Mozilla explains their recent foray into advertising - A free and open internet shouldn’t come at the expense of privacy : firefox

[–] TeoTwawki@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

there are sites where I WOULD HAVE whitelisted them from addblocming if they had not chosen to make them functionally unusable or not stop nag me me. take youtube. I never minded those ad breaks..but that constant box nagging me to try premium is not acceptable. And then they just had to keep ramping up the adds and are now being a big baby trying to wage war on adbocking. Result: no more youtube. ty for convincing me to not even visit anymore -slow clap- good job ahole.

and ever been to a fandom wiki? used to be named "wikia" so that people could confuse their brand with "wiki". so many adds jammed into that thing browsers tend to choke if you aren't adblocking.

I mean sure privacy is great to care about, but nobody even pretends to care about usability.

[–] LWD@lemm.ee 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There's actually a whole group called the Acceptable Ads Committee who decides on making advertisements distinct and unintrusive... But they don't have any policies regarding privacy invasion.

They also partner with popular ad blocking software developers, such as AdBlock Plus.

They also have eight members, via their other name "eyeo", on the W3C PATCG committee (alongside Mozilla, Facebook, Google, more ad companies).

[–] TeoTwawki@lemmy.world 2 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

all the groups you cited? are they just toothless and making no impact because it happened way too late? or do they just have a very trash definition of what is intrusive? The major players still intrude all they like the second adblock isn't there.

by the time ablock plus's author tried to meet in a middleground advertising was already so far out of control that the users said "f that, no more" and most of us moved to ublock origin. these pricks need regulated into submission but it'll never happen.

if it became reasonable, I'd turn off my blocking. ain't gonna happen and we all know it no use pretending these companies are gping to back off thier tactics.

[–] LWD@lemm.ee 2 points 21 hours ago

It's worse: I would say every group is malicious. Ad companies try to look like they are policing themselves, in the hopes that they don't suffer external regulation. But back when AdBlock Plus started this nonsense, people made uBlock Origin in response. People wouldn't just take the ad industry at its word.

Now... For some reason, people have changed their minds.

[–] Wooki@lemmy.world 34 points 2 days ago (1 children)

We do not need a corporate structure to maintain software.

This stinks of C-suite justifying their existence when the alternative is well established and very successful.

[–] Blisterexe@lemmy.zip 11 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Where else do you expect them to get the money needed to maintain a web browser?

[–] tetris11@lemmy.ml 12 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Well, how did they do it in 90s-2010s? Genuinely asking. What's changed that they can no longer do this.

[–] abbenm@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Web standards have grown dramatically more complex since then. (To me, this raises a question in and of itself, I think it would be good to try and develop standards intentionally easy to maintain to avoid embrace-extend style dominance from individual companies).

You now have HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, WebGL, WebAssembly, WebRTC. You have newer and newer layers of security, and you have multiple platforms (Apple, Windows, desktop, phone) to develop for. It's a mountain that has grown out of what was once just a unique type of slightly marked up text file.

[–] tetris11@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Well, on the standards front, they tried

google just kept shifting the goalposts and forcing everyone to follow.

On the technology front, you could maintain these things with a very small team of developers whose total salary is but a small percentage of the CEO's current pay.

[–] abbenm@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I entirely agree with you about Google perpetually shifting the goalposts, which increases complexity and works to their advantage. I would say I think of the standards and technology as being, in many ways, integrally related.

I think the idea though, is that it has indeed grown so vast that you need, effectively, teams of teams to keep up. There are browsers done with small teams of developers, but the fruits of those, imo, are not super promising.

Opera: moved to Chromium.

Vivaldi: also on Chromium.

Midori: moved to Chromium.

Falkon: Developed by the KDE team. Perhaps the closest example to what you are thinking of. It's functional but lags well behind modern web standards.

Netsurf: Remarkable and inspiring small browser written from scratch, but well behind anything like a modern browsing experience.

Dillo: Amazing for what it is, breathing life into old laptops from the 90s, part of the incredible software ecosystem that makes Linux so remarkable, so capable of doing more with less. It's a web browser under a megabyte. Amazing for what it is, but can barely do more than browse text and display images with decent formatting.

Otter: An attempt to keep the Old Opera going, but well behind modern standards. Also probably pretty close to what you are suggesting.

Pale Moon: Interesting old fork of pre-quantum Firefox but again well behind modern web standards.

All of the examples have either moved to Chromium to keep up, or are well behind the curve of being modern browsers. If Firefox had the compromised functionality of Otter it might shed what modest market share it still has, not to mention get pilloried in comment sections here at Lemmy by aspiring conspiracy theorists.

I do love all of these projects and everything they stand for (well, the non-chromium ones at least) but the evidence out there suggests it's hard to do.

[–] tetris11@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There's ladybird too, but I hear you.

[–] abbenm@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 day ago

Oh shoot, that's actually the best example of all, and, in fact a great counterpoint to all of those examples above. If Ladybird does it and can sustain it, then Mozilla really has no excuses.

[–] GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Netscape, which was essentially the predecessor to Mozilla, was a well funded VC-backed startup. That’s how they did it.

[–] tetris11@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

and only now the investors are asking for their return? Or the investors aren't re-investing and that's the problem?

[–] ants_are_everywhere@mathstodon.xyz 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

@tetris11 @GnuLinuxDude

Netscape exited to AOL in 1998. The Netscape founder Marc Andreessen has since then been a successful venture capitalist who loves cryptocurrencies and Donald Trump.

[–] tetris11@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 day ago

oh dear

[–] ants_are_everywhere@mathstodon.xyz 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

@tetris11 @GnuLinuxDude

Mozilla Corporation -- which makes Firefox -- is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation. The foundation is a nonprofit.

A nonprofit can't generate a lot of business income unrelated to its mission. Firefox used to generate a lot of income, so it had to be spun off into a taxable entity called Mozilla Corporation.

The corporation doesn't have investors in the usual sense.

[–] tetris11@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 day ago

Christ that's a messy inheritance model. Hopefully Firefox will be spun off to, and will have to focus solely on the browser.

[–] Blisterexe@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 day ago

The web got WAY more complicated, at the time all websites were mostly just static.

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[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 86 points 3 days ago (23 children)

This will be easy to hate on, but let's be careful not to get carried away.

Maintaining a web browser is basically the toughest mission in software. LibreWolf and PaleMoon and IceWhatsit and all the rest are small-time amateur projects that are dependent on Firefox. They do not solve the problem we have. To keep a modicum of privacy and openness, the web is de-facto dependent on Firefox continuing to exist in the medium term. And it has to be paid for somehow.

This reminds me of the furore about EME, the DRM sandbox that makes Netflix work. I was against it at the time but I see now that the alternative would have been worse. It would have been the end of Firefox. Sometimes there's no good option and you have to accept the least bad.

[–] RoyaltyInTraining@lemmy.world 51 points 3 days ago (3 children)

I would love to give Firefox money, as long as they slash their CEO's ridiculous salary

[–] dojan@lemmy.world 28 points 3 days ago (6 children)

And slash the CEO as well. Not literally of course.

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[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 24 points 2 days ago (5 children)

I'm completely fine with anonymized ads being an option in theory, but there needs to be a way to compensate services w/o resorting to advertising. I think Mozilla should provide a way for users to pay to opt-out of ads, and get websites on board that way.

Websites want to get paid for their work, and advertising is the easiest way to do that. The solution isn't better ads, but alternative revenue streams for websites, and I'm 100% fine with Mozilla taking a cut of that alternative revenue stream. But I will not tolerate ads on my browser.

I hoped Brave would've solved this problem by letting users pay to remove ads, but instead they went to crypto to reward viewing ads. That's the opposite of what I want, and I really hope Mozilla has someone still working there in a position that matters that understands that.

[–] felsiq@lemmy.zip 8 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Isn’t that exactly what brave did? I wasn’t a fan of their “watch ads to get BAT” system either, but the alternative was always to just buy BAT with actual money. I’d rather see Mozilla work with brave to collaborate and improve on the BAT strategy than to start another competing standard, personally.

[–] abbenm@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Isn’t that exactly what brave did?

I'm actually quite intrigued with Braves attempts at innovating here, but I don't know how effective they have been and, alas, Brave relies on Chromium.

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[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (9 children)

Does buying BAT compensate websites? AFAIK, no sites actually signed up to be compensated that way, so it just ended up being a random cryptocurrency. Brave went crypto first, websites second, and that obviously didn't work.

Mozilla should do the opposite IMO. Go out and make agreements with major sites to make their content available w/o ads for compensation, and then get users to start using that service. What they use for payment isn't particularly important to me, but it should be stable and low-cost. I think GNU Taler is a good start to keep costs really low (no money is actually changing hands), and Mozilla can settle up with websites monthly, quarterly, etc.

It should be Brave collaborating w/ Mozilla, not the other way around, because Brave obviously has weird motivations. Brave can keep BAT to reward watching ads, I just don't think they should use the same system for rewarding ads vs compensating websites for not showing ads.

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[–] tb_@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Why's it gotta be crypto though

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[–] ziviz@lemmy.sdf.org 40 points 3 days ago (7 children)

A fundamental flaw in this, is it still involves user data, even if "anonymized". You can advertise without any user data. We do it all the time. Does a television channel know your gender? Does a radio station know if you bought a car recently? Does the newspaper know your hobbies?

[–] abbenm@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 day ago

A fundamental flaw in this, is it still involves user data, even if “anonymized”. You can advertise without any user data.

Right. The reassurance is supposed to be: "don't worry, no personalized data is retained." So, ideally, no individual record of you, with your likes, your behaviors, your browser fingerprint, aggregated together with whatever third party provider data might be purchased, and machine learning inferences can be derived from that. Instead, there's a layer of abstraction, or several layers. Like "people who watch Breaking Bad also like Parks and Rec and are 12% more likely to be first generation home buyers". Several abstracted identity types can be developed and refined.

Okay, but who ordered that? Why is that something that we think satisfies us that privacy is retained? You're still going to try and associate me with an abstract machine learned identity that, to your best efforts, closely approximates what you think I like and what is most persuasive to me. I don't think people who are interested in privacy feel reassured at anonymized repurposing of data.

It's the model itself, it's the incentives inherent in advertising as an economic model, at the end of the day. I don't know that there's a piecemeal negotiation that is supposed to stand in for our interests to reassure us, or whose idea was that this third way was going to be fine.

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[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 30 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Users don't want ads and advertisers want something that can collect as much data as possible.

Mozilla as lost both

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[–] LWD@lemm.ee 22 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Mozilla has a clear conflict of interest in their statements: they are now an ad company. Because of this, they must be approached with skepticism.

Every corporation invested in unhealthy ventures will say it is necessary, and they can do it ethically, regardless of how misleading or untrue it is. They will launder their bad behavior through an organization to make it appear more ethical and healthy.

Mozilla is doing nothing new under the sun. But for some reason, after burning through so much community goodwill, some people are still willing to give Mozilla the benefit of the doubt with a technology that they surely would not have given Google or Adobe or Facebook the same treatment.

Surely we wouldn't ignore the canary in the coal mine until it was too late. Surely, we wouldn't look at a huge corporation and say "this time it won't be the same."

When Google acquired DoubleClick, they positioned it as a net good for everybody in terms of privacy. DoubleClick was notoriously awful in those terms. Google said (and people, including myself, believed) that by owning them, Google can make them into something better.

Instead, DoubleClick made Google into something much, much worse.

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[–] BlackEco@lemmy.blackeco.com 26 points 3 days ago

A free and open internet shouldn’t come at the expense of privacy

Free as in free beer, not as in freedom unfortunately