The original developer has a great blog, and has commented on this
They’ve decided who their customers are, and it’s not you
Since FF is free - isn’t that a given?
Google was recently successfully sued for being anit-competitive by paying third parties to set Google as the default search engine.
That payoff by Google is like 90% of Mozilla’s income, which is probably disappearing. So yeah, they’re in full panic to fill that gap.
Maybe if we support firefox we could reach the same amout of money than google
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.
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.
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.
Right, there’s still a slippery slope issue here. I actually think it was a good thing that Mozilla was coming up with add-on products to create a revenue stream. I would love to, for instance, pay for a 2TB Mozilla Drive over Google Drive. I would rather do that than the ads.
I’d love a subscription-based privacy review service. Hell, combine it with a full product review where the consumers of the reviews are paying for it, rather than ad revenue, commissions from selling what they are reviewing, free products from the makers, or being outright fronts for marketers.
Like that report about all car companies selling cars that are spy machines was very good to know, as much as it sucked to see confirmation that that was indeed the case.
If there’s enough easy visibility on who is doing privacy right and wrong, then there might actually be more economic incentive to make good products instead of trying to sell out their own customers to make an extra buck.
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.
But it means we’re probably more susceptible to propaganda that accuses corporations of corporate bullshit, whether the accusation has merit or not.
Exactly. It’s a different variation. I think the Mozilla stuff is more a sleepwalking echo chamber than an intentional campaign, but at a certain point the difference doesn’t matter.
Yea that’s a really good way to put it!
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.
Can you point to where I said that Mozilla is as bad as Google?
I don’t think you’ll be able to.
Mozilla has been called out for concerning things in the past, as has Canonical. I think it’s okay to call companies out for doing shady things, and I think it’s okay to hold them accountable.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be concerned.
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.
This is just a huge fuck you to their community.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, instead, they should cater to an industry that has long been a known vector for malware, abuse, and PII theft?
that is the only current accepted alternative to paying for website access, yes
if you have better ideas though, we’d all love to hear them
Your stance appears to be roughly “we’ve tried nothing and are all out of ideas, so let’s keep doing objectively harmful things”.
The simplest idea is not to accept the premise that an objectively harmful business model that only brings value to a shrinking minority is acceptable. Maybe commercialism of every part of the web isn’t something that humanity needs. As for paying for access, there are plenty of extant models that have never been attempted with any seriousness.
Then again, the whole Linux ecosystem is able to thrive without bending the knee to the ad industry. There’s no reason that a web browser cannot also thrive without ads except for a lack of desire to do so.
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 can’t 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 doesn’t generate enough revenue to made a profit, you don’t have a viable business
I don’t want the internet to be exclusively business
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.
It is time to fork Firefox. Mozilla has bern hijacked by people who don’t care about its vision.
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.
Maintaining a browser is very labor intensive
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.
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.
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
Have you tried to make money with one?
It, uh…makes…food…uh…come in…?
Money has a definition. It is exchanged for goods and services. In the Star Trek universe, they are not trading replicators in exchange for goods and services, the goods are made by the replicator and services are provided freely. Therefore replicators are not money or income or anything.
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.
If treated like animals, that’s what happens. Observe the difference between U.S. criminal justice, and the Netherlands. Without a chip in your shoulder, it’s pretty simple.
oh no the human nature argument
Well, do you subscribe to news sites, YouTube Premium, Kagi? The world you dream of is available to you today
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.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.
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! 😅
Burn the phoenix again.
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 don’t think you understand my point. The software I write in my free time does not pay my bills. That’s 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.
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
People who work at non-profits aren’t volunteering.
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.
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?
No ads?
People need money mate. Not everyone can afford to run a website.
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.
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
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.
