That is exactly the problem I have with it - weasel words and euphemisms; FF is scoring an own-goal here and eroding trust.
Why not just tell it like it is. "We need funding and are lining up deals with third parties to display their ads/messaging in the address bar search. We vet these third parties by holding them contractually to these standards [list standards to establish bar required for "trust"]."
It's only my opinion, but spelling it out clearly - the need for funding and how/why "trusted partners" get to display their stuff - would make me far more likely to allow these suggestions. (Oh, and as for "relevance", FF should explain how that's intended to work, ie what data are being used etc.)
I second your opinion - I'd be willing to entertain, or even support, this way of them making money iff they spelled out honestly what they're doing and why. In details. Talk with me like two adults that respect each other.
"I'd be willing to entertain, or even support, this way of them making money iff they spelled out honestly what they're doing and why" implies both of these:
- "If they spelled out honestly what they're doing and why, I'd be willing to entertain [...]"
- "If I'd be willing to entertain [..] then they will honestly spell what they're doing and why".
The second of which doesn't make sense to me, unless I'm missing something? He should have used "only if" rather than "iff" here.
> - "If I'd be willing to entertain [..] then they will honestly spell what they're doing and why".
This is true, because if they won't, then you wouldn't be willing to entertain [..]
A = OP supports Mozilla making money from address bar ads
B = Mozilla is honest about making money from address bar ads
"B -> A" (OP supports Mozilla if Mozilla acts a certain way) makes sense. "A -> B" sounds confusing in a sentence, but its contrapositive, "!B -> !A", also makes sense.
However, for:
B = Mozilla decides to make money from address bar ads and is honest about reasons
"A -> B" no longer makes sense, since OP can support Mozilla having the address bar ads with an honest justification, but Mozilla can still decide to not have the address bar ads.
(2) Logically, iff, equivalence and double implication are themselves equivalent, the expression in question is (necessarily) logically correct even in those forms, though it is irrelevant as of (1) and a confusing way to express the relationship, as the causality clearly flows in one direction.
(3) It was not meant nor interpreted as a bare logical proposition, hence it is improper to blindly apply logical transformations and reinterpret in a different system.
If I am willing to entertain then they honestly spell what they're doing and why.
It means that if you know that I am entertaining the idea you can infer from that they were honest.
But even playing the game of treating informal language by the rules of strict logical formalisms, it still makes sense. The two elements implying one another would be (1) trusting mozilla and entertaining this new program, and (2) mozilla communicating clearly about their ads. You trust them if they communicate honestly, and communicating honestly garners trust. Makes sense to me.
We understand the intent and thought behind the use of iff in the original comment, regardless of what it may be interpreted to mean outside of a _very informal_ setting.
But then I thought, okay, they need money, ads in address bar isn't the worst thing in the world.
But then then I thought: But only if they are clearly disclosed as ads! Instead we seem to have a combination of " traditional suggestions like browsing history and open tabs, as well as new suggestions from our partners" -- are the "paid placements" clearly designated as such? Unclear? Probably not?
In "traditional" media, the first rule of advertisements is that they be clearly identified as advertisements, as content put there by someone paying for it, instead of by editorial judgement. Because how can you trust the editorial judgement of the publisher if you can't tell which is which?
That even Mozilla no longer thinks this is necessary shows how much the culture has changed, where "paid placement" is pretty much assumed everywhere (or if not, you're a naive fool) and nobody trusts anybody.
Replace the brand there with yours and that's what you get. No contextual bs, no crazy logos or statements, just a simple word from a sponsor.
National "NPR" may be better. But our local NPR "affiliate" has whole shows that are really pay-to-play. :(
https://www.baltimoresun.com/citypaper/bcp-why-so-much-pr-wy...
Maybe Mozilla needs to do a pledge drive, instead. I had used Mozilla products for many years before I even realized they accepted charitable donations.
Because they don't want to say: "we want a lot of money to all kinds of projects irrelevant to the browser".
They should focus on their core product and cut everything else away.
Instead they are an organization that tries to save the whole world. It seems like they think the jobs created for themselves by "saving the world" is the core business and Firefox is just a cash-cow for this.
The first of its sins is the tacit agreement that Mozilla is doing this because, as the parent comment says, they "need funding". Mozilla needs funding now like Wikipedia needs funding: they have more of it than they've ever had, but by all appearances, you'd think they're really strapped for cash or something, because their pleas have gotten steadily more intrusive and desperate.
Second is the "focus on their core product" remark. There's so much wrong with this sentence. First, it's the tacit acceptance that Mozilla is and should be a classic Valley tech company—a bit player with a product competing in the market, rather than the way mozilla.org operated in its heyday—you know, when it was actually a force for good and were winning hearts and minds. This is another case where the trend does not support the thesis. Mozilla _has_ steadily gotten more focused on Firefox compared to its historically diverse interests (to the exclusion and chagrin of many of its volunteers and advocates), and by most measures we're worse off for this Corporation-centric mindset. At its height, Mozilla was accomplishing way more, had greater influence than it has today, and did it on a fraction of the budget. Today, Mozilla has half a billion in annual revenue but the Firefox team claims that keeping a menu item around that lets you jump to a site's RSS feed is too much of a maintenance burden.
Where do you think all the money is going? It's not Thunderbird or developer.mozilla.org that are sucking hundreds of millions away. And as bad as Mitchell's leadership has been over the last 5+ years, her new salary in the low single-digit millions has pretty much nothing to do with it. For comparison, Mozilla has something like a 50+ million dollar marketing budget. This is classic cost disease. Ten years ago, it was a common quip that Chrome's effective marketing budget (i.e. in imaginary dollars) was greater than Mozilla's entire annual revenue. Well guess where we are today? A well-funded contender in the browser wars could almost certainly appear tomorrow and grab as much market share in the next 3 to 5 year period as Firefox currently has and do it on total operating costs that measure half of Mozilla's marketing spend (in actual dollars).
So please stop doing this. Every time you feed into this meme that you heard on social media and that sounded good to you because it wrapped things up in a nice, simple narrative, at best it's going to have no effect, and at worst you encourage Mozilla to lean in and do _exactly_ the things that have led to present situation. If you want to provide encouragement, encourage Mozilla to overhaul its entire leadership, to live by the principles they purport to care about (how about starting with removing opaque clicktracking links from emails?), to put a real content blocker in the browser, to stop hawking VPN snake oil, and to open source Pocket like it was promised over 4 years ago. Demand that they make falsifiable claims that can be evaluated for success or failure on well-defined criteria. Campaign for them to either cap the marketing budget to $1 million or actually do something effective with it (like writing a check to Wikimedia and then blogging about how the reason that there are no overlays on Wikipedia this year nagging you for funding this year is because Mozilla decided to foot the bill and so you're welcome—which would be way more effective than _anything_ the marketing department has done to date).
This is true but it also has nothing to do with anything Mozilla is currently doing. It is actually a business maxim of Jim Barksdale [1] (and others probably) who used to be an executive at Netscape. Barksdale said that you could move into a market with a large concentration of users and steal a percentage of them away by just offering an alternative.
Maintaining a position is not the same as building a position. If Barksdale is right then the existing players in a market need to work to ensure that they can't lose market share from new entrants.
If a player M controls some "share" in the game and an independent contender C can appear and match M's current share on <1/10 M's current costs, then M's costs to maintain its position relative to all others are not greater than C's costs. If M₀ is M's current offering, then M can carve out part of its budget to fund the entry of their own, controlled Cₘ, independent of M₀, and when Cₘ reaches maturity and matches M's share from M₀ alone, they can let M₀ die—or keep both M₀ and Cₘ around, having advanced their take with greater efficiency than all the costs it would have required to make the same gains with M₀ alone. This assumes that the share from Cₘ comes entirely from those competing with M. This won't be the case; M₀ itself will suffer. But even in the worst case scenario, the share from Cₘ can come entirely from eroding the share of M₀, i.e., a simple transfer. This also won't happen. However, even in the event that it does happen, it's still a net win for M, having used Cₘ to cut their costs by >90% under the regime with M₀.
I think the big thing about VPN is that its value is predicated on others being shit. Stuff like Edge Collections, Brave's privacy respecting Search/News/Talk/Rewards(tips) stack, Vivaldi having built-in RSS and notes, and yes Pocket all provide direct value to the user. A password manager is direct value, as was Send or whatnot.
I doubt wikimedia would agree to that, since their schtick is that it's user funded and thus a neutral actor
Indeed. Mozilla should be honest. That's what builds trust.
We all know they need money, so if this gives them money to improve FF, fine by me. But they need to quit the marketing bullshit-speak.
Whomever they have hired to (1) perform UX research and (2) make executive decisions aren't performing, IMHO.
I dont really have a lot of complaints about it. I like the dark mode and the address bar at the bottom it has ad blocker.
What all changed between those versions ?
Poor design of tab history (chronological order)
No more about:config
Change in the text rendering engine causes some websites to be unreadable (esp. news, arstechnica, and reddit), accessibility out the window
There are many more, but I don't mean to rehash because it's been a passionate discussion for many over the past year.
So few realize the importance of this. Some say "well only in Android" or "use nightly". The plan is clearly to incrementally erode freedom to a final state of dysfunction under the guise of gaslit improvements and false switches. They actually argue that removing about:config was for our own good. Printing webpages to PDF is also something we're supposedly better without. But we shouldn't complain, for they've abandoned the crusty old obsolete concept of configurability for brave new ones. Pocket, guerilla advertising, binary over variety, cloudflare, dom.battery.enabled, privacy.resistFingerprinting.alwaysdisabled and an emoji level of privacy. Why design good software when they can design good users? They're not all bad though. At least they saved us all from the terrifying overwhelming burden of RSS, right?
They're attitude is that, yeah, the internet is becoming a roiling cloaca, which is accepted and inevitable, yes? So rather than resist and try to improve it, adapt and contribute to it's descent.
That's quite the accusation, and completely baseless. about:config was removed from the stable version on android to prevent users breaking their installations. It's interesting you mention privacy.resistFingerprinting, as it alone is the cause of countless bug reports and support tickets from users who don't understand the implications. If you're confident enough to go digging in about:support then you can run beta or install a fork with it enabled. There's no alterior motive.
Also note that an ulterior motive doesn't need to exist for the path towards centralized, user-hostile control to happen. It starts with "the developer knows better what the user wants than the user themselves" sort of attitudes.
Removing a whole toolset of configurability because one tool was causing trivial issues is practical? And you have evidence of jubilant hordes prostrating themselves in gratitude for this benevolence? Where are they? Did they all get disappeared along with this post?
This mentality goes down well-known paths.
Autoplay forever, whether anyone wants it or not!
Is it some business school process or management training BS? It usually only happens when "trained" business people get involved that this sort of BS happens.
… which, in fairness, is itself a species of selling ads! But setting a search engine default is far more benign than what they’re planning here.
I'm no expert, but from what I've heard the reasoning is that ad companies don't like it when you do that and won't want to work with you. They'd rather FF says "we love these guys and they just happen to be handing us bags of money" rather than "look, we dont like this anymore than you do but we need the cash".
Not excusing it, and I could well be wrong (there could also be a way of saying it that satisfies both parties), but thats my understanding of the rationale
This is exactly the point why I left Google Chrome back then and considered FF as a good alternative. I didn't trust Google anymore. But now I face the same problem again, because I don't want these "features and trusted partners". I also don't want to have to justify over and over again why I don't want them. I just want a well-functioning and secure browser that people can trust.
You can't trust any of them. The real question is, who do you trust more? Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, Brave. You can't trust any of them, but you have to pick one.
It's bad enough to have to instruct people how to disable the New Tab ads, now you have to add one more step. At this point it becomes pretty awkward:
"Don't use Chrome browsers, they don't respect your privacy and are bad for the web! Use Firefox instead. Oh but wait you have to disable integrated ads first, just do this and that and this and I swear it's fine!"
This is why I use Ungoogled Chromium and build it myself.
Mozilla has a lot of no value initiatives activities that they want to fund
Mozilla Corporation (which is where your donations go - you can't donate to Firefox as such) is a taxable, profit-making company.
Mozilla Foundation wholly owns Mozilla Corporation, and is a non-profit. But you can't donate to Mozilla Foundation.
(I don't know how you can be a non-profit that wholly owns a profit-making corporation; I'm not an accountant, and I'm not familiar with US tax law)
The history of Netscape and Mozilla is sufficiently farcical to fuel an entire 6-series comedy franchise. Were it not for the jaw-dropping salaries that the absurd execs draw, I'd laugh.
And Harvard has a multi-billion dollar endowment that they hoard. Mozilla is doing it wrong.
Harvard endowment is so huge for two reasons: (1) fundraising, (2) earning more than 5% per year for long, long, long time. But they still must spend 5% per year of their massive endowment.
Running a non-profit with only an endowment (no fund-raising) for more than 20 years with is hard to do.
Given the massive salaries and bonuses paid out to upper management[0], I think their problem would be not sounding like that dril tweet about budgeting[1].
After the massive layoffs and cuts to vital web platform projects this move just feels consistent in their move from their old "quirky nerd charity" image to a new, more corporate one. I'm not saying that this is a good thing.
One thing surprised me as well:
"Firefox barely exists on phones, with a market share of less than half a percent. This is baffling given that mobile Firefox has a rare feature for a mobile browser: it's able to install extensions and so can block ads."
Yes, indeed, FF is pretty great on the phone, it looks like someone fails to advertise it as such. I use it precisely because I can use add blocker. The person with 2.4M compensation should notice that something wrong is going on.
I am afraid that Firefox/Mozilla at some point will become something like Yahoo or Commodore, a name that is being bought and sold by investment founds to extract some income and sell it further...
Ironically Netscape itself became "something like Yahoo or Commodore": AOL bought Netscape (which led to the Mozilla foundation being created), then proceeded to sell discount services under the name "Netscape ISP" and eventually renamed the original Netscape company. As far as I know the original company (now non-operating) eventually ended up being owned by Facebook and the Netscape brand somehow ended up being owned by Yahoo.
They've been losing market share, and these actions and language are not going to help.
Yeah, I guess Baker needs a raise.
‶Firefox usage is down 85% despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up 400%″ -- https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
Yes, the kind of leaders that forget the core of what they are doing and that make shady deals and decisions like this. "World-class leaders" are sharks and have no place in a company for common good.
You're equating greed and competence. It's an oddly common mistake.
NGOs and benevolent societies are attractive on the basis of their values.
If monetary compensation were correlatory with quality products, we clearly wouldn't be in this position with Firefox: Mozilla's current leader is clearly world-class by your own definition (where world-class==well remunerated), and is yet demonstrably failing the company on every possible metric.
https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
I'd rather have people that care about the cause in charge of these NGOs.
Excactly them trying to find more sources of income is fine by me. The hiding it and the deceptive messaging is awful. "enhance and speed up your searching experience" - I'm sure it will.
Even the opt-in screen is an anti-pattern.
"Allow suggestions" or "customize". No "do not allow suggestions". On the first level.
This is the stuff I want (and in the past expected) Mozilla to fight, not to become.
Because the sad truth is every other company is doing exactly the same. We live in a world where the people who track you most will greet you with "we value your privacy".
The incentives aren't made clear and you're left with the gaps to fill leading up to how decisions like these got made at an executive level. Does Mozilla stand to lose favor with Google or someone else by trying to be more honest about what it's trying to accomplish, or avoid?
Mozilla does stand to lose a lot of favor with its core audience by trying to act corporate now of all times, with Firefox marketshare at an all-time low. And I have to wonder if these kind of statements were universally accepted by the people who are a part of the company, on the foundation or corporate side. Are there any Mozillians that believe that this is not Mozilla as people remember it? Would they be willing to express their thoughts, if so?
I hope it is not coming to you as news the fact that those corporate statements are scripted, likely much more heavily than a TV show.
Speaking for myself, I'm not shocked, nor even surprised, that marketers would like to get into my living-room and my bedroom. If Mozilla wants to facilitate that, then they become my enemy.
Marketers are going to do marketing, just as pigs roll in shit and rabbits breed. I'm not trying to stop the tide; but I'll sandbag my front-door, so the tide doesn't wash into my home. If Mozilla wants to try an end-run around my flood defences, Mozilla can be removed quite easily.
Mozilla execs seem increasingly the same as the execs at IANA. They don't have real customers or shareholders; they are not held to account. It astonishes me how much these greedy oafs get paid. They are removing value, not adding it.
Wouldn't it be cool if we could get some of the products we use from companies that are structured so that they "serve their customers" and nobody else? Customers (i.e. users) would then have a veto on idiotic new "features" and infelicitous marketing partnerships.
If Mozilla had been such an organisation, then perhaps Firefox wouldn't have slid away from the top spot.
aged like milk i guess.
I just want a browser that isn't controlled by the ad mafia.
I also don't understand what will stop all five of their remaining users from switching to IceCat, Chromium, or Brave.
Do I hate the current exec team? Fuck yes. Do I have any serious alternative? Effectively, no. Am I a hostage? Sadly, a bit. I hope people with the power to influence this state of thing will, sooner or later, draw a line and find a better way forward (i.e. a new exec team). Either that, or the project will die and hopefully someone else will pick up the baton.
Vivaldi?
I'm using Firefox myself and have been using it almost exclusively since it was named Firebird back in the day, but I have considered Vivaldi as an alternative at one point.
I am sure I will regret asking... but why do you think that?
No, I find it amazing and I can probably write an essay about it.
The "ad-supported" economy is directly responsible for a lot of content, but the majority of it is not just bad, it is also actually damaging to society. Think of all the sites that "make a living" on clickbait, content farming, fake news, SEO manipulation and outright fraud. Also, think of all the big ad tech companies that have no incentive in ensuring any kind of quality on its users and just focusing on metrics like "engagement".
It is not too much of a stretch to think of how the "ad supported" content economy is correlated with the increased polarization of people, the growing tribal divide and the isolation of individuals. I honestly think that we should be treating the majority of "ad supported" websites as heavy polluters of our minds and our societies.
"Ad-supported" sites have nothing to gain by working on quality content and can put all their efforts optimizing for controversy, shock value and eyeballs. When everything became "free", we lost our ability to vote with our wallet and lose any power in steering the market to produce the things that we value.
Given that we can not simply ban "free" sites, the next best thing is to find an alternative way to finance content creators, but where the users can have a say in how the resources are allocated. The Brave model does exactly that. Content creators still have a way to make money from their work, but it is not just enough to plaster ads on our faces and collect a check from Google. They will have to compete for quality. They will have to be able to demonstrate that their work is not just worth of the people's time (for those that want to put up with ads), they will have to produce something of value to us.
> If it became dominant, you'd just be creating a new monopoly.
No, not at all.
There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING stopping Mozilla to create a similar ad network and to follow a similar model. In fact, they can even also base it on BAT and leverage all the work that Brave already did and avoid all the pitfalls that Brave had along the way when they were developing the system. Brave buys the token in the open market, Mozilla could do the same. They could use the same partner exchanges. They could probably even use the same codebase on the client side.
Honestly, if Mozilla did just that on Firefox, I'd switch back to it immediately. Like you, I also wish that Firefox continued to be a strong alternative to keep Google in check. But after the many years of poor management, blatant cash grabs and all the marketing spending that makes them more focused on "looking good" than "doing good", I've given up. I don't want wishy-washy feelings, I want to destroy Surveillance Capitalism.
Mozilla/Firefox are not working on anything to do that. Brave is.
That's a huge jump. Incentives are basically the same, at worst the same as subscription-supported services that are slowly becoming the standard for news websites that still care about their reputation. The Brave system simply moves some of the power from multiple ad networks to a single entity, Brave. No thanks, this is not the open web.
> There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING stopping Mozilla to create a similar ad network and to follow a similar model.
It doesn't matter who runs the network, you are still creating a massive bottleneck that can potentially determine the fate of any site.
I'd rather have a browser be a browser, without any cryptocurrency bullcrap, thank you. If that means I'll be limited to Konqueror when Mozilla goes down in flames, so be it.
Those with brand recognition and that can charge subscriptions are not the ones in the long tail. The rewards system is supposed to be a way to help those that are in the long tail: Youtubers with a small but engaged community, Open Source software developers that want to work on their own project, kids making Fortnite skins, investigative reporters that want to cover stories that are not getting picked by mainstream media.
- "Well, these people could use Patreon", you can respond.
Yes, some of them could. But Patreon requires people to contribute their own direct money and requires that people to have access to the global financial system. While with Brave anyone, in any corner of the world, can take whatever little amount of money they want and send as a tip.
> this is not the open web.
Do you use an ad-blocker of any kind? Over 40% of internet users do. Do you think they are "against the open web" and "abhorrent"?
Are you against ad-blockers? Are you okay with Google's push to make it difficult to run ad-blockers on Chrome? To me working actively against the interests of the users is the abhorrent thing.
> you are still creating a massive bottleneck that can potentially determine the fate of any site.
HOW??? To a site that is dependent on ads, I'm still failing to see what the brave rewards program does that is different from any other ad-blocker. That revenue opportunity is already sunk, Brave has no fault here.
> I'd rather have a browser be a browser, without any cryptocurrency bullcrap.
You started to move the goalposts. You only need to deal with "cryptocurrency bullcrap" if you decide to cash out the tokens you receive. If you just want to take the BAT token to tip for other creators, you don't even need to signup to an exchange and you don't need to give away any personal data. If Brave was able to run its revenue share program by transacting with cash, would you be okay with it?
> If that means I'll be limited to Konqueror (...), so be it.
Honestly, it just seems like you just have a bunch of misconceptions and prejudices you don't want to re-evaluate. If you don't want to use it, fine. What is not fine is to be calling companies and people "outright corrupt" without anything to actually back it up.
Users receive crypto if they join the brave rewards system. The rewards are directly related to Brave's revenue from their ad network - the notification ads. Advertisers put money for a known reason and a quantifiable investment. It's all opt-in. Users don't need to put any of their own money to be able to withdraw the rewards they receive. It's as much the opposite of a scheme as it can be.
What would you take to get you to take another look at it, to see it for yourself?
The big concern there is that ads that don't track are generally less valuable so even widespread adoption of Brave's system would cause a decrease in ad revenue, same as Apple's recent anti-tracking changes.
> Every time I try to espouse an issue that I have with the design or architecture
If you start a conversation with "issues that you have", you are going to have a hard time. Always. Starting with "issues that you have" is bad because (a) it assumes that you know more than the developers who have done the work of designing and addressing the trade-offs of the system and went through the actual work of developing the solution, (b) it assumes that your needs are more important than those of other users who are satisfied with the solution and (c) places the burden of solving your issue onto their shoulders while offering nothing in return.
In other words: no one likes a know-it-all.
If you start the conversation with the intent of understanding why things were done in a certain way and why certain design choices were made, you will be more likely to get in an engaging and productive conversation than just showing up with a laundry list of things that you'd like to see "fixed". By asking why instead of "confronting" design choices, you are more likely even to get them to recognize when a choice is sub-optimal.
I follow a good part of the lead members in Brave on Twitter. I've seen a lot of conversations from them with other people. Most if not all of them are working with false assumptions and don't even bother to question themselves. Those that come right away aggressive against them or assuming malice are indeed met with brashness. It might seem rude, but I would probably do the same after fending off the 100th random person on the internet accusing you of things you haven't done or demanding that you do something about the token price.
Those that come with the intent of understanding and assuming good intentions are way more likely to be treated cordially.
This is not an issue on Firefox, Chrome, or even Safari god forbid. These browsers are the main contenders because they're simple, and just browsers. Trying to build an "everything machine" is what made Internet Explorer such an unbearable slog, which is why all of our modern browsers are defined more by their limitation than their capabilities.
Again though, these are not my problems to fix. Brave has already burned their bridge of trust by involving themselves in crypto (and pocketing a portion for themselves, worse yet), so I have nothing more to do here than kick back and watch your development slowly turn back into a Mozilla-type org again.
Anyway, you just created a bunch of strawmen and expect others to spend time trying to reasonably argue with you? If this isn't the biggest "QED" to my comment, I don't know what is.
I could point to at least 5 false statements in your 3 paragraphs, but it is clear that you are not interested in having a productive conversation. So, don't be surprised if others just tell you to piss off and be less of an entitled aspie prick.
Also, Firefox mobile lets me block YouTube ads with ublock origin.
There is really close to no choice for browser alternatives.
Long term the gemini protocol and browsers like lagrange might be the only option - its just too hard to build a modern standards supporting web browser these days (even Microsoft has thrown in the towel and adopted Chromium for Edge).
Here's what I'd really like them to do:
* Stop paying out millions to execs
* Focus more on Firefox instead of other side projects
* Let me pay for Firefox development directly
It lasted a few years (it seem 5, based on Wikipedia), and they ultimately ended up switching to the default engine business model.
Maybe people would be happier if they had to pay to switch off the ads instead of it just being a setting (/switching default search engine)??
A lot of people just think that Mozilla should be a nonprofit and not aim to primarily enrich it's CEO and leadership. This isn't the case at the moment, which is clear if you paid any attention to what they've been doing for the last few years.
Little of the money that's going to be raised by this will end up paying for engineers to improve or maintain the Firefox code base and the vast majority of it will end in the pockets of said leadership, and this is kinda displeasing.
https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...
mozilla employs at the moment around 800 people.
according to their FAQ
> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2015/f...
> More than 75% of Mozilla spending is on people-related investments to produce the products and programs that support our mission: keeping the web open, free, and accessible.
this would mean they had around 300 million to spend on these 800 employees, averaging around 375 000 per employee.
Sr. Software Engineers get <$200 000, so IF all of their 800 employees were senior software engineers (extremely unlikely), their salary would be around 160 million, which is slightly more then 50% of what was available. a more realistic calculation would be around 20-30%, because not everyone will be getting SV wages. They've got global presence after all with offices SF, Toronto, Berlin, Beijin etc.
you'd have to verify in which unrelated projects by third parties mozilla invests and generally follow the money to figure out anything more, but that is simply out of scope of a hn comment.
A common rule of thumb is employees cost a company 2x salary.
The 2019 combined financial statements show $210 million for program salaries and benefits. Management and general salaries and benefits were $109 million.[1] Program means software development basically.[2]
[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201...
[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201...
Minor nit here - they don't have to pay taxes because they don't make a profit, not because of their status. If a for-profit corporation doesn't make profit (and few tech companies do), they won't have to pay income taxes either.
$375k per employee for a pure technology company doesn't seem outrageous? That has to include facilities too.
It's hard not to read into your message the suggestion that you'd like Mozilla to outsource development to lower-wage countries. I really doubt that's going to succeed in a challenging and competitive market like browsers. IMO they'd be better off spending more trying to poach the best brains behind Chrome.
does it? whats the remaining 25% (100 million) for in that case?
> It's hard not to read into your message the suggestion that you'd like Mozilla to outsource development to lower-wage countries
i do not want them to do that particularly. i just pointed out that not all 800 employees will be getting the $137,000 with a $54,800 bonus wage to point out that i'm being extremely generous in my calculation of how much they're likely paying to actual employees.
there are no conclusive numbers i know of, but if you just look at their open positions portal (https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/) you will surely agree that few of these will be getting that $190k...?
this is quite offtopic but what i find especially disheartening about mozilla is that almost all of its revenue comes from google.
every nation i know of is trying to build up their online/web presence, and yet we have only one mega corporation sponsoring web browsers to a significant degree. why isn't every nation like the USA, Canada, Australia etc each investing at least 10 million into a fund to build an open source web browser or contribute to one? why is every nation fine with that situation?
I'm sure you could find 50,000 people in the world willing to pay this. I'm one of them.
The problem is how you get started while building reputation, but I'm sure that it's possible.
In case of Mozilla/Firefox: do this while you still have some reputation left. It's literally the one party on the Internet that would have a chance of pulling it off.
But Firefox is open source. This is very important for many reasons.
Same. I already donate to the Mozilla Foundation but I'd love to fund Firefox more directly.
Maybe a way to rely less on Google and "trusted partners" money is just to spend less.
[1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/public-records/
It's also worth noting that there is a strict separation between the Mozilla Foundation (the tax exempt non-profit) and Mozilla Corporation (the wholly owned, for-profit subsidiary which builds Firefox). The Foundation is not directly involved in the creation of Firefox.
Wow I didn't know that. I always assumed Firefox was developed by a non-profit. So it basically means that Firefox is a commercial product (the purpose of which is to make money). Thanks for that bit of information which was not at all obvious if you don't pay close attention...
The subsidiary is a for-profit, but the profit all goes to the parent non-profit, which is then constrained in how it can use that income.
Think of a little charity shop that sells, say, second hand clothes in order that the profit from sales funds a charitable purpose like fighting cancer. The little shop is likely to be a for-profit company, wholly owned by its parent charity.
Charities have to follow strict rules about how they spend their money, care for their assets, make decisions, report on everything and be audited.
Everything they do is required to be demonstrably for the charity's purposes, which clashes with the on-the-ground flexilibilty required to make business-like decisions for something like a shop. For example when you decide to spruce up the lighting at the front of the shop to attract customers, which only indirectly serves the charity's goals.
That may be a poor example. The point is that the subsidiary business can be run more like a business, being managed, making decisions and spending its income in the freer way a business is allowed to do. The parent charity retains shareholder-like ultimate control, but that is indirect control; the subsidiary has its own directors and executives.
In the case of a shop that means it can spend on things that may attract customers, take gambles that may bring in more profit for the parent charity to use, and make day to day decisions that aren't subject to the same level of reporting, auditing and trustee oversight that the parent charity is. The shop's operating assets are outside the charity, giving it operational flexibility, but when it transfers some portion of assets as profits to the charity, those assets become inside and how they are spent becomes more tightly regulated.
In contrast to all other browser products, whose main purpose is increasing share holder value.
I have no idea how that works.
[Edited, because I got it 180deg arse-over-tit]
Conversely, AFAIK, Wikimedia doesn't accept money for merchandising their users. At least not in any official, straightforward way.
- Developing Firefox looks way more expensive than running Wikipedia servers. - It looks like there’s at least 10x less Firefox users than Wikipedia users.
It might still be possible (Firefox users might me more willing to pay and to pay more than Wikipedia users). It still looks really hard.
I wish they didn’t try to match the startup/VC/pivot/diversify frenzy but, in the end, I’m really happy that they exist.
Of course if you don’t like what an organization broadly does with the money given to it, don’t give it money. Maybe issue some feedback that you think the organization should do x or y, and the fact it’s doing p and q makes you hesitant to donate.
Take out all the crap, and strip it back to a plain browser. Freeze all new features. The only maintenance that is needed is security patches. That shouldn't need more than a handful of full-time devs. They could be paid using just one exec's salary.
I'll maintain my contribution to Thunderbird; if Mozilla doesn't feel like helping financially with that more-or-less unique product, fair enough. But I'm not OK with having to drill into about:config to disable Firefox Pocket's hijacking of high-profile screen real-estate - why hasn't it gone yet?
Maintaining an independent, high-quality browser engine so that the design and implementation of the Web isn't up to a Google/Apple duopoly is incredibly expensive: https://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/12/maintaining-independent... (4 years old, but the situation I describe hasn't changed, except that Microsoft has switched to Chromium so Mozilla's engine is more important than ever.)
Feels like a massive missed opportunity - microsoft is the only big player not funded by ads.
Also having their own Engine was cool, i liked it, although it did sometimes have failures. Looks like they got tired if different issues and thew in the towel
Remember the W3C DRM standard and how Firefox implemented it?
Read this: https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....
To quote,
--- start quote ---
The total word count of the W3C specification catalogue is 114 million words at the time of writing.
If you added the combined word counts of the C11, C++17, UEFI, USB 3.2, and POSIX specifications, all 8,754 published RFCs, and the combined word counts of everything on Wikipedia’s list of longest novels, you would be 12 million words short of the W3C specifications.
--- end quote ---
This is why. It's currently impossible to start a greenfield browser [1]. And even forking an existing engine and trying to keep up is almost impossible [2]
[1] There's Flow browser, https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/ I don't know if it's truly from scratch
[2] Microsoft forked Chromium and is still almost 2000 APIs behind, https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
It actually used to be that way. For example, it used to be the case that the Firefox product owner was a Googler getting paid by Google to work on Firefox. Lots of other contributors hailed from other companies (or universities), too, whether they were specifically getting paid for it or not; there was a long-tail of completely unpaid contributors. Mozilla wasn't anything like the Bay Area company you see today so much as it was, loosely speaking, a co-op. Mozilla's various formal organizational incarnations were supposed to handle, in order of importance: A. keeping the infrastructure running, and B. paying the salaries of its own contributors to the mozilla.org commons.
Several things changed this:
1. Google, the biggest contributor to the project, pulled their people off Firefox to go build Chrome.
2. Mozilla-the-Corporation, having deceived themselves about the role that the commons-style development played in the project's success, went and Netscaped it.
On the latter point: basically, the Corporation abused its position. They tried (and unfortunately succeeded) at consolidating things under their corporate structure (particularly during the FirefoxOS era after hiring an Adobe exec to be their shepherd through that doomed project—convinced that what Mozilla really needed was good, business-minded leadership). This launched Mozilla on the descent we've seen over the last ten years, and burned all sorts of bridges including goodwill with external contributors and other parts of its base. They hollowed it out, and then had people on payroll to fill in the parts that were getting fucked up. As with the case of Netscape, not all of their hires were good hires.
The perverse thing is, if you know anything about Mozilla's early history, i.e. Firefox pre-history, you'll know that this was already tried once before. What's amazing is that it actually "worked" this time. You'll hear (from people like Mitchell, even) stories about how mozilla.org was an escape pod, and that it had to be rescued from Netscape, because Netscape thought they were the rightful rulers by fiat—this, even after mozilla.org had been set up! Unfortunately, Mozilla-the-Corporation (distinct from mozilla.org) succeeded at taking control where Netscape failed, mostly because everyone involved pretty much let them. A lot of the mechanisms that had been put in _specifically_ to keep Netscape hires in their place were rolled back as part of the post-Firefox-4.0, "we want to move fast and break things, too" era.
Lots of people who at one point once had @mozilla.com email addresses will dispute this, choosing to tell themselves—and others—a different story. And of course they do. It happens for exactly the same reasons that the "are we the baddies?" meme is a thing.
A few don't, like VLC: https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/73dafr/vlc_creator_...
There are in fact not a lot of posts about this topic
I'm still waiting for any concrete evidence, as I am genuinely curious what kind of sponsorships of that kind there are, or were, if any.
Are you sure? For me, I can only "Disable" it, and it gets promptly re-enabled right after clicking on some other item in the sidebar.
There doesn't seem to be any way to disable it permanently, or, preferably, removing it entirely.
I remember seeing lots of devs complaining about Safari not implementing the latest new shinny google technology for chrome but looking at some of these features those aren't things I'd have in my browser like PWA. Web developers are totally out of touch if they expect that everybody wants a website to have access to things like USB ports.
If you pay for it, yeah. But you can't have that and have the software be £free to use
Donating to the foundation feels a bit like donating to the WWF because I want to help a specific Panda I met at the zoo.
It seems it's time to find a Firefox alternative now, privacy-minded and ad-free.
Pity the web is mostly unusable with w3m. Would any HNers recommend DDG's browser as a viable alternative?
As it stands now, they are obviously wanting to monetise their product but for whatever reason don't want to open up to the option of a retail/consumer grade price. Probably it is because they'll make more from feeding ad companies.
Once someone gives away a roughly equivalent good enough product for free charging for a competitor becomes incredibly difficult and that ship sailed when MS bundled IE with windows.
Notably was the notion that it came with a kitchen sink when most just wanted a web browser.
That said, I don't understand, why would somebody use Firefox instead of Chrome, Edge, or Safari if they ad in-browser ads.
But I'm software engineer, and I didn't know about it. I don't think most (as in 95%+, even in tech) people would know difference to care. My point is visibly – firefox seem to be just as ad-hungry as competition.
They could be better behind the scenes, but customer wouldn't know it.
Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm just grumpy.
You know what I wonder? Where's the hatred threshold for ordinary people? When you see an ad in a middle of something and you're so pissed that you'll go out of your way to specifically avoid the product that's shoved in your throat. I know mine's been reached, but, hey, I'm just an grumpy asshole ;)
This was released in Chrome 69 and rolled back in Chrome 70: https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/product-updates-base...
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
Guess what Mozilla's response is when Google lists something they shouldn't? "Take it up with Google". And you think Google supports those who they defame better than their usual customers? No. This is not a hypothetical scenario.
This said, of course, I hate this "feature" and I'll make sure I disable it.
Placing ads in the search bar and datamining everything you search for is failing at this mission.
"When contextual suggestions are enabled, Mozilla receives your search queries. When you see or click on a Firefox Suggest result, Mozilla collects and sends your search queries and the result you click on to our partners through a Mozilla-owned proxy service. The data we share with partners does not include personally identifying information and is only shared when you see or click on a suggestion."
Doesn't sound like "datamining everything you search for".
This, right here. They get those regardless of whether you click on anything. What happens with those queries afterwards?
> "No new data is collected, stored, or shared to make these new recommendations."
If that's true, it would imply search queries were already being sent to Mozilla. I hope it isn't true. I feel incredibly dumb that I never bothered to verify it, that I trusted them. If it turns out the queries were sent, I'll look into filing a GDPR complaint, because I sure as hell didn't give consent for my queries - intended for the search engine of my choice, and which might contain PII - to be processed by Mozilla.
https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2021/09/15/data-and-firefox-su...
> Mozilla approaches handling this data conservatively. We take care to remove data from our systems as soon as it’s no longer needed. When passing data on to our partners, we are careful to only provide the partner with the minimum information required to serve the feature.
> A specific example of this principle in action is the search’s location. The location of a search is derived from the Firefox client’s IP address. However, the IP address can identify a person far more precisely than is necessary for our purposes. We therefore convert the IP address to a more general location immediately after we receive it, and we remove the IP address from all datasets and reports downstream.
That's hogwash without access to details of actual cases. What is the definition of "minimum" for a given partner here?
Reminds me of the UX of Android a couple years ago:
- Android: "I'm a better system than desktops, I offer fine-grained permissions that ensure apps only have access to what they need, nothing more."
- Every single app, upon installation: "I need every single permission enumerable in the current SDK version."
>> A specific example of this principle in action is the search’s location. (...)
Oh, that's nice, I feel a bit more relaxed - this means they can't enable this feature for me at all, because they first have to seek informed consent from me for this kind of processing. They'd better remember to ask.
I wonder how containers affect this behavior? Since the same history seems to pop up regardless of which container I'm in, I wonder if this effectively makes containers permeable?
Mozilla needs reform as an institution, it needs new leadership. But its raison d'être is still very much there.
Basically a open source project were the downstream is considered hostile.
There is an institutional problem at Mozilla, we should focus on fixing that rather than trying to come up with even more complex sticking plasters.
Basically what nature does when the elder generation acquires to many parasites and dna damages, spawn a new generation and die, taking most of the parasites with them.
How do you fix that from the outside if not by forking or at least using a different Browser to make it clear that the current behavior is unacceptable.
It was my position that ads violate the ethos of free software by making the user serve the software. You can debate that, but in any case that was the beginning of this culture at Mozilla to use bs language to placate users.
The fuck with this?
How can they make _relevant_ suggestions without spying on my (s/browsing history/activity/), profiling it and phoning back to the mothership?
(Edited, "browsing history" -> "activity")
If you search for "hotels", they'll show you suggestions that match "hotels".
Doesn't seem that complicated to me.
Try again.
If you search for "hotels", they'll show you things related to "hotels".
That doesn't require access to your browsing history - it's right there in the search term.
The principal is the same. People don't want their private lives (in part expressed through what they search for) exploited and exposed.
I wish they'd give the about:config key to disable it as well as UI instructions in posts like this. The former can be set in a preferences file; so easily synchronised between machines and not forgotten when setting up a new one.
Once enabled, Firefox Suggest sends what I type in the address bar to Mozilla. There it gets augmented with my location and makes its way to their "preferred partners", limited, for the moment, to a lovely establishment called "adMarketplace".
You don't see a slightest problem with that, no?
Reading through their "how Mozilla handles data" page [1] reveals absolutely nothing specific. What's collected, what's being passed on, etc. Just a bunch of hand waving and "don't you worry, everything is tip-top".
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2021/09/15/data-and-firefox-su...
If adMarketplace is just receiving from Mozilla a stream of (search text, city, clicked yes/no) then no, I don't see a problem with it.
If Mozilla sends a unique user ID as well then I would see a problem with it, but as far as I can tell, they don't.
Because this is on by default in FF93, be it a new install or an upgrade.
For now limited to the US, but it's safe to assume they are just testing waters.
The default, in friendly big blue colors, is to "Allow suggestions" with the alternative called "Customize in settings". It is also not clear if disabling "suggestions", switches off all its machinery or merely prevents them from being shown.
As others have said up this thread, the problem is not as much the feature itself, but the fact that Mozilla deemed it perfectly fine to roll out something like this in the first place.
It becomes increasingly obvious that Mozilla no longer understands (or cares!) what it was that made Firefox special, made people stick with it and what the motivation and priorities of these people are.
This extends to the splash screen as well. No "disable ads" button just "not now" or "settings".
In contrast the settings dialogue looks fine.
I understand Mozilla needs money but it is very disappointing to see them do the same dark user patterns as other tech companies.
Apart from many questionable choices over the past few years, they fired fired a large number of employees, then their CEO bumped up their own salary to 3 million USD: https://www.zdnet.com/article/endangered-firefox-the-state-o...
I am not sure whether their fall to around a 5% market share in the browser market had anything to do with any of the things in the above article, but to me it feels like the logical next progression at some point is to remove Mozilla from the actual Firefox software.
So my question is this: how long will it be before any fork of Firefox will gain a large following, much like what happened to CentOS/Rocky Linux?
Seems like there are quite a few independent forks, but nothing that i think would be a no-brainer for replacing Firefox as the default browser of any Linux distro or on a Windows desktop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#Gecko-bas...
Tho not in the best way, I feel, but at least this is opt-in?
They did not. I checked on all my computers following the update and all of them had the option enabled by default.
While it would be good news if they were, insofar as creating more competition for the incumbents (let's be honest, the incumbent, google), at this point only regulators can do anything about the state of search/ad industry.
If this is actually the case Mozilla is yet again being used as one of Google's pawns.
"See, there are other browsers and search/ad companies flourishing despite our market position!"
To me this is clearly not spin or weasel words, this is glaringly blatant dishonesty.
This “Privacy First Data Sharing Platform” for example
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/take-control-over-your-d...
I feel like this kind of marketing language is only there to obfuscate the real reason why things are done. They want to include ads to help finance Mozilla – the main goal isn't "to enhance and speed up your searching experience". Calling the introduction of ads an enhancement for the user is just dishonest.
"Relevant" is a code word for "we spy on your every move and also share your personal browsing behaviour with our many external partners to serve you relevant ads".
For those who actually want to understand the feature, and its implications for privacy and data sharing, https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2021/09/15/data-and-firefox-su... is a starting point.
> relevant suggestions from our trusted partners
The suggestions are not relevant to, and the partners not trusted by, me.