Mozilla doubling down on ads in Firefox
Mozilla doubling down on ads in Firefox
LAURA CHAMBERS, CEO, MOZILLA CORPORATION As Mark shared in his blog, Mozilla is going to be more active in digital advertising. Our hypothesis is that we n
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/23894598
Despite its emphasis on protecting privacy, Mozilla is moving towards integrating ads, backed by new infrastructure from their acquisition of Anonym. They claim this will maintain a balance between user control and online ad economics, using privacy-preserving tech. However, this shift appears to contradict Mozilla's earlier stance of protecting users from invasive advertising practices, and it signals a change in their priorities.
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.
That's really nuts to me when I run into it in the wild. It's so easy and such a qol upgrade. I know a guy who self hosts a bunch of services, programming job, but does not use any ad block at all. He's on the computer all day. Just looking at ads.
I occasionally accidentally open the fandom page for a game on Chrome with no ad block (which I keep around for Google apps) and it's unusable. Go there on Firefox with ublock origin and it's fine
And there's worse sites than that
Download sites for things like Minecraft mods have several competing "download" buttons without ad block
It's nuts people might accept these, let alone want them
such a qol upgrade
I don't think you're wrong, but I do think that if everyone thought that, they would be doing it already.
I have routinely tried to get friends and family to use ad-blockers and they simply don't care enough to even attempt to download one.
A bit disingenuous to call explaining what they're doing as doubling down.
Also disingeneous to call it adding ads to firefox, because that's also not what is happening. They're trying to replace cookies with something better for our privacy, and them developing this feature will not impact any users who block ads or disable tracking cookies already.
I think they should go ahead and make the feature so that people who don't care about ads at least don't get tracked.
They are not trying to "replace" cookies. This is effectively adding yet another way to track users. Sure, may not be as invasive as cookies, but this does nothing to remove or modify them either.
Then there's the fact thay they deployed this behind the scenes and did not mention it until they were called out.
This comment alone:
"As part of this work, we are also committing to being transparent and open about our intent and plans prior to launching tests or features."
... means they have no intention to be honest about shit.
disingeneous to call it adding ads
Who called it adding
Yet another Mozilla hit piece that seemingly-intentionally misrepresents the good they're doing for users.It begs the question: who has the means and motivation to consistently pay "journalists" to malign the only browser that has the slightest chance of tearing any significant amount of users away from chromium-based browsers?
EDIT: Turns out the answer to my question above might, in fact, be OP! They wrote a patently false, inflammatory title that isn't supported by the article (or reality) at all, and I fell for it like a sucker.
…did we read two different articles? The only link I see is to Mozilla’s own blog, explaining their choices in a relatively positive way. I’ve seen the effect you pointed out a lot, I just don’t see it here.
Nope; you read an article, and I just reacted to comments on Lemmy, assuming that those commenting had read the article.
If I'd simply opened the link, I'd've seen it was on mozilla.org and would've realized it was just that the OP made a shitty clickbait title, not another Mozilla hit piece.
Shame on you, OP! Also shame on me.
I guess the hit piece is just the title OP put on the post.
Gotta pay the bills somehow, and I’m just happy they care about privacy.
I dislike ads as much as the next person, and find uBlock Origin necessary for browsing the web, but the cold fact is that the internet is run with advertising, whether you like it or not.
If that is done without creating a profile on me, and without crippling the reading/viewing experience, I can tolerate advertisement.
I assume this is also an action towards becoming independent from Google funding; which is a good thing.
Fuck ads.
You're lying to yourself if you think ads will ever be delivered without tracking.
This whole "anonymization" nonsense is a lie. It's been shown, repeatedly, that data can be de-anonymised, especially data that's not exactly narrowly collected.
I absolute despise ads but they are a necessary evil, it can be implemented well if it is not done intrusive and doesn't take up more space then the content it self. Also if it are mostly scam ads and such they might as well not have ads at all.
I can already see a crowd of advertisers running to them for the remaining 3% of its users.
So banning ublock origin lite from the addon store was malice, after all?
That means they will drop MV2 as soon as Chrome ends the business/legacy support, since they were the alternative.
And you downvoted me for my position about Mozilla
Laura Chambers, who replaced Mitchell Baker this year
They say it right: "A woman on a ship means trouble!" And when there's a whole line of women and inclusivity, the ship is doomed anyway, it'll sink with the crew - it's just a matter of time. Mozilla was a good company once, and the browser was not bad, but today there are no good browsers.
I'm very happy that I moved to Floorp.
I just... I... I can't install a browser that's called "Floorp". I just cant. I wouldn't be able to look another person in the eyes and tell them that "I use floorp". It's probably a perfectly good fork of Firefox, but I just can't.
No idea what's that but it sounds... sticky.
Here ya go! it's a Japanese fork of FF that's more focused on privacy. I prefer Librewolf personally but it's good to have options I guess.
