Firefox as an organization does not get branding at all. They claim to be the champions on privacy and user freedom yet they keep breaking that image over and over again with unwanted ads, telemetry, and services you can't disable. I still use Firefox as my main browser, but I can't fathom how they come up with such poor decisions every single time.

You can disable the ads in the preferences. The telemetry can be mostly disabled there too, more if you use about:config. Pocket, which I assume is the service you mention, can also be disabled in about:config.

You can find more here: https://www.privacy-handbuch.de/handbuch_21u.htm

This user.js will disable most of the telemetry and other things: https://www.privacy-handbuch.de/download/minimal/user.js

So yes, you can disable these.

But it isn't by default, that is the issue

If telemetry was off by default, Mozilla would be blind to what the users are doing, to common sources of crashes and to what features are not being used.

Mozilla needs that information to be able to make a decision on where to focus.

Same for ads, default off ads defeats the entire purpose.

Mozilla is a privacy-aware and even -focused corporation and I will assume that the defaults of the browser are good for the common end user. Everything else may be configured.

mozilla needs to ask before collecting data. What is difficult about that?

They need to ask if they collect personal data as per GDPR or the US Data Privacy laws. If the data collected is not of private nature they don't need to ask.

Usage patterns can be granular enough to identify a user online, its easy enough to do that with machine learning nowadays. They have to ask anyway.

It doesn't send that granular enough of a usage pattern though, they have a group of people making sure that they data they collect cannot be used to identify someone.

Maybe if users were willing to pay for a browser, they wouldn't be so desperately scrambling around for non-Google revenue sources.

They could try to offer some kind of "pay us to forgo marketing partnerships" deal, but I somehow doubt even most of the well-paid privacy advocates on HN would sign up.

> They could try to offer some kind of "pay us to forgo marketing partnerships" deal, but I somehow doubt even most of the well-paid privacy advocates on HN would sign up.

I would pay for this, provided it was a one time payment! (I feel I need to add that caveat nowadays, since subscriptions are all the rage.)

> I would pay for this, provided it was a one time payment!

The problem is that web browsers require some of the most intensive software maintenance of any software, ever. They're one of the most exposed attack surfaces to external security threats; and piles of new features are unfortunately getting continuously added to web standards, which need to be supported for compatibility reasons.

I think a one time tip-jar payment makes sense for a lot of software, but not for web browsers. I think a subscription-type contribution makes the most sense for them.

Put the money into a trust fund? I suppose I could do that on my end, but that's a little extreme from an effort point of view.

Subscriptions are just difficult to manage, I can't deal with individual recurring costs for so many pieces of software.

Have they ever tried crowdfunding campaigns? I don't think so. Wikipedia seems to be doing fine with it. At least they should experiment with some ideas in that line and see what works.

And then people will complain that Mozilla is nagging them for money. I doubt anyone likes the nag screen that Wikipedia pops down about 15 seconds into reading a page and it covering almost half the screen.

Wikipedia has sufficient marketshare to survive despite that.

The ads that mozilla shows are fairly privacy-friendly, much more than any other ads you'd find on most websites. That's an improvement.

If you don't like them you can easily disable them.

>And then people will complain that Mozilla is nagging them for money. I doubt anyone likes the nag screen that Wikipedia pops down about 15 seconds into reading a page and it covering almost half the screen.

Users may not like nag screens, but I doubt they like the shitty ads Mozilla shows on the new tab page by default either. As long as the screen is easy to dismiss I don't see the problem.

Even easy to dismiss screens can disrupt the users flow similarly to how I mentioned that it interrupts my reading of the wikipedia page.

Wikipedia has, as mentioned, the market monopoly advantage so they can do as please, Firefox doesn't and can't afford to annoy users.

I would doubt users are more annoyed by ads, especially the type of ads that Mozilla uses, than nag screens.

I can't say that I like the wikipedia reminders, but I don't dislike them. They remind me to pay for a service I use daily. So I do and they don't remind for a while. It is fine.

Maybe crowdfund API development for some of the 'power user' features, like live bookmarks or tree style tabs?

Why can't the community do this for themselves, without having to make Mozilla do everything?

Why do you still use it?

"Choose Firefox now, or later you won't have a choice"

https://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-l...

Honestly that's a very poor rationale. People should be choosing Firefox because it's a better product or a more ethical one (sadly they are doing a poor job at convincing us of that), not because we need to keep a competitor alive forever no matter what.

"Should be" doesn't get us anywhere. The rationale is sound, regardless of whether it should be.

Since Quantum, I actually find it to be a better product.

Right now, it is both, it is a better product and a more ethical one.

If people will not use it for these reasons now, then they will not be able to use it in the future.

That's the argument, and it seems pretty straightforward to me.

> it is a better product

Maybe for you. For me, it's unuseable until they add hardware accelerated video decoding.

Regardless of the reason why, we're now reaping the fruits of Google's unchecked rampage across the browser space, what with Chromium/WebKit all but taking over. Mozilla continues to be starved for cash. Most Firefox users despise one of its only monetization strategies (selling advertisements). FF would be dead tomorrow if Yahoo (or whoever the default search engine is) pulled their funding. Mozilla is surrounded by rocks and hard places on all sides, what else can they do?

I'll happily use a (marginally) inferior competitor because I value competition for its own sake. I use Firefox, DuckDuckGo, Bing Maps.

Yes, you can do that. But if you want it to be sustainable, you can't use that kind of line to convince people at large. And note that until Firefox 57, Firefox was not "marginally" inferior, it was substantially inferior in a number of metrics. They have improved since then, but it took them a very long time - you can't expect users to wait forever for you.

If we can't expect educated, tech-savvy users on HN to take the long view and support Mozilla, then I guess you're saying the game is already lost.

We might as well just make our peace that the age of an open internet and general-purpose computing is coming to an end. In future, we'll enjoy AOL 2.0 access on our Google Home Terminal Appliances.

I was talking about "people at large", not HN users.

For the lack of better alternatives (I need some specific extensions, and I don't want to use Chrome). I also use alternative browsers like qutebrowser but it cannot replace everything I need to do.

Have you tried Brave? I'm really liking it.

Nope, I want no ads in my browsers and Brave does not interest me in that sense.

There is an extension called Chrome Store Foxified. It's like wine for Firefox. Check it out.

[..]This add-on has been discontinued. I am leaving it here because it still works in some versions of Firefox. Discontinue Notice and Discussion[..]

Source: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/chrome-store-fox...

The linked discussion makes the impression that they try to revive it.

Firefox is being sabotaged from the executive level, I'm 100 % sure of this. Tech-wise, solid. Administration, a complete disaster.

Probably. It's pretty sad when you see something great stuck in a local minima because of "thinking heads" that know better.

They should bring back Brian Eich, things were better for the users when he was in charge.

I don't think it was him in particular, it was just that firing him gave them the opportunity to replace him and his people with people more attuned to their agendas. It's the agendas that should change, the people would follow. They installed a new culture at the top that was more interested in using Firefox as a transitional way to burnish their resumés, and any semblance of core values disappeared in a tangle of projects that were branded as innovation and that everybody could sign. Meanwhile they've been in consistent negative growth in users that is actually starting to look insignificant because their entire userbase is now insignificant. I mean: losing 1%/month of the number of the users they have now seems like a rounding error compared to 1%/month of the users they had 5 years ago.

Anyway, they'll always be guaranteed at least 3% of the market from diehard anti-Google/Microsoft/closed-source users like me, and users from outside the US who are concerned by unaccountable US tech behemoths who are intimately intertwined with the government. With that 3%, they'll be able to fulfill their primary function of being something that Google can claim in an antitrust hearing keeps them from being a monopoly.

1) That's not his name.

2) "Things were better before so let's revert to where we were five years ago" is a terrible strategy.

>"Things were better before so let's revert to where we were five years ago" is a terrible strategy.

I mean, if things really were better before, reverting to how they were sounds like a pretty good strategy. That's kind of a tautology.

Worked pretty swell for intel when netburst got out of hand and they backtracked. 10 years of market dominance followed.

Intel can't revert the market back 10 years, but the problem with Mozilla isn't its struggles with the market. If it is true that Mozilla's problem is compromised leadership, then it would make perfect sense to go back to independent leadership.

He's running brave now

And Steve Jobs was running NeXT. And like NeXT, Brave doesn't really seem to be catching on...

From what I understand though, Eich has lost faith in Mozilla maintaining their own renderer, so if he came back to Mozilla it would probably coincide with Firefox becoming yet another chromium skin.

Mozilla is sticking with Gecko for now, and they do not need my faith to continue.

Brave is growing, has grown every month, not at over 5.5M MAU. I am not sure how to interpret "Brave doesn't seem to be catching on" as other than false. Firefox in 1H2004 was in a similar trendline. People then still said "IE for evar!"

I have no idea if Brave is going to succeed at their goals, but they are the only ones trying to comprehensively change the model...I wish them success!

Exactly. And they still don't advertise a lot of the Firefox features outside of release notes. I mean REALLY advertise. Google used to have regular commercials with celebrities to advertise Chrome, and people are still somehow baffled that they're number one now? FOSS devs build some good software, but we're terrible at marketing.

How do you think Mozilla gets the money to pay their hundreds of developers?

The ads on their homepage are far more benign than their google search integration which pays hundreds of millions per year.

As far as I know, it's also personalized completely locally.

It's just like the new tab page in chrome on Android. But you can disable what content is shown in settings, including the ads.

Backdoor? Please.

In addition to this:

Even though the link claims that it is not a paid placement, it's still an advertisement. If Mozilla really wants to provide more value to me, they'll tell me how to permanently disable it. Its presence provides negative value to me.

What.. Have you even used FF in the last decade? It comes with tracker and 3rd party cookie blocking built in. Your accusation is a bit of a stretch.

I guess you think I should use chrome? Because that has zero to do with serving me up more profitable advertising at all..

But aside from that, you do know you can disable everything on the home page under general preferences - including the ad section.

And worst case if they remove the option, ublock will still block it and if it can't you can just disable it's display in userChrome.css.

How is an accusation of it being an ad at all a stretch? It’s a placement offering a deal for a company, whether or not it was paid for. That seems to fit the definition of an ad to me.

Furthermore, I’m not sure where you got the idea that I am telling you to move to chrome or indeed do anything at all, given the comment to which you replied says “me” 3 times in it. I was quite evidently purely asking about my own situation.

Their argument, per the GP’s link, is that they want to provide their users additional value. This does not achieve that for me, hence I want to remove it.

I have not yet had a chance to upgrade and try to disable it, as I am not near my computer right now to upgrade to the latest release. Hence why I asked for them to provide a means of removing it. If that already exists, fantastic! It achieves precisely the outcome I’m after.

It's not in the latest release it's from a release or two ago so you probably already have it disabled.

But its not only ads they serve up, it's closer to the Google Now feed you see on chrome new tabs in android or Google now.

The accusation was that they're not adding value or in fact negating it. My complaint was that Google or alternatives don't do nearly as much as they could to ad value - so to call out Firefox like this just makes no sense.

I will mention they're pushing pocket hard and I think this sis the route they're going for monetary gains. It's gross but it's pretty easy to remove it all from context menus via user chrome CSS anyway.

I would suggest you consider this: with Microsoft moving Edge to chromium, there are now only 3 engines standing: Chromium, webkit, and gecko. Therefore Firefox is important to deny Google enormous control over the browser and therefore the internet.

Firefox desperately needs a revenue stream that is independent from Google. Although Google has not done so yet -- it's imo very valuable to Google to preserve the illusion of not having a browser monopoly -- a huge amount of their revenues come from their Google search deal. Google can, for example, cut that deal at any time: Firefox is selling into a monopsony.

I don't love advertising, but we need Firefox to have a non-google revenue source.

I completely understand the need for the Mozilla org to diversify its funding sources. If that’s the case, they should be honest and upfront with it. Come out and say that you want to try ad revenue, rather than this “giving back” nonsense. If Mozilla are honest about it then we as the Firefox community can have a more realistic conversation about what this means and how it’s best implemented.

Does the Mozilla foundation accept private donations? Even if they do, they clearly don't push it enough.

I have no idea if it would bring in enough revenue, but it would presumably help? I'd much prefer a Wikipedia-esque donation request on the new tab page than any of Mozilla's other partnerships.

> Does the Mozilla foundation accept private donations?

Try https://donate.mozilla.org/

They do, but donations are not put toward Firefox development.

Just to clarify Chromium (browser) uses Blink, which is a fork of Webkit. IMO the consolidation demonstrates the complexity involved.

The alternative is subscription. That hasn't fared too well traditionally in browser space for a few decades. Maybe the Brave approach might work, where a fraction goes to the browser vendor akin to a transaction fee?

Of course they paid for it... Do you really think the Mozilla Corporation has sent an ad to millions of users for free? Whether that money went to the corporation or to the pocket of an executive, that's another matter.

Or it can be a deal to see what returns the ad gets. If Mozilla is serious about selling ad space there, they're going to need case studies. In the early stages, that is something you would give away for free. Particularly because the ad providers are going to get a lot less data than they are accustomed to, you will need some case studies that show someone getting great returns on their ad spend even without tracking data.

Then the statement "It was not a paid placement or advertisement." is blatantly false. they simply say whether it was paid, not whether it was paid to a specific entity.

Read the statement more carefully:

> 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.

It could be that they are knowingly making public statements which are untrue and will expose themselves to legal liability for that or it could be that the statement means exactly what it says and that Mozilla is experimenting with promotions for using Firefox which do not involve money changing hands, especially if they're just gauging interest to see whether people even click on those regions. The concert was definitely promoted as a “Thanks for using Firefox” deal so I would not be at all surprised to learn that Booking.com gave a modest discount as part of a deal where no money changed hands as per the statement.

> 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.

I don't know about legal liability, but you don't really need to look further than this to know that Mozilla lied because these two statements are already inconsistent. "Offers provided by a partner" are advertisements. The quid pro quo in this case wasn't money, but rather a link on booking.com to download Firefox.

Unless you can back up that statement with some kind of evidence, I'd say it looks awfully close to libel.

> Are these ads introduced with these updates, or does Firefox include a backdoor so the Mozilla Corporation can show whatever they want on your home page?

The snippets are just a web page fragment fetched over HTTPS, AFAIK.

I don't see this on mine, but I modified the defaults a long time ago.. My new tab page just has a list of 10 (out of 16) sites I added there manually. 6 of those are services I run on my local network.

Hit the gear at the top right of your new tab page. Uncheck boxes you don't want.

Optionally, disable Pocket completely by going to about:config in address bar. Search for 'extensions.pocket.enabled' and double click to change value from true to false.

The home / new tab page itself is local. The snippets at the bottom of the page are loaded from a Mozilla server.

I think you missed the shift. It's all about internet openess now. Not sure the end user is still in the equation.

I was so excited when Quantum was released. I used it exclusively and was happy with the performance.

Then Mozilla started back dooring ads and other promos and broke my trust.

I’ve since gone back to Chrome. At least there Google has the decency to make it obvious you’re being tracked, and with the new privacy controls I (hopefully correctly) feel like I can exercise some control.

Mozilla really needs to get right with their users.