Mozilla Says Ad on Firefox's New Tab Page Was Just Another Experiment (venturebeat.com) 256
Some Firefox users yesterday started seeing an ad in the desktop version of the browser. It offers users a $20 Amazon gift card in return for booking your next hotel stay via Booking.com. VentureBeat reached out to Mozilla, which confirmed the ad was a Firefox experiment and that no user data was being shared with its partners. From a report: The ad appears at the bottom of Firefox's new tab page on the desktop version with a "Find a Hotel" button that takes the user to a Booking.com page. The text reads: "Ready to schedule that next family reunion? Here's a thank you from Firefox. Book your next hotel stay on Booking.com today and get a free $20 Amazon gift card. Happy Holidays from Firefox! (Restrictions apply)." A second version reads: "For the holidays, we got you a little something just for using Firefox! Book your next hotel stay on Booking.com today and get a free $20 Amazon gift card. Happy Holidays from Firefox! (Restrictions apply.)"
No surprises here (Score:1)
Firefox lost its way long ago.
Its reputation as the Anti-IE keeps its market share at 10%, otherwise it'd be less than 2%.
It is telling though, that their "experiment" went the way of advertising disguised as gift-giving.
What will they think of next....
Stick a fork in it [Re:No surprises here] (Score:5, Insightful)
How come nobody is forking it? (Arguably other than Pale Moon.) Maybe there's not enough interest?
Having an alternative to Chrome that's slightly corporate may be better than giving in to a big near-monopoly. If FF stick ads in non-annoying places*, perhaps we can just learn to live with them so that we at least have choice.
* No jokes intended
Re:Stick a fork in it [Re:No surprises here] (Score:5, Informative)
Do you mean like these? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
GNU IceCat looks interesting. I might see how easy/difficult it is to build for the Mac.
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That's called moving the goalposts (fallacy), you said nobody is forking it, they showed there is a dozen or so forks.
Mozilla doesn't need ads, it needs to figure out what the users want and give them that. I'm having to use a fork of Firefox because bit by bit it removed it's best feature - customisability and at the same time pulled dirty moves like ignore privacy concerns and try to shove advertising and unwanted 3rd party add-ons in.
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I don't think any of the forkers can realistically compete at that level because browsers are too gargantuan in complexity. To get a new browser takes a behemoth like google to advertise the browser lots or leverage other popular things like OS or search. Facebook could probably do it but I wouldn't touch a browser made by them with a barge pole.
https://netmarketshare.com/bro... [netmarketshare.com]
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Yes, and chrome wasn't about back then.
Fork warning (Score:2)
Unlike with Vivaldi and other forks of Google Chromium, Mainline Firefox extensions are not always available on its forks and you will lose some of the more obscure functionality, needing to research for replacements.
The addons store itself sometimes leaves you without a download link and shows a silly "Get firefox" link that obscures the actual download package --this kind of misdirection is one reason I hate mainstream app store control-freaks with a passion. The situation is compounded on mobile, because
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I created a seamonkey branch on github to try to get a newer firefox version to build on my OS. It's extremely complicated. Not to mention forks have to decide when to fork. Do you do pre quantum? Do you accept their rust language that isn't portable?
I chose code that's roughly equivalent to firefox 52 ~ because it doesn't completely depend on rust at that point. It's not easy to work with. webkit is much easier to deal with. The build system is clunky. It's very particular.
Browsers are hugely comp
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> Non-annoying places
Like the back of a Volkswagen?
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I'm curious, what language would you write it in, if given a choice?
It sounds like what's needed is somebody(s) to formally document it, not necessarily start over from scratch. There's more to good software t
Re:No surprises here (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox lost its way long ago.
Really? Then why do I have such a strong preference for it vs Chrome, and why is Firefox my primary browser?
Running a bunch of good and essential Firefox extensions. They told us the sky would fall when the old leaky extension APIs were removed, and it did not.
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They told us the sky would fall when the old leaky extension APIs were removed, and it did not.
It took over a year of hard work of many extension makers, and not all regressions have been fixed yet.
But yeah, I haven't ran Waterfox in over two weeks.
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They told us the sky would fall when the old leaky extension APIs were removed, and it did not.
It took over a year of hard work of many extension makers, and not all regressions have been fixed yet.
Right, but I think extension makers more than anybody knew why it had to be done. I thank them all sincerely for their great work, and that most certainly includes the Mozilla devs.
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Firefox lost its way long ago.
Really? Then why do I have such a strong preference for it vs Chrome, and why is Firefox my primary browser?
Firefox is still my main browser. It has been since the Mozilla suite 0.8 beta days nearly 20 years ago. I feel like we're just choosing the least worst of the browsers.
Introducing an ad(s) in your browser (even if it was just and experiment) is not cool.
Not being able to turn off annoying update prompts in version 63 was annoying. So was introducing prompts in version 64 to try out extensions and features. [slashdot.org]
It feels like Firefox has been slowly losing their way. The user should be in control of the browser.
Everything is an experiment. 1800mb for 2 tabs. (Score:2)
which makes the experiment line just a bunch of bullshit.
they rolled out ads for some people on new tab. it's bullshit.
it's already at the point where I'm quite near to going back to chrome for a while at least.
Just make the browser actually fucking lighter. that's what people want. don't mess with the window styling. don't mess with the api's. give options to disable web push, web workers and all of that shit easily.
like, right now I have facebook and slashdot open. it's using 1800 megabytes of ram. WHAT
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Firefox lost its way long ago.
Really? Then why do I have such a strong preference for it vs Chrome, and why is Firefox my primary browser?
Running a bunch of good and essential Firefox extensions. They told us the sky would fall when the old leaky extension APIs were removed, and it did not.
Instead, we have a leaky browser, I have to constantly clean the cache because once it hits 1GB, Firefox tends to run very poorly. The last version I had set to auto-clean at about 350MB.
Firefox has totally lost it's way, Chrome sucks, and I don't have any windows or apple systems to compare how IE/Edge/Safari compare.
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Sky did fall; adblock is about 100 billion times harder to use as it can not open list of urls to make rules for ans Firefox UI sucks ass as Classic theme restorer is not able to fix it. Previously one could still fix by plugins the idiotic changes Mozilla did, but not anymore.
Perhaps the main reason for the changes was that telemetry showed that people refused to use what their idiot management wanted and designers did. My way or highway strategy has worked and most people have moved away from Firefox.
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Running a bunch of good and essential Firefox extensions. They told us the sky would fall when the old leaky extension APIs were removed, and it did not.
Now show me the replacement for Scrapbook Plus. ScrapbookQ doesn't work, period (I've tried it on both windows 7 and Linux and the documented install process produces a working solution on neither) and all the others don't actually do what Scrapbook+ did. They do something else, like save a page to a file that nothing can open without dragging and dropping it back into the browser. When I can has Scrapbook Plus for Firefox, I'll try it again. Until then, I'm sticking with Pale Moon.
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The only one that didn't was uBlock.
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Firefox marketshare collapsed. If that isn't the "sky has fallen" then fucked if I know what is.
1) Chrome overtook Firefox in 2011. Extension API was 2017 2) Firefox was displaced by Google "bundling" chrome and adopting other tactics reminiscent of Microsoft's war against Netscape 3) Firefox still has a major chunk of the browser market.
Firefox is basically an also ran browser that has a relatively insignificant marketshare now.
Firefox is still popular and is the only thing that stands between Google and complete internet domination like Microsoft had a few years back.
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Idiot.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's because they're less about the browser these days, and more about how they can use the Mozilla Firefox brand to spread all the feelgood diversity stuff they constantly bang on about.
They're trying to survive (Score:5, Insightful)
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Maybe they shouldn't have jumped on every political hype train from fake news to censoring comments.
They wasted efforts on going woke. Now they're going broke.
You don't get it. (Score:5, Interesting)
They have always been out of touch, going back to the Netscape days.
The AOL/Mozilla Foundation days was just more of that. If it hadn't been for the developer of Phoenix (who WAS NOT a Mozilla developer, and did without their support, until it became popular enough they offered him a job, coopted the project then backburnered him.)
While XUL worked out in the end, the original Phoenix was so fast and low memory usage because it was a gtk wrapper over the bare gecko engine with none of the XUL crap in the way. It could support a hundred plus tabs in 512M of ram on Win9x. I know. I used it like that.
The success of Firefox was directly a result of Phoenix and all the nerds grassroots promoting it, which allowed mozila with google's funding to advertise it in a big way to the plebs who were just becoming seriously interested in the web as myspace and company took off. The problem was the inherent mangement issues in the Mozilla Foundation, which had carried over from AOL and Netscape before it, never had time to get darwinned out, and now Mozilla is in a terminal death spiral not altogether unlike the US Government, where the leadership has been insulated from the reality of their customers(nee citizens) needs, and the TRUE ECONOMIC and SOCIAL position of what they are supposedly helming.
Many of you will scoff at me and say 'if only xxx is in charge, all will be better', but the truth is the rot is from top to bottom, and without pulling away the funding and mindshare (or even if you do) neither group is going to come back to reality before it is too late for their respective organization.
Watch and see. Short of a concerted community fork, either is going to survive the next 10-20 years.
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Which makes me wonder why no-one has made a decent fork of it. There is Pale Moon, but development is stalled and it's stuck with the same performance crippling flaws that Mozilla fixed in Firefox but which killed off all the old extensions. Waterfox is in the same boat now, starved of upstream improvements from the paid devs at Mozilla because it wants to maintain old extension compatibility.
It's a similar situation to systemd. Lots of people complaining about it, no one actually doing much about it. The b
Re:They're trying to survive (Score:5, Insightful)
The Mozilla Corporation received $542M in 2017.
Which has been enough to throw $30M at Pocket, fund rust, multiple poorly thought through attempts at entering the mobile/IOT/operating system space, attempt a single login system, but not enough to fund Thunderbird development.
The CEO received $2.3M in 2017, the treasurer $1.3M with various other directors earning about $200k.
Mozilla has more than enough money to maintain a web browser. I actually feel if they had significantly less they would focus more on the core browser and have less time to come up with great ideas to further annoy their user base.
Re:They're trying to survive (Score:4, Insightful)
The standard MBA tactic when your core product (Firefox) is losing market share rapidly is to diversify into other areas and hope they make up for it. Fixing the product is too hard, easier to write it off as a changing market and shifting user preferences. Additionally they can sell off the unprofitable diversified bits to some chump a few years later, and pocket a nice bonus.
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Which has been enough to throw $30M at Pocket, fund rust, multiple poorly thought through attempts at entering the mobile/IOT/operating system space, attempt a single login system, but not enough to fund Thunderbird development.
Sadly here they had the right idea, just a shitty execution. Here's a long recount [medium.com] from one Mozilla engineer about Firefox OS, it'll just snip the relevant bits:
Everyone basically agreed that we couldn't compete with the likes of Android and iOS on their own terms. We couldn't catch up with Google on Android features and we could never out-Apple Apple on design. Mozilla was used to punching above its weight and had taken on titans before and won, but we wouldn't win if we played by their rules - we had to play by our own rules.
The way I remember it is that there were basically two schools of thought about how to differentiate Firefox OS.
The Web is the Platform
Connecting the Next Billion
Connecting the next billion is "let's create something cheaper than the cheapest product on the market today" as a niche player with no experience in hardware. Yeah that didn't work. And the first one was basically an aversion to packaged software, I mean seriously:
Another serious problem was the lack of a key app, Whatsapp, which was essential for many of these markets. We failed to convince WhatsApp to make a web version, or even let us write one for them
I think they gave up way too easily not beating Android at their own game, because "e
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Great post.
Not as obvious as it looks. Personally, signing onto the slate of an omnibus Google competitor would make me think twice about future repercussions.
Google wields powers great and small. They've never been as cutthroat with their great powers as Microsoft was with theirs back in the day (a high-water mark rarely replicated), bu
Re:Mozilla doesnâ(TM)t get it (Score:4, Insightful)
That's what happens when your browser company is run by people who aren't interested in hiring or retaining the most talented browser developers. When you focus on hiring people based on their genitals, skin color, sexual preferences, or ideology, it's guaranteed that your product quality will decline. That goes for people who will only hire white men, and for people who insist on not hiring white men. Anything other than selecting for the best candidate will have negative consequences.
Excuses aside, was a shitty expirement (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop with the fucking ads already.
Try treating people with respect instead as mindless consumers where you obviously don't respect their time or space.
--
Atheist, noun; a spiritual blind man arguing color doesn't exist.
Theist, noun; a monochromatic man arguing other colors don't exist
Re:Excuses aside, was a shitty expirement (Score:5, Insightful)
So you give yearly donations to Mozilla right? Is that why you are on your high horse?
Your browser is one of the most complex pieces of software on your computer. It took thousands of man-hour years to develop. It takes a team of hundreds of developers to maintain.
They need a constant source of revenue. Could they have handled this better? Of course, but considering all the good they have done to protect our privacy, I'm willing to cut them some slack here.
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" Of course, but considering all the good they have done to protect our privacy, I'm willing to cut them some slack here. "
You shouldn't.
The ad " trial " is Mozilla testing the waters to see how their user base will react to such things. If the reaction is negligible, they then proceed with a small unobtrusive ad. Then, another one. Then another. Etc. and so on.
The internet was neither designed nor intended to be an advertising platform.
The fact that it turned into one is why it is such a shit-show to
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They need a constant source of revenue.
It seems to me that's where the trouble started. When they struggled for donations it was a soild product that wasn't updated at such an absurd rate. They had an income of $562 million in 2017. Most of that was from Google and Yandex. And you pity them because that's not enough to run a browser company? How much do you suppose it costs? Even with their flagrant waste, their own financial statement says they ended the year with over $100 million profit.
Stop spreading FUD here, Mozilla employees!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, but considering all the good they have done to protect our privacy, I'm willing to cut them some slack here.
You've got to be kidding me - Nice try spreading FUD like someone who works for Mozilla. Let's start with these, just to name a few:
- Pocket
- Safebrowsing (calling home to Google for every URL accessed)
- Telemetry built in
- Removing the ability to disable javascript without a 3rd party addon
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Scope creep. It didn't have to be complex. The vendors and over-caffeinated standards bodies got into a me-too fight and put too much crap into them, ignoring carefully thought-out & vetted parsimony, and lacking discipline to say "no".
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Your browser is one of the most complex pieces of software on your computer.
Scope creep. It didn't have to be complex.
I take a middle view, which I typically believe to be more correct than your extremes. The browser had to become complex. However, Firefox has become needlessly so, while at the same time losing functionality which mattered to users (particularly in the extension department.) Besides the much-maligned (by me) Pocket nonsense, there's lots of other stuff in Firefox which should really be in an extension. The new home screen and the developer tools both leap immediately to mind. The whole point of Firefox was
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I don't give money to Mozilla because they use most of the money they get making the browser crappier. If we give them more money, they will only ruin it faster. They spend money on shit like Pocket, which is literally the opposite of what I want. They changed Firefox mobile so that it always shows Pocket on launch, EVEN WHEN LAUNCHED WITH A URL INTENT, which means that I am already being advertised to every single time I launch Firefox on the fire stick. That is effectively a pop up ad built directly into
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You might want to poke around in Firefox's settings; using Firefox Quantum on my Android device, the "default" screen is whatever I had open last time, unless I delete all the tabs, then it's some sort of thing showing recent tabs.
I don't browse much on my phone though because it's so awful. I use Firefox there so I can have uBlock Origin going... browsing without an ad blocker is like a root canal without freezing.
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You act like it doesn't already have a massive source of revenue. It could ditch the CEO and directors, they appear to be pretty useless condescending fools and are paid far too much for losing market share.
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Perhaps they should focus on their core product instead of squaring time.
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I'm not sure why a browser should be so damn complex. It seems unnecessary to me. Maybe if more webpages would just stick to HTML/CSS, there wouldn't be an issue, JS is what makes browsers difficult and annoying.
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Unfortunately it seems that browser development is too resource intensive for a community-driven solution to be feasible.
You're kidding, right? [seamonkey-project.org]
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Less cruft to update. The package does all those things, and it's still a smaller download than Firefox. And, it doesn't look like Chrome
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As a mystic I'm well aware of:
* The Ignorance of Atheism
* The Arrogance of Theism
=== The Lies of Buddhism ===
1. Life is suffering.
This is a half-truth. The correct phrase is: Life CONTAINS Dukkha.
i.e. Life ALSO contains Love. The WHOLE POINT of life is TO BE Unconditional Love.
2. The Origin Of Suffering Is Attachment.
The correct phrase is: The secret to happiness is to release FALSE Expectations.
EVERYTHING is divine and has an attachment to The Source. You have a connection to The All Parent whether you
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> Buddhists MAY be atheists.
FTFY.
SOME Buddhists believe in Gods.
SOME Buddhists don't.
It is irrelevant if they do or don't -- Buddhism is based on Lies [slashdot.org] due to ignorance of reality. They only have intellectual Beliefs and lack experiential Knowledge.
--
Politics, Applied Earthly Philosophy corrupted by false profits,
Religion, Applied Spiritual Philosophy corrupted by false prophets.
Ya, no. (Score:5, Interesting)
My Home and New Tab pages are set to be a Blank Page. In addition, all the Firefox Home Content check boxes are unchecked - as is the "Recommend extensions as you browse" item. Furthermore, these things are specified as disabled in my "user.js" file -- along with a *bunch* of other crap, like Pocket, etc...
Re:Ya, no. (Score:5, Informative)
Could you post or link your user.js here?
Check out this for user.js -- Firefox configuration hardening [github.com] tips. I pulled some from here and others from simply Googling "firefox disable ____________" after a new release when some dumb crap -- I mean feature -- was noted in a review somewhere or in the Release Notes.
Re:Ya, no. (Score:4, Informative)
I created a fork from that. I think it is a little more up to date, includes hardening not done by pyllyukko and blocks all the recent telemetry.
https://gist.github.com/MrYar/... [github.com]
The more ads that are pushed (Score:3, Informative)
Keep pushing ads and users will embrace any brand that stops the ads.
People want a browser on their desktop, their cell phone.
Make the browser great again not. Not more ad delivery software.
Re:The more ads that are pushed (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem here is "how?"
Essentially all of the most used sites on the internet have massive interest in serving ads and tracking. Should any browser that actually breaks those two things appear and gain significant market share, its functionality WILL be slowly but increasingly broken on those sites to get people to switch from it to browsers that conform to advertisers' and information brokers' needs.
Even Mozilla, the purported champion of free web is financed almost wholly by various search engines world wide, and depending on installation location, will set different search engines. That means it's in Mozilla's direct interest to not help users with blocking things like tracking and ad serving by these search engines to make such partnerships as lucrative as possible.
So what is the business model that would work that can work both against the interests mentioned in the second paragraph and the third one?
Re: The more ads that are pushed (Score:2)
There is no technical solution. It's time for Congress to ban companies from cyberstalking and data hoarding.
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How would that stop them from spinning off such efforts to third world locations in separate corporate entities? How would that stop massive companies who primarily work in other states who practice the same thing from delivering such a service just like the spying on one's own citizenry is delegated to other allies according to Snowden's revelations?
This is not a genie that can be put back into the bottle by a single nation, no matter how powerful.
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Your solution to the legal problem is to fund foreign crime.
This would result in massive retaliation from forces that will have far more resources dedicated to this retaliation.
The "privacy" browser (Score:2)
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>"What's the point of this browser, when in real life its behavior is not much different or even worse than Chrome's?"
Still is more user driven.
Still is much more configurable.
Still no info shared with Google or third parties (in this example).
Still not a binary blob.
Still resists the web being "owned" by a single company.
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Yes, I turn everything off that shares info. Most (perhaps all with regards to data sharing) is in Preferences and clearly labeled.
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The number one reason I like... (Score:3)
...Mozilla over Chrome is the lack of advertisements. I would be open to any suggestions for a browser that isn't money hungry though.
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Where in Chrome are you seeing ads?
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I haven't used Chrome for a while, but I do remember Chrome frequently and annoyingly suggesting to improve your browsing experience by "creating a google account", "signing up for gmail","create your documents with google docs",etc.
Maybe that's the advertising PP is referring to.
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Post packet capture logs of this behavior. Put up or shut up. Mine opens up a blank tab.
AT&T (Score:1)
"Ooops, we accidentally telemarketed you during your Sunday dinner 58 times." (Mostly true story.)
The problem is trusting liars. "Not an ad?" BS. (Score:1)
The problem is trusting liars. "Not an ad?" BS.
They are outright lying to everyone.
Just start blank (Score:2)
Opera (Score:2)
You all laughed and rejected it when Opera was ad-based.
And, even then, that many years ago, Opera had a bucket more features and a ton more respect for the users.
Pity it got sidelined and turned into the shit-show it currently is (with the only "successor in interest" being nothing more than a Chrome clone with skins, that they have changed the icon for FOUR TIMES but not added most of the Opera features of old at all).
I've never seriously used Firefox or its derivatives.
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Anything post v12 isn't "Opera". It's a Chrome-clone. Opera proper hasn't existed in a long while, and never had anything even remotely like Facebook integration.
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Vivaldi is the new Opera 12.x. Even though it, like everything, is based on Chrome.
Customizable everything, the Opera-like, side panel, Heck, they even make it easy to turn the file menu back on and put tabs on the bottom. The ex-Opera CEO who founded it has done a pretty good job reproducing what I loved about it.
I still want the cookie-filtering popups back though. "Ask me every time"
3 words: Fuck That Shit (Score:5, Informative)
The UI sucks ass. Looking at my firewall logs this fucker is like a needy 12 year old girl on the phone to her 30 y/o "boyfriend"
I suspect that by the end of the week I'll be taking my TV off the internet. The plusses I get with having the smart part being smart are way outweighed by the minuses I get having this PoS connected to my network.
tl;dr: don't buy a Samsung TV. It spies on you, shows ads all the time, and on top of that the UI is the worst PoS I've seen since the 90's, when companies rushed to slam GUIs on top of their command line tools.
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Smart TV is Stupid (Score:5, Informative)
With all due respect, buying a Smart TV is a dumb move. I realize it's hard to find a dumb TV any more, but it's worth some effort and expense. The "industrial" models for signage and such tend to be the best-made anyway, and they have none of that junk in there. Plus, they often have additional, interesting interfaces which can be used to control them. The best argument, though, is that Smart TVs are just more prone to failure. Even if you trust in your ability to prevent them from spying on you, or being compromised remotely and used as part of a botnet, most of them won't work at all if the "smart" bit fails.
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Suggestions?
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With all due respect, buying a Smart TV is a dumb move.
Suggestions?
I suggest you ask someone who's bought a TV in the last ten years. My Costco-sourced 52" SHARP AQUOS TV from days of yore is still working fine. It's a prosumer-level model with a crapload of inputs and a serial port. It's got a slight 60hz hum, which is annoying, but it clearly hasn't killed it.
How does Mozilla survive? (Score:2)
None of us like ads, but there is not another financial system that works on the internet. Ads rule everything. There is so much money in ads, that companies can accidentally dump tens of millions of dollars into bot farms where no one sees the ads, and this is considered an accepted loss.
It is false that there is not another way to monetize the internet. It is true that no one has been able to come up with a compelling financial vehicle to run the internet.
No doubt people have had it with ads, but mos
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No doubt people have had it with ads, but most people won't donate $5 to the cause either. Until people put their money where their mouth is, and the people that own businesses follow along, this is a moot point.
I actually would have donated to Mozilla, at least before they started making Firefox worse. Now, not so sure about it.
All they had to do was ask: "We are short on funding. Please donate, to keep Firefox ad-free."
But, if that had turned out not to be the truth..
Oh, Those Wacky Firefox Guys--FORK! (Score:2)
I don't use Firefox anymore (Score:1)
This is one reason why they have sucked for the past year. They used to be for the users. Now they are for the advertiser.
They just keep finding new ways of further destroy (Score:2)
Part of a study? (Score:1)
Check your about:studies if you downloaded a recent copy. Make sure it's not pre-populated with active studies if you previously opted out of studies. Whether or not it's relevant to the ad, Firefox 64 started having pre-populated studies even for those who opted out of studies in a previous version. (Firefox doesn't really update, one uninstalls, preferences and such are preserved in the registry or elsewhere in the system, then a new version is fresh installed that preserves all previous settings.) Chrome
Firefox needs to gain marketshare... (Score:2)
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Because it is good and it is not controlled by a major tracking firm.
Re:Hee hee (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not? Last time I checked, the vast majority of their revenue is from the world's largest advertising company.
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Exactly. If it really happened outside their lab, in their released version, that's no "experiment;" they really did it!
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Because it is good and it is not controlled by a major tracking firm.
Except for the fact that Mozilla gets nearly all of its revenue (approx $300 Million a year) from Google.
Mozilla is not "independent". Mozilla is owned and controlled by Goog.
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Use your software freedom with Firefox (Score:2)
Precisely: use your software freedom with Firefox—make Firefox do what you want it to do yourself, or ask someone to edit out the stuff you don't like, or pay them to do this on your behalf, or get together with others and pool your development/funding efforts. You have options with free software [gnu.org] which you don't have with almost every other major browser because they're all proprietary (Microsoft's, Apple's, Opera's, and most cell phone/
Mozilla controlled by totalitarian progressives (Score:2, Interesting)
Brendan Eich was forced out as CEO of Mozilla for the horrible crime of expressing a political opinion shared by the overwhelming majority of the American populace and considered obviously-correct for all of history until the last five years.
Down with democracy! Down with the moral teachings of all major world religions! Down with happy healthy childhood! Long live financial oligarchy! Long live sodomy! Long live emotionally damaged children!
This is the Progressive future. Don't like it? Too bad - it'
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Tell me again why the browser matters?
Because you do not want a single entity which makes its living from tracking and selling you to be in control of all web browsing.
Re: Hee hee (Score:1)
Ya, well the IT department got sick of their shenanigans and this little "experiment" just resulted in a group policy update which removed firefox across the entire Corp desktop space. Over 50k installs gone in an afternoon. Now I need a three page software justification form, signed off by my VP, if I want it back.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah I use a little thing called safari. Maybe you have heard of it. It just work right out of the box. No spyware. No malware. No unrenderable pages. No bloat. It is very nice. You should try it some time!
Awesome! Now where can I get an .rpm or .deb for it?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: If you "experiment" with invading my privacy (Score:3)
And to which browser to you switch?
Re: Why is it that (Score:2)
Because they are using Chrome, which to any tech- or usability minded person is a laughable piece of garbage?
Re: (Score:2)
I've been using Pale Moon for quite some time now with noscript, but now they are suggesting people not use noscript because it causes problems with Pale Moon. I'm still using it anyway, of course. What's sad is that the Pale Moon site suggests using uMatrix with Pale Moon... which you can't do without patching it, or running a seriously old version.
What's keeping me on classic Firefox is Scrapbook Plus. I want captured pages in my sidebar. ScrapbookQ flat out doesn't work, I've tried it on both Windows 7 a