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.
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.)