,
yes, and that's the saddest part
But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozillaās history.
Is it?
I would rather have a world where Mozilla is actively engaged in creating positive solutions for hard problems, than one where we only critique from the sidelines.
Maybe your users don't.
Yeah adblock plus said the same thing. A lot of companies have said the same thing. It always comes down to greed
In addition to your good points:
a world where Mozilla is actively engaged
That doesn't have to mean a world where Firefox itself is involved in this engagement, despite her insistence that it for some reason must be. Firefox is not Mozilla as a whole.
It is time to fork Firefox. Mozilla has bern hijacked by people who don't care about its vision.
Itās 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.
But at least forking is still an option. The instant they make any moves that inhibit forking or privacy on forks, Firefox will be completely dead. For now, itās just gangrenous.
Good luck with even maintaining that fork up to date , with security threats and web standards changing so quickly.
Chromium manages (obsfucated binary blobs from google still being included aside)
Chromium is developed by Google. It's not some grassroots fork with user interests in mind...
The thing is, people willing to maintain a fork could contribute to Firefox today, and reduce the development cost, reduce the need for income.
Sure, some people will be more willing to contribute, if it's a pure grassroots effort, or if they're left without a browser otherwise, but to just assume that a fork will fix it, that's wishful thinking.
I wish that most forks wouldn't be even worse. Pale Moon, the most interesting one, is a gang of patent trolls.
Pale Moon feels like it forked during the peak of Windows Vista, and hasn't updated its UI, or extension library since.
LibreWolf, Mullvad Browser, and Waterfox feel the most up to date, while being FOSS.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Did I miss something? I don't think the browser is going to be full of ads?
Mozilla actually has (had?) ads in Firefox, right on its default start page.
Right and that has existed long before today. And I can't find anything in this article suggesting that the start page, or anywhere else, is going to be reallocated towards new ads which is what it sounds like the commenter above me was suggesting.
You can easily turn them off in settings
Opt-out can never be the right answer.
Would you prefer Mozilla to not exist? They're trying to find revenue streams other than the money they get from Google.
The current incarnation of Mozilla would not be any meaningful loss to me.
Well it would to everyone who relies on Mozilla for making the only current alternative engine to chromium. Mozilla dying would harm its forks, too, and finally give chromium a total monopoly
Other engines exist.
I would prefer Mozilla to ask. Some options:
on first install, pick your poison - donate, accept ads, or accept negative karma
pay to remove ads on a page - you'd pay into a bucket, and payments to remove ads would subtract from that
more optional, revenue-generating services (e.g. push their VPN harder)
Not that they've announced yet, I just meant more broadly I am very sick of advertising and adverts
Realistically, I don't think so either. Pessimistically, I give it until Jan 1st, 2030.
Your pessimism is more optimistic than my optimism
Yeah, perhaps because advertisements go against the values that users look for in your browser?
Squidward on the floor saying "Future, future"
But actually hexbear does need a future Squidward. We've got others but we need future
This Squidward also matches it well.
This breaks my heart.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I would say you're basically right. I think Mozilla can try to grab a slice of the pie, the Q is if it's enough, and fast enough, to replace revenue from the search partnership.
The only ones who will embrace it are the advertisers....
You're forgetting about the people in the office building that sit around the big table. They embrace it too.
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.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the Google ad monopoly case?
It's probably at least a factor, yeah. They've been trying to reduce dependence on Google for a long time, which was always a smash hit with the community (not), but if there's a very concrete scenario where will stop paying, then the urgency ramps up quickly.
This is just a huge fuck you to their community.
Ladybird is not usable yet, but it's an independent browser and engine that accepts donations
So is NetSurf, and has been for most of this century already. I mean, it's great to see people even caring about independent browsers, but NetSurf surely needs much more love (and more developers). :-)
Time to switch to other fork
Does this mean they are gonna brick ublock origin and force me to Google's 3.0 shit? (I forgot the name of it)
Very unlikely. They will support new extension API's (they are already 90%+ compatible with manifest v3) bit Mozilla has committed to maintaining compatibility for the manifest v2 API's that don't exist in v3.
Claims otherwise are FUD.
They also are rolling out a modified version of Manifest V3 that restores the ad blocker capability that Google was disabling.
Well y'know what, if the cost of that is some backed in ads on the new tab page I am totally good with that.
YouTube allows just about any ads on their site, so many recent examples of scams and malicious sites advertising on there.
Yeah, I don't love Manifest V3 adoption, just for what it implies about Google's ability to push standards it wants. (Is google even pretending it's not purposely targeting ad blockers with V3?) But if you have to, this is the way to go.
Manifest v3? I gather they're already moving towards this but not in a manner which harms ad blocking
Burn the phoenix again.
I feel like Iām 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 Iām not sure thatās a bad thing. I know lemmy is largely āMozilla badā, but Iām 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.
Yea that's likely what it is. Hopefully I can remain in the 1% of people who go out of their way to block ads. As long as I can do that I'll welcome the industry as a whole being more privacy friendly (if that's even possible)
Yeah, that might be the best case scenario. Have ad blocking but add in some technical hurdles so that not enough people do it for it to be worth stamping out.
Though that makes me wonder if this will be effective at all because the technical hurdle to get Mozilla's new ad system is only slightly less than the technical hurdle to install ublock origin. I'm guessing advertisers will either ignore it entirely and continue with what they are doing (because the data means profit for them) or maybe put some portion of their bandwidth towards it while continuing to do what they are doing with other providers.
It's really hard to tell how Mozilla is acting doing because 99.99% of the posts/comments on Lemmy/Reddit is just FUD. I'm sire it skews people's perception.
Yeah, Lemmy isn't getting the same kind of propaganda as other social media, but it does appear to be present here on some topics.
Like normal conservative propaganda gets drowned out since the userbase has a large portion of people who are here because we're tired of corporate bullshit.
But it means we're probably more susceptible to propaganda that accuses corporations of corporate bullshit, whether the accusation has merit or not.
Yea that's a really good way to put it!
There is no indication that theyāre blocking adblockers or taking away firefox customization.
Yet.
We don't know that after they are deeper and deeper into the advertising industry, that they don't just go ahead and do it.
Remember how Google wasn't always evil? Money changes companies (and people). Advertising money could very well change Mozilla. Plus, remember, these statements are them telling you the public version, things that they are claiming will happen. Often times what goes on behind the scenes is very different.
I don't think it's unreasonable to be concerned by this.
Yes, that's the same thing every time Firefox is mentioned here. It's like people here WANT to be angry.
Not good
Technically correct: literally no one does fit the criteria for not everyone.
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.
I will go against the tide here and welcome this change. The web is powered by advertising and tracking. It will happen whether Mozilla is part of it or not. In that case, I would much rather have a website using a Mozilla advertising service that is more ethical and respects the user more than the ones from big tech. It's a lesser of two evils and I support this. I would of course rather have no ads at all but we don't live in a fairy tale world and evil companies exist.
And like most ads currently in Firefox, I fully trust we will be able to disable them easily, just like we can right now.
I think this is a good thing that Mozilla is finally trying to distance itself from Google's money because it ensures that maintaining the nonprofit is more sustainable
If Mozilla starts being aggressive to ad blocking, I'll agree with the common opinion on this post. But for now I'm more less neutral. If the choice is Mozilla dies or they do some ad stuff, I'd rather the latter. Whether the current and former people running Mozilla have made the right decisions or not to get to this point is kind of irrelevant, because people do not want Mozilla to disappear (even if they claim otherwise) because Mozilla is still a major driver of privacy-oriented work in w3c and web in general.
Aside from that... The only real way to stop ads and tracking, or at least prevent selling and sharing of data outside of the 1st party collector, is a legal path. Whether Anonym/Mozilla is as private as they are claiming, their intent is at least what a realistic legal solution to web tracking would condone that would continue to allow for revenue via ads. There is no way ads will ever go away in a capitalist economy, so it'll need to do something, blocked or not.
Mozilla wonāt go after ad blocking. It just makes no sense for them to do so. They havenāt given any indication that they will put extra ads in Firefox, they are saying that they are creating an ad company which respects privacy as an alternative to all the others
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.
Talk is cheap, get contributing! Donate, translate or code. That way we'll have a proper way out of Mozilla sooner
So long as they remain open source
Now imagine if they had something to advertise which people actually want!
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.
I switched to a fork of Firefox (Zen) without their bs..
Based.
I switched to Midori
Iāve been using Zen, too, for a few weeks now and despite it being early days it feels like a very polished experience.
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)
Hey, Laura. Fuck you. Fuck your profits and your corporate greed. Enshit yourself till you close down.
The enshitification of Firefox continues š¢
Cory Doctorow: "Disenshittify or die!" (YouTube)
What if we could have a world that wasn't powered by ads? I'd like to get past this "only one way to run the internet" train of thought.
I'm just so tired of ads, commercials and advertising in general. It's exhausting.
It's either that, a subscription model of some sort, going to pay to install models, or something else to fund themselves. I'd suggest going to a donation based model, but I doubt there's enough Firefox users willing to pay to even be able to keep it alive more than a year or two tops.
I would happily pay to download Firefox if they removed telemetry, ads, analytics. Security updates could be free, feature updates could have a small fee. Something similar.
There is a way to fund Firefox without user data and ads. Will it be as profitable, who knows, because quite simply, the vast majority do not want to make it a reality and loose what profit, control, or power they currently hold onto.
I've always said this about software. Let me license a specific version, with free minor updates until the next major release.
If the new version has something I need/want, I may be willing to buy it again.
I use lots of old software, on my PC and my phone. It works, why do I need the new version? And some, the new version sucks so bad I refuse to upgrade (FolderSync on Android, for example).
Universal Basic Income, ala star trek, is an option, then just let everybody make cool shit.
Star Trek has no Universal Basic Income. It has replicators for all your basic needs.
Replicators, which are universal and basic.
But is not income
It, uh...makes...food...uh...come in...?
Hahahaha, you're funny.
Because people suddenly become altruistic, and won't try to fuck over the next person?
UBI won't fix human nature.
oh no the human nature argument
Says who?
Plenty of sites out there just run by people who want to run them, no fee, no ads.
It's people who want to capitalize on having a website that have this problem.
And let's be clear, it's their problem. Not mine. If they can't turn a profit with/without ads, that's not my concern, that's theirs. But they setup these web sites/services with the intention of making money through ads and surveillance, so let's not go around acting like these orgs just won't make it without us (there are exceptions, say archive.org, and guess what, people donate to them because they believe in the cause).
The problem is a bunch of people figured out the web was a brilliant way to data mine for profit. I actually had this discussion with a friend circa 1993. If we could see it then, imagine how many other people already had plans.
Well, do you subscribe to news sites, YouTube Premium, Kagi? The world you dream of is available to you today
Even of they reduced everything down to just Firefox, Thunderbird, and all in infra to run those products (Mozilla accounts, addons stores, hosting, dev/build services...), as well as continuing to pay for dev time on open source they use/contribute to, and the time their employees put into w3c and other foundation/standards/steering initiatives, I don't think you'd want to see the cost of a monthly subscription.
This stuff costs way more than people think it does, and behind the scenes Mozilla does a lot of work (with google, Microsoft, apple) on web standards, and trust me, you want them still involved seeing as each other browser group involved is well... You know... Much worse for privacy generally.
YouTube premium and kagi aren't even remotely in the same league for comparison when it comes to the cost and value a "Firefox" or "Mozilla" subscription would be.
Right, I think people forget that Opera used to be funded by a subscription. But they had to move away from it because it just didn't work. I think the golden age of Opera was shortly after they dropped that. And I dearly miss Opera as they were before they switched over to Chromium.
I think the history of early to mid Opera is the perfect example of actually wise and interesting and innovative software choices. They were in very early on things like browser extensions, and they had incredible innovations like Opera Unite, Opera Turbo, and all kinds of incredible customization. But I suppose in some ways they're also a chilling tale of what could happen, because I'm pretty sure they sold to a Chinese company, switched to developing on Chromium, and seem to have abandoned the ethos of innovating. I know that some of the original developers from Opera went on to create Vivaldi but that too is based on Chromium.
Was never much of an opera user, but I have enjoyed vivaldi quite a bit. I don't see myself using vivaldi due to the chromium aspect. I used to keep it around for the random chrome-only sites but that's way too uncommom nowadays.
Lately safari/gnome web (i.e. WebKit engine) have gotten good enough to be my pwa installer browser depending on my OS, though i really hope firefox re-implements PWA support sooner than later.
Actually, I do. I have a YouTube Premium subscription and subscriptions for two news sites. And on top of that a ton of Patreon subscriptions and offline memberships. I am the one who
knockspays.I subscribe to Nebula because f*ck Google, and I'd pay for Kagi if I could just simply pay $X for Y searches with no subscription BS.
I think the ad model is fine as long as adblockers work. Only a small percent uses them and the normies without can watch the ads so the service stays free. Perhaps a bit egoistical but works for me! š
Frankly, I'm surprised it took them so long to say this publicly. For over a year, Mozilla has had a de facto conflict of interest when it came to their stance on advertisements, so take anything they say about their necessity with a huge grain of salt...
Not everyone?
Does anyone?
Good thing we can fork, I guess, but it's kinda sad to watch a previously good org die
Fork, blah, blah, blah.
When one of these forks doesn't depend on Mozilla to do all the heavy lifting of security updates and compatibility fixes, then maybe we can talk seriously about forks. But no fork does fuck-all towards the hard part of maintaining a web browser engine. So forks mean nothing.
So just stick with firefox?
Well, if users don't the source of the actual work, then none of the forks survive. I don't know what people think are going to happen.
Shitting on Mozilla seems to be a competitor sport around here sometimes, and it's fucking self-defeating. In 5 years, there will only be the Chromium engine, and then Google will shut down the opensource side like they pretty much did with Android. And then we're truly fucked.
I've been using librewolf over the last week. Honestly.... It's a drop in replacement for me
Does it support containers and sync settings between installs on multiple systems? If so Iām in without hesitation.
Yeah
Thanks. Just set it up on one of my computers. Iāll be doing the rest as time allows. Thereās a lot I love about it already, familiar but with better defaults, and including search engines like SearXNG. I hope enough of us can switch and send a message to Mozilla, though that feels very unlikely to stop the enshittification.
oh they're full on corpo now it sounds like, which is too bad. They should have gone the proton route and go full non-profit org controlled, but here we are.
It's basically hardened Firefox, you can do all the same things here too. Alas using it with an account kind of defeats the purpose. However you can use your account once to sync everything.
The problem with those sorts of forks is they still require moz to do most of the heavy lifting.
If Firefox stopped being developed they'd all pretty much freeze in place.
I agree to a point, I think some people would pick up the development. Idk if it'd be librewolf or if someone would fork off that, but if Firefox completely shit the bed I think someone would pick up the mantle a bit. We wouldn't have nearly the release cadence of firefox though.
I don't want to see Mozilla shutdown because Google no longer pays them, or due to the loss of another funding source.
Diversifying their income sources is a good thing.
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.
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.
How about not have a multi-million-dollar-costing CEO? Seems a bit rich (pun intended) for a supposed non-profit org.
Yeah I'm not defending that but CEO pay only rounds to like 1% of their total expenditures. Developing a browser is expensive.
only 1%? That's about on par with a fortune 500 company, which supposedly Mozilla is not.
Ideas:
But the article here reads like, "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas. Have ads..."
What makes you think that developing a free web browser needs to grant anyone any income?
Do you think developers don't have to eat? or pay rent? And donations alone do not cut it.
Being a developer myself (with no ads in his software), I donāt think you understand my point. The software I write in my free time does not pay my bills. Thatās why I also have an actual job.
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.
Please enlighten me: how do they deserve to be paid for a non-profit product?
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.
There is exactly no single reason to make this personal. What I meant is that writing a free piece of software does not necessarily have to be paid work. A variety of popular software tools, including a few web browsers, by the way, is written and maintained in the developersā free time.
āDoing stuffā is not the same thing as ādoing paid workā.
You simply cannot have a project the size of firefox without paid employees, why do you think chromium, webkit and gecko are the only three webengines
What's making it personal?
Stop being a sophist, you'll have more meaningful conversations.
Non profit means their earnings must match their expenses or be used to actually improve the product/service, not that they earn nothing at all
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.
People who work at non-profits aren't volunteering.
Non profit does not mean what you think it means
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..
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?
Pay executives less. Focus on grants and PBS-style 'underwriting'. Subscription services like email and VPN.
Getting into advertising is just jumping into an intractable conflict of interest.
No ads?
People need money mate. Not everyone can afford to run a website.
Ideas:
At this point, I don't see many other options to keep everything going for Firefox. If they somehow lose the go*gle money they use to keep themselves going, they need another revenue source and I severely doubt there are enough Firefox users willing to pay enough to keep it going as it currently does. Don't like it, but I'm gonna at least play devil's advocate.
It would be nice if they at least allowed for even being able to donate to the browser itself. All the options that I am aware of are either the paid extra stuff they have, or to the overall company. Which is annoying since I imagine that the current "donation" option means that the money is being used mostly for the upper execs and routed to the extra shit that already has options for paying subs.
They could try not having an overinflated budget?
I don't know a thing about their budget, so I'm not qualified to make any comments about how good or bad they are doing at managing it or make any comments.
Where would you cut?
Are you kidding?
I mean I don't love it, but I'm also not sure what the argument is supposed to be about how this ties to browser market share. Mozilla made $593 million from their most recently released financials. The CEO made $6.9 million. My calculator tells me that's 1.16%.
So is the argument that Mozilla that if they set the CEO salary to $0, used it all on more developers, that would spin up a browser experience that's so improved it would lead to more market share? A 1% change in Mozilla's spending will bring them to 50% market share? 40%? 20%?
What's the cause and effect here? Do we even actually know that that's true, that it even has anything whatsoever to do with development choices at all? I get that the CEO is an easy target but I think assuming that is explaining market share ignores things like Google's dominance of search and ads, and how those piles of cash drive initiatives like Android and Chromebooks, which helps propel Chrome to dominant market share. Those are the drivers of market share. I don't even think people have even tried to begin to think through this argument in real terms, it's just a lot of knee-jerk reaction to news stories disconnected from any specific idea of cause and effect.
The CEO is for a good reason an easy target: Show me another company where this level of incompetence is rewarded with steady salary increases?!? (I am afraid you'll be able to. ;-))
Given your calculation is correct, you are correct that paying the CEO nothing would not make a big difference for Mozillas income. Although it would hopefully open the road for a better CEO.
Your argument that hitting at the CEO ignores the whole context of market dominance of Google could IMHO also used against your argument: If the CEO is so powerless that she cannot take the responsibility for the decline of Mozilla, than why does she get payed at all. If all is a function of the environment and the tides of the market, we can easily replace her with ChatGPT and have the same results w/o wasting money.
At the end of the day, we are exactly where we have been literally a decade ago: Finding a sustainable business model for Mozilla/Firefox. Once more: This core problem of Mozilla/Firefox has been well known for over a decade by now, and again the CEOs only answer is advertisement. Why do we pay money for the bullshit every first semester MBA student would come up with a brainstorming within the first 3 minutes.
Mozilla survives thanks to Google and their (rightful) fears of being outed as a monopoly.
The discussion is always if Mozilla could survive on donations. I do not now if they could. I still think there are a lot of actors with an interest of an independent browser, even whole governments. What I know for sure is, I won't donate to Mozilla as long as incompetent CEOs are payed.
That's my argument? I don't recall supporting the CEO pay. Pretty sure I said I don't like it. And just to be clear, I am finding it hard to justify that much for a CEO. So that's not turning my argument against me, because that was never my argument.
What it would really look like to, as you say, "turn my argument against me" would be something that speaks to Google's search monopoly, ads monopoly, and hundredfold advantage in revenue, and why, in light of those facts, they would imply that Mozilla should have more market share. Like if I forgot to carry a two somewhere in my math, or why they are actually proof of a synergy that Mozilla is benefiting from that I'm not accounting for. Those would be examples of turning the arg against me, and I'm happy to hear it if there is one.
Not sure if it s a language issue (non native speaker), but seems we have the same goals.
So sorry, if I misunderstood your position/point!
My point is mostly, that it seems every browser is mostly US controlled directly or transitively, and it should be in the interest of every other country/nation to have a free, open source, not US controlled browser on the market... but given the sad reality in my country, I'll probably be long dead before corruption/lobby-ism and sheer stupidity of the the government will come to this conclusion. :-(
So it looks like the CEO of mozilla is bleeding firefox to pad his salary. Thats disappointing. Are we sure firefox wasn't simply taken over by a private-equity firm?
It's 1.16%. I don't love it but claiming it's bleeding them to death is, I think, not what we're looking at. I think they just recognize their exposure because any given year 80 to 90% of the revenue is coming from their agreement with Google, and they're screwed if they can't diversify their income a bit more.
Any where more substantial to address the shortfall expected without Google default money?
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.
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.
The dot com bubble made the Internet explode, sure, but corporate sites weren't the entire internet back then. There were far more niche sites, web rings, forums, etc...
The reason I mentioned the dot com bubble is because a lot of the companies back then failed because they couldn't figure out a sustainable business model. It was mostly hype-driven with the idea of getting users first, then figuring out monetization later.
That's why we have ad-supported sites today. It was the main business model that was the most sustainable.
There were a lot of small sites, sure, but a lot of them were hosted on services with no real business model. Even back then, not a lot of people self-hosted.
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 canāt 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 doesnāt generate enough revenue to turn a profit, you donāt have a viable business
I don't want the internet to be exclusively business
Catering to the ad industry is backwards thinking, imo. Securing user data is easy enough if you do not collect it to begin with.
Imo, the fact companies have changed the narrative in favor of advertisers and data collection, proves only profit matters, not the people.
No one starts a company because they care about people
Bingo.
As if de-anonymizing hasn't been demonstrated, repeatedly.
Mozilla's non-profit status needs to be revoked.
I think at this point they have a nonprofit and a company, the later being used for all their taxable income.
I know; they should not be allowed to do that.
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.
why would Mozilla choose to be directed by an ebay+paypal+airbnb experience and can somebody with that background not think like this ā
"Because Mozillaās mission is to build a better internet. 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."
thanks to Mozilla for assuming the responsibility of improving advertising
if we stay with that metaphor of "We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it", it's not difficult to imagine Mark and Mozilla being swallowed by the monster he's "staring straight in the eyes" :/
i hope they can filter the shit Mozilla will include in Firefox from mull and mullvad
She's not particularly wrong, but this highlights the problem for me.
Why does the corporate arm behind one of the last "free" browsers out there need to become involved in this clear conflict of interest?
Why does this need to be developed as core functionality in the browser codebase instead of as an addon like most of the previous experiments?
There is repeated insistence that this is key to the future of the web. I don't neccessarily disagree. I disagree entirely that this should have any direct contact with the Firefox project. Create a separate subsidiary within Mozilla for this shit. Anything to maintain a wall between the clearly conflicting goals.
This all reads like a new CEO coming in hungry to make a mark rather than actually just be a steward to keeping business as usual going.
yes, and that's the saddest part
Is it?
Maybe your users don't.
Yeah adblock plus said the same thing. A lot of companies have said the same thing. It always comes down to greed
In addition to your good points:
That doesn't have to mean a world where Firefox itself is involved in this engagement, despite her insistence that it for some reason must be. Firefox is not Mozilla as a whole.
It is time to fork Firefox. Mozilla has bern hijacked by people who don't care about its vision.
Itās 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.
Maintaining a browser is very labor intensive
::: spoiler fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck :::
But at least forking is still an option. The instant they make any moves that inhibit forking or privacy on forks, Firefox will be completely dead. For now, itās just gangrenous.
Good luck with even maintaining that fork up to date , with security threats and web standards changing so quickly.
Chromium manages (obsfucated binary blobs from google still being included aside)
Chromium is developed by Google. It's not some grassroots fork with user interests in mind...
The thing is, people willing to maintain a fork could contribute to Firefox today, and reduce the development cost, reduce the need for income.
Sure, some people will be more willing to contribute, if it's a pure grassroots effort, or if they're left without a browser otherwise, but to just assume that a fork will fix it, that's wishful thinking.
I wish that most forks wouldn't be even worse. Pale Moon, the most interesting one, is a gang of patent trolls.
Pale Moon feels like it forked during the peak of Windows Vista, and hasn't updated its UI, or extension library since.
LibreWolf, Mullvad Browser, and Waterfox feel the most up to date, while being FOSS.
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.
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.
Here's a frighteningly accurate prediction from The Register, written back in January:
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.
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.
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.
You mean the original uBlock Origin. The original uBlock has been gone for a long time.
Sorry, you are correct - I meant uBlock Origin
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
Did I miss something? I don't think the browser is going to be full of ads?
Mozilla actually has (had?) ads in Firefox, right on its default start page.
Right and that has existed long before today. And I can't find anything in this article suggesting that the start page, or anywhere else, is going to be reallocated towards new ads which is what it sounds like the commenter above me was suggesting.
You can easily turn them off in settings
Opt-out can never be the right answer.
Would you prefer Mozilla to not exist? They're trying to find revenue streams other than the money they get from Google.
The current incarnation of Mozilla would not be any meaningful loss to me.
Well it would to everyone who relies on Mozilla for making the only current alternative engine to chromium. Mozilla dying would harm its forks, too, and finally give chromium a total monopoly
Other engines exist.
I would prefer Mozilla to ask. Some options:
Not that they've announced yet, I just meant more broadly I am very sick of advertising and adverts
Realistically, I don't think so either. Pessimistically, I give it until Jan 1st, 2030.
Your pessimism is more optimistic than my optimism
Yeah, perhaps because advertisements go against the values that users look for in your browser?
Squidward on the floor saying "Future, future"
But actually hexbear does need a future Squidward. We've got others but we need future
This Squidward also matches it well.
This breaks my heart.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I would say you're basically right. I think Mozilla can try to grab a slice of the pie, the Q is if it's enough, and fast enough, to replace revenue from the search partnership.
The only ones who will embrace it are the advertisers....
You're forgetting about the people in the office building that sit around the big table. They embrace it too.
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.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the Google ad monopoly case?
It's probably at least a factor, yeah. They've been trying to reduce dependence on Google for a long time, which was always a smash hit with the community (not), but if there's a very concrete scenario where will stop paying, then the urgency ramps up quickly.
This is just a huge fuck you to their community.
Ladybird is not usable yet, but it's an independent browser and engine that accepts donations
repo - https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird
youtube channel with monthly updates - https://www.youtube.com/@LadybirdBrowser/videos
So is NetSurf, and has been for most of this century already. I mean, it's great to see people even caring about independent browsers, but NetSurf surely needs much more love (and more developers). :-)
Time to switch to other fork
Does this mean they are gonna brick ublock origin and force me to Google's 3.0 shit? (I forgot the name of it)
Very unlikely. They will support new extension API's (they are already 90%+ compatible with manifest v3) bit Mozilla has committed to maintaining compatibility for the manifest v2 API's that don't exist in v3.
Claims otherwise are FUD.
They also are rolling out a modified version of Manifest V3 that restores the ad blocker capability that Google was disabling.
Well y'know what, if the cost of that is some backed in ads on the new tab page I am totally good with that.
YouTube allows just about any ads on their site, so many recent examples of scams and malicious sites advertising on there.
Yeah, I don't love Manifest V3 adoption, just for what it implies about Google's ability to push standards it wants. (Is google even pretending it's not purposely targeting ad blockers with V3?) But if you have to, this is the way to go.
Manifest v3? I gather they're already moving towards this but not in a manner which harms ad blocking
Burn the phoenix again.
I feel like Iām 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 Iām not sure thatās a bad thing. I know lemmy is largely āMozilla badā, but Iām 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.
Yea that's likely what it is. Hopefully I can remain in the 1% of people who go out of their way to block ads. As long as I can do that I'll welcome the industry as a whole being more privacy friendly (if that's even possible)
Yeah, that might be the best case scenario. Have ad blocking but add in some technical hurdles so that not enough people do it for it to be worth stamping out.
Though that makes me wonder if this will be effective at all because the technical hurdle to get Mozilla's new ad system is only slightly less than the technical hurdle to install ublock origin. I'm guessing advertisers will either ignore it entirely and continue with what they are doing (because the data means profit for them) or maybe put some portion of their bandwidth towards it while continuing to do what they are doing with other providers.
It's really hard to tell how Mozilla is acting doing because 99.99% of the posts/comments on Lemmy/Reddit is just FUD. I'm sire it skews people's perception.
Yeah, Lemmy isn't getting the same kind of propaganda as other social media, but it does appear to be present here on some topics.
Like normal conservative propaganda gets drowned out since the userbase has a large portion of people who are here because we're tired of corporate bullshit.
But it means we're probably more susceptible to propaganda that accuses corporations of corporate bullshit, whether the accusation has merit or not.
Yea that's a really good way to put it!
Yet.
We don't know that after they are deeper and deeper into the advertising industry, that they don't just go ahead and do it.
Remember how Google wasn't always evil? Money changes companies (and people). Advertising money could very well change Mozilla. Plus, remember, these statements are them telling you the public version, things that they are claiming will happen. Often times what goes on behind the scenes is very different.
I don't think it's unreasonable to be concerned by this.
Yes, that's the same thing every time Firefox is mentioned here. It's like people here WANT to be angry.
Not good
Technically correct: literally no one does fit the criteria for not everyone.
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.
I will go against the tide here and welcome this change. The web is powered by advertising and tracking. It will happen whether Mozilla is part of it or not. In that case, I would much rather have a website using a Mozilla advertising service that is more ethical and respects the user more than the ones from big tech. It's a lesser of two evils and I support this. I would of course rather have no ads at all but we don't live in a fairy tale world and evil companies exist. And like most ads currently in Firefox, I fully trust we will be able to disable them easily, just like we can right now.
I think this is a good thing that Mozilla is finally trying to distance itself from Google's money because it ensures that maintaining the nonprofit is more sustainable
If Mozilla starts being aggressive to ad blocking, I'll agree with the common opinion on this post. But for now I'm more less neutral. If the choice is Mozilla dies or they do some ad stuff, I'd rather the latter. Whether the current and former people running Mozilla have made the right decisions or not to get to this point is kind of irrelevant, because people do not want Mozilla to disappear (even if they claim otherwise) because Mozilla is still a major driver of privacy-oriented work in w3c and web in general.
Aside from that... The only real way to stop ads and tracking, or at least prevent selling and sharing of data outside of the 1st party collector, is a legal path. Whether Anonym/Mozilla is as private as they are claiming, their intent is at least what a realistic legal solution to web tracking would condone that would continue to allow for revenue via ads. There is no way ads will ever go away in a capitalist economy, so it'll need to do something, blocked or not.
Mozilla wonāt go after ad blocking. It just makes no sense for them to do so. They havenāt given any indication that they will put extra ads in Firefox, they are saying that they are creating an ad company which respects privacy as an alternative to all the others
https://ladybird.org/
Thanks but
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.
Talk is cheap, get contributing! Donate, translate or code. That way we'll have a proper way out of Mozilla sooner
So long as they remain open source
Now imagine if they had something to advertise which people actually want!
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.
I switched to a fork of Firefox (Zen) without their bs..
Based. I switched to Midori
Iāve been using Zen, too, for a few weeks now and despite it being early days it feels like a very polished experience.
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)
How it's been going.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QbBc3Oduc8
Does anyone know if this will hit Fennec on Android as well?
Hard fork incoming in 3... 2... 1....