The original developer has a great blog, and has commented on this
Literally no one but advertisers like ads. Anything that leads to more ads being shown is a negative to your community. Some might understand the need to make money, but that doesn’t make anyone like ads.
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.
Thank you for breathing a bit of sanity into this thread. Same here. Some commenters were like “oh there’s already too many adds” and I was like wait, what? They’re not adding more adds to Firefox, are they? The article doesn’t suggest that.
The “Mozilla bad” crowd echo chamber has gotten completely out of control in my opinion, and it’s an avalanche of low effort comments, dozens of upvotes, and it’s kind of a self sustaining echo chamber that exists because it exists.
Yes, that’s the same thing every time Firefox is mentioned here. It’s like people here WANT to be angry.
It’s like people here WANT to be angry.
Outrage addiction is absolutely, 1000% a thing.
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.
There is no indication that they’re 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.
It’s comments like this that concern me. It’s extrapolating on a worst case hypothetical, and setting it equal to a present day reality of Google’s hundred billion dollar advertising empire.
It doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be concerned about, but I think you need to understand the difference between possible bad thing, and fanning the flames of mob mentality.
Remember how Google wasn’t always evil?
You know who also also wasn’t always evil? VLC. And guess what, they’re still not evil! Even though they have turned town tens of millions of dollars that would have compromised their software. So, what does that prove? Maybe that measured concern should be combined with an ability to be nuanced on a case by case basis.
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!
Hard fork incoming in 3… 2… 1…
This is just a huge fuck you to their community.
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.
Thanks but
We are targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026.
We need an alternative before that
Talk is cheap, get contributing! Donate, translate or code. That way we’ll have a proper way out of Mozilla sooner
Done! I contributed $10 a few days ago. Hope to give some more after my next payment.
Maybe this pushes the development a little bit. Would be a good opportunity to ask for funding and other means of help.
I honestly never expected the final death blow for Firefox to come from Mozilla.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Did you read the article?
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.
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)
Burn the phoenix again.
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.
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.
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.
