Only to see that this is neither generally available, nor can you use it without enabling telemetry. I don't know who makes these decisions inside Mozilla, but I just don't get it.

> Previously, access to these changes required you to share technical and interraction data (telemetry) with Mozilla. However, as of Firefox version 148, you can opt into receiving remote improvements, even if you have opted out of sharing your telemetry or participating in our experimental studies.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/remote-improvements

How did that even happen? I sure hope that was a bug and not a product decision, because that sounds very backwards.

1)Agreeing to it in the first place

2)Hiding it from users

3)Circling the wagons and setting the bugzilla ticket to a secrecy level so high all but upper management couldn't even view it, and marking all the related tickets as 'wontfix' and so on. The tickets are full of complaints that mozilla staff aren't being remotely transparent about what was going on or decisions being made.

Oh, and the kicker? It exposed the fact that Mozilla was employing people from adtech companies. The project manager for the Mr. Robot bullshit had her entire career worked at advertising companies.

The bug kept bouncing between being secret and public, and I remember seeing it was the PM who kept trying to make it secret, and then some unknown dickhead exec at m

bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1423003

Then there was the fact that the CEO was making more and more money as she drove Mozilla into the fucking ground with cratering market share numbers. Then there was Mozilla's absurdly expensive taste in real estate...

> If you’re a Firefox user, you may have noticed a weird new extension that suddenly showed up in your browser this week. > The extension is called “Looking Glass 1.0.3” and this is its description: MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT FROM YOURS. Now that sounds ominous. It’s really not, though. It’s a promotional campaign between Firefox and the TV series Mr. Robot that brings an alternate reality game to your browser. This must have sounded like a great idea when somebody pitched it to Mozilla, but the backlash has been fierce.

"Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser" - 757 points - Dec 15, 2017 - 515 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15931730

If this had been a hardcoded easter egg there would have been no real complaints. But showing up as a mystery extension spooked some people, and then misreporting made it spread a lot further than if all the reporting was accurate.

There might have been another way to do it later but we'll never know.

https://github.com/mozilla/addon-wr/blob/master/addon/backgr...

And I don't think the visibility of a bug report tells us whether they learned their lesson.

You could always tell they didn't mean to install chrome, because these people would also have a malware "Chrome" browser that installed through the exact same pathway.

Even the most obvious stuff needs to be said like... I don't know... but it looks like Google might be slightly bad here.

---

The CEO literally paid her hell a lot of money while she sold MDN to competition. While Rust to competition. While market shared shrinked from 9% (or 7%, forgot the exact number) to where it's now. Citing - NO MONEY!!!

We still have her controlling Mozilla right even though she is not CEO? And apparently we are not supposed to criticise em.

If there's someone at Mozilla reading this: turn it on already! I want to get off Orion, it's so buggy, but the internet is unusable without an ad blocker.

Yeah, seemingly tons of companies do this in a very weird way. Either make the switch 100% once you publish the press release, or wait until you reach 100% then publish. Starting the experiment with gradual rollout and then making the press release immediately seems like asking for potential problems and confusion among users.

A proper announcement done the day of the release, or an embedded notification like what Firefox already does (a "What's new" tab) that can be easily dismissed without any "Reminder me later" cr*p solves the issue.

I guess you could quietly update documentation at the start of the rollout, then make the blog post at the end.

Also sometimes tabs disappear from the tab picker, which makes tab management confusing.

As someone who successfully uses the internet day in and day out with zero ad blockers, this stance always amuses me. It's not hard to just ignore ads.

Is that for a technical reason or a commercial one?

YouTube Premium is one of the few subscriptions I am completely happy to pay.

So on that front I'd prefer YouTube go out of business so that something like Nebula can take its place. Or the only videos left at\re the ones doing it as a hobby and not as a job.

I'd imagine Google would start charging for videos that don't make enough money or heavily deprioritize them from discovery. That seems like a problem they could solve if they wanted to.

I'm surprised that YouTube doesnt ask $100 per year and then also show ads. Like App Store (which requires "developer fee" for doing far less)

YouTube videos actually have some real world disk space, bandwidth, etc costs just to show so if google doesn’t get to show an ad they lose money instead of an opportunity to make money.

  Introducing Ad Blocker for Firefox on iOS [Non-GA]

?

> Sponsored shortcuts and other sponsored content shown by Firefox when you open a new tab are separate from ads on the web pages you visit, so Ad Blocker doesn’t affect them.

Regular Firefox (non-Focus, the app from the article) can not benefit from Safari Content Blockers, and therefore does not benefit from Firefox Focus's ad blocking.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/protube-block-ads-on-video/id6...

It's not a perfect solution - I have occasionally noticed it leading to some buggy behaviour in the YouTube/YouTube Music sites using Safari, but nothing anywhere near as bad as using those websites without it!

The only odd behaviour I can call to mind was one time that it continued playing audio when I answered a phone call. It was easy to stop the music playing, and the other person on the call couldn't hear the music. I was actually disappointed that the other person couldn't hear the music, and I've been disappointed every time I've taken a phone call since and the music hasn't continued playing. I wish that was a feature :)

I think Vinegar was well worth the small one-time price, and I like supporting the developer. I've heard that Brave allows playing with the screen off, but I like my setup enough that I don't want to install Brave just for that.

Please delete this before anyone sees it :)

It's web scraping, and occasionally falls behind yt changes (2 years ago it was unusable for about a month). It could be described as an arms race, but Google appears to suffer it to live.

I suppose they understand that zero is not the optimal corruption target. (Because, as you asymptotically approach total control, the user cost also rises asymptotically.)

> This feature is experimental and is being introduced to the Firefox user base through a progressive rollout. It may not yet be available to all users. Additionally, remote improvements must be enabled.

Apparently, you can only block ads if you allow Mozilla telemetry. Thanks, dicks.

Making an announcement when fewer than 40% of your customers will see the feature fees like (unintentional) gaslighting.

Must we? Such vulgar swipes only weaken your position, making you seem like the bigger jerk. Please observe the guidelines, not because you owe Mozilla anything but because you owe this community and indeed yourself better than this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

While I have you: could you please have a re-read of the guidelines and have a think about if you really intend to participate here earnestly? We've asked you several times to lift your game, and we're not seeing any effort to reform. This place only continues to exist because we have guidelines and uphold them daily, and enough other people make the effort to contribute positively. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

As opposed to all the browsers that don't have this feature?

It's not done yet. When it's done it will just be a normal feature with no requirements.

> Does ad blocking affect search engine ads? > No. Ads shown on search engine results pages are not blocked.

A lot of the search results on top of Google are there to scam you, providing phone numbers for pass through services that charge $ for it, like flight cancellation:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/1p6h81i/beware_fake_...

So this omission should absolutely be addressed, but they probably cannot because of the Google Search contract...

If anyone's interested I have a very pretty one listed in Brooklyn. See my Google search ad for details. :P

But it will still have tolls.

maybe they should go get some then

Also I'm eager to see how it will behave on Linux when they will have finished their port; I hope we will finally have a really low-energy consumption browser then.

A browser in the class of Firefox or Chrome is for all intents and purposes a full OS constantly exposed to the world.

I understand open source OS development to be sustainable thanks to the the effort put into the server farms. That doesn't work for client side software, with the additional hurdle of needing to be better than the ad funded browser.

Maybe companies should see browsers more as a the Linux kernel, a precompetitive commodity layer on top of which we deliver/extract value to/from users.

And Firefox is not riddled with ads. The websites it loads are. If you run a program that shows ads on your Linux distro, the Linux kernel won't block them, will it?

But to give an answer: if you wanted to bake an ad-blocker in the Linux kernel that would prevent programs from showing ads in a transparent way (the ads just don't show and the programs still work and look fine), I think it would not be trivial at all.

But I don't see the point of going down that discussion.

Linux is a highly complex piece of software. It is OSS. And it does not shove ads in face of its users. So my point is if there is a will there is a way.

The question is then why aren't we all getting behind a solid OSS browser? Specially now with AI coding assist, this should be even more feasable.

Like Firefox or Chromium? Seems like we aren't, for some reason.

So the point stands: OSS community has shown itself capable of tackling some of the hairiest technical challenges (Linux) and we should not let the notion that 'browsers can only be developed by corporations' stop us from creating OSS alternatives to the current offerings.

Has it though, say in the last decade? My first intuition would be that Linux was in a very different situation when it started. And it's not like there are 10 similar open source kernels that were created in the last decades and that got usable enough to be replacements for Linux...

(and I love ff)

so basically less than 1 percent chance

Absolutely amazing, works inside webviews (e.g. netnewswire).

v3 just released.

https://github.com/0xCUB3/wBlock

You can send a tab to/from your Firefox desktop instance. Also synced passwords. Those aren't the only reasons -- Firefox on iOS has a lot of code in that wrapper -- but sync is the main one for me.

(There are also reasons why it's significantly worse than Safari, which has special privileges, so your question is valid.)

Can we get tab management on iOS too please?

Which is why I think we need to be less critical everytime Mozilla tries to make money some other way. They need to become more self sufficient in order to improve Firefox.

The thing I'm worried about with Ladybird is it's core logic is being coded by AI. I don't mind AI in other regions of code but I think core logic should be carefully written. They're also not very organized. Deciding to rewrite the whole codebase from CPP to Swift, then the decision changes to Rust shows uncareful decision making.

I don't understand, maybe i'm missing something...

[1] "Ad Blocker won’t block every ad. Ads served directly by the site you’re visiting and ads shown in search results will still appear."

Brave is doing it, Firefox can do it too. And maybe I can recommend that kind of browser to the average Joe again.