They're either completely clueless, don't care about damaging the brand or are just malicious. And in the process, accordingly to themselves, they aren't even making money just partners and good feels, right?
We can't afford to lose Mozilla and Firefox.
Can we do anything, as users, to stop these people from hurting Mozilla, without stopping to use Firefox everyday?
Are they, in any way, accountable to their bad performance for all those recent years?
I have no other alternative to recommend my social circle and feel, daily, increasingly helpless to do anything about a future determined to shake down the miracle of humanity for pocket change.
Mozilla Corp--the for-profit business arm of nonprofit Mozilla Foundation--has sold out its users before in a partnership with German ad company Cliqz and again in a marketing blitz for Mr. Robot. No amount of outrage from its users has changed their behavior. Perhaps because we are locked into a browser duopoly, Mozilla Corp feels privileged to continue to abuse user trust.
How do we take back user privacy when the world's computing window becomes poisoned by those impassioned for money? It is deplorable behavior.
I would like that people were more explicit in why they despise ads. For me it is because they are unsecure, often outside the control of the site owner and heavily rely on tracking.
For a long time my impression of Mozilla is that they are trying to "sanitize" ads on the web by experimenting on advertisements that are non-tracking by design.
(this does not cover cliqz, I never found a good reason for that and honestly think they should be more transparent about it or cancel it)
Clearly we see that Mozilla has no interest in being an holy warrior against advertisements, but as said above ads can work while respecting privacy.
> How do we take back user privacy when the world's computing window becomes poisoned by those impassioned for money? It is deplorable behavior.
non-profit or for-profit every company still needs money to keep existing
> they are unsecure, often outside the control of the site owner and heavily rely on tracking.
- They attempt to influence me into buying things I do not want or need.
- They take up some of my attention, a resource that I consider very valuable.
- They create perverse incentives to create content that advertising buyers appreciate (particularly worrisome when we are talking about a browser, that I have to rely on to not sell out my privacy).
- The are often promoting things that are often objectively bad for me (e.g. energy drinks).
- They apply all sorts of psychological tricks, many with negative consequences (e.g. implying that I look bad).
The fact that Mozilla wasn't paid for this means very little. This is clearly Mozilla experimenting with a new channel of advertising that could be monetized in the future if successful.
Sorry, but no. Ads are not a good way to monetize software. Period. This has been discussed enough in countless articles during the last two years. The reasons are well-known by now. If you still managed to miss all that has been written about ads, I recommend Pinboard's talk about website obesity as a starting point.
Agreed. Frankly, this is not a good time for Mozilla to fuck around.
Would enough users pay money for a browser?
Those "partnerships" on the other hand seem all about showing that Mozilla is willing to sacrifice any kind of UI integrity or user control in order to advertise their user base as capital - without even gaining them anything.
What is going on there?
...or are some people in charge at Mozilla really delusional enough to believe the "this is our thank you to our users" line?
"This snippet was an experiment to provide more value to Firefox users through offers provided by a partner. It was not a paid placement or advertisement. We are continually looking for more ways to say thanks for using Firefox. In a similar vein, earlier this month we offered Firefox users a free opportunity to enjoy a live concert from Phosphorescent."
Well, maybe it's just me but it seems every single time Mozilla fucks up they respond with a excuse like "yeah, but it was just a experiment".
If they keep going on like this, thousands of former Firefox users will switch to Brave - which due to its latest codebase is basically technologically Chrome but designed from bottom to top with privacy and security in mind. And former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, who - politics aside - seemingly DOES know how to run a company focusing on PEOPLE using the web and building a browser with PEOPLE using the web in mind will be there and happily welcoming them to the Brave community.
And it's not like these idiots EVEN need the money because it is an open secret the likes of Google are giving Mozilla $300+ million dollars on a year-to-year basis to keep them afloat and "competing" with Chrome anyway!
I can understand a number of the things Mozilla does, but they have been so clumsy lately :-/
On new Firefox setups I'll specifically turn off all the splash page widgets and/or set the homepage to about:blank. The search bar in the middle of the front page is just a shortcut for the super bar anyways.
which, like all Google products, are constantly phoning home and mining data across all your web behaviors. Recent changes are hostile towards privacy. Worse still, for mobile devices they don't allow add-ons given it will impact mobile ad-revenue, all the while the OS itself is mining user data. Disabling the data-mining is nearly impossible. Google makes tens of billions off this data also.
Firefox, on the other hand, is injecting an text ad to the default tab, but clearly it's not very targeted. It appears they're doing the equivalent of affiliate marketing, where they'll take a commission if they drive a sale. The lack of targeting will mean the effectiveness will be questionable.
Unlike Google, Firefox is also not in the data-hoarding business and this is a feature that's trival to disable. They just screwed up by not disclosing this test to their (privacy concious) users.
Firefox gets a lot of revenue by allowing Google to be the default search engine and they will need to figure out monetization strategies to get away from that model. Standing up their own infrastructure to monetize their users without selling them out to a competitor is a good starting point.
This seems to sadly be also true in Firefox nowadays with things like telemetry, crash reporting, safebrowsing.downloads.remote, etc.
The nice thing about Firefox is that you don't even need to fork for that.
> Make Pocket optional
Go to about:config and set extensions.pocket.enabled to false.
> remove the (paid?) list of URLs that's apparently preloaded
If you mean the stuff that's displayed on new tab pages (like the snippet in TFA), you can get rid of it by changing "Firefox Home Content" at about:preferences#home .
> remove all of the phone home shit
I've deliberately enabled all telemetry, because I think it's data that Mozilla should have (check about:telemetry to see what they're measuring) but you can disable it under "Firefox Data Collection and Use" at about:preferences#privacy .
I agree it'd be better if Firefox came with a sane configuration by default, but the fact that you can change it at all makes Firefox a good enough browser for me.
That doesn't remove Pocket, it merely disables it. It's a stupid feature and a stupid default. It should be an extension that users can choose to install (or not).
> remove the (paid?) list of URLs that's apparently preloaded
This might be an android thing only, but when I type, for instance "sea", the URL bar autocomplete will suggest "sears.com", even though I have search disabled and have never visited sears.com. There are a bunch of these which seem to have come out of nowhere.
It's only urgent if the browser is adtech optimized and delivers tons of random third party js, html on every page visit by default. Otherwise with sensible defaults that block all that the risk of exploitation of any 0day is too small to make it urgent.
Or perhaps just go for Apple and Safari, whose bottom line depends on respecting privacy.
By simply shoehorning this into the existing Snippets functionality and deploying it without warning they're continuing a dark interaction pattern with their users.
Their response to the issue - a weird way of maybe saying they weren't paid for this and that it is purely to help users - is either a weasel words lie or a ridiculously out of touch action that is not cognizant of how much goodwill they've been tarnishing over the past year.
Neither bodes well for them.
If you really want you can just build the browser your self and change the startup page.
it "was an experiment to provide more value to Firefox users through offers provided by a partner" and "not a paid placement or advertisement".
I think its concerning that Mozilla is that deep into the marketing double-think.
Mozilla’s handling of this situation is really a problem, but it’s not hard to understand that they need to find sustainable ways to make money if they want to continue their mission.
Mozilla burned their trustability with me at least.
Beware of your negativity bias.
Totally fair, but this alone by no means indicate that Chrome is more privacy-friendly than Firefox.
Firefox was the first browser to implement DNT (Do Not Track) alongside other major browsers in early 2011, whereas Chrome/Chromium implemented it nearly two years later at the end of 2012.[0]
> Most developers target Chrome and you're less likely to experience issues.
…and don’t you find it worrisome that interoperability might one day completely fade away?
> Chrome is also open-source (BSD) as Chromium
Yet Google still has a massive influence over the project. For example, see what I wrote about DNT above. Chromium also syncs all your data to Google’s servers the moment you login to any Google service.[1]
[0]: https://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?revision=156566&view=...
[1]: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/09/23/why-im-l...
Companies need web browsers (and their component parts), too. They're going to pay engineers to work on them, anyway. That's how development is supported for Linux, Git, Postgres, Ruby, etc.
If every Git command started displaying ads tomorrow, would you say that that's "unfortunately inevitable" given that people expect version control to be a free product, and that the Git developers need to be paid somehow, and there's only 3 possible ways for that to happen?
("It was not a paid placement or advertisement", they say, so it's doubly strange to try to excuse it as a necessary revenue source. There is no revenue for Mozilla here.)
