Mozilla Launches New Initiative With Scroll To Fund Publishers (axios.com) 33
Firefox, the global web browser from Mozilla, is launching a new subscription product Tuesday called the "Firefox Better Web initiative," and it will feature former Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile's new product Scroll as a launch partner. From a report: It's uncommon for a web browser to launch a product that's explicitly tied to paying out publishers. Scroll's business is all about paying publishers for their content while giving users a better ad experience. The test pilot for the product, which is a subscription to a privacy-first Firefox extension, will only be available in the U.S. The money from a membership ($4.99 monthly, $2,99 for first six months) goes directly to fund publishers and writers.
Pay for content? (Score:2)
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No, you're paying for ads, even worse. See TFS.
Content yes, work no. (Score:1)
Learn the difference.
Otherwise I've got a nice stack of $100 bills from my copy machine, to pay your salary with. You won't mind that I only worked for the original $100, and are effectively stealing your work, right? /s
You wouldn't pirate those $100 copies either? They are my occupational property after all! I worked hard for those $100, ya thief!
Good idea, wrong organisation to implement it (Score:3)
While the idea is right and possibly a valid alternative for advertisements, i do not like that Mozilla is on the chair of organizing such, simply because this makes them not an independent party but a money collector for publishers.
Let's see what our options are now: Chrome - comes from an advertising company. Edge - comes from a spyware company. Mozilla - in bed with publishers. Opera - do they even still exist. What remains are some open source initiatives, typically forks from Firefox.
I see a future for an independent organization that makes a browser. Much like Mozilla once was in the past, but with no financial ties to the big players. And yes Mozilla, if you read you can't be trusted by what i'm writing, you're reading it right.
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Scroll sounds iffy.
"Scroll tracks user engagement and loyalty and then distributes to publishers a fee based on the share of time and loyalty they take from a Scroll subscriber."
I've advocated for systems like this but based on some kind of crypto token that is unique per visit. Only handed over after the site has been viewed for more than 30 seconds. It would need to tie in to uBlock Origin or similar to detect if the site is honouring their word not to show ads or track, and even then there could still be
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AFAIK Opera was bought by a Chinese company. Think what you want of that.
The last option is only available for Apple devices: Safari.
It then comes down to what you think of Apple. But they do make their money from selling hardware and services and keep trumpeting how they want to keep their users secure. One false move and they'd lose that credibility, so they're pretty diligent about it. Keep in mind there's a difference between selling your personal information and giving away generic statistics about the
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Opera - do they even still exist.
Sort of... It got bought out by a totally-not-nefarious corporate nebula called Golden Brick back in 2016.
Some ex-employees from Opera who weren't keen on the move got together and build their own new browser, called Vivaldi, in the spirit of the old Opera browser. It's market share isn't huge but it works well, so you have that option.
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Bloat! (Score:3)
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Netscape is still the best [seamonkey-project.org]
That is quite lean! (Score:1)
What other complete operating system comes in at under 50MB?
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Re: Bloat! (Score:2)
I hear you, but today we have ~/bin directories full of 50+ MB Go binaries for everything "cloudy", terraform, kubectl, etc, etc, etc.
We don't have to like it, and I'm not debating the value of static linked binaries, there are lots of advantages. Regardless, it's where more things are going, and it makes a 50Mb web browser look TINY. Especially if you look at a browser as a thin client to ... all the crap you can do with it.
I know this isn't going to change any minds, I mean it still grosses me out seein
Better WORLD wide web (Score:1)
Great idea (Score:1)
The extension tracks "engagement and loyalty" on participating websites to determine how much share goes to each. So now you're actually paying money for the privilege of being spied on more. And I can only imagine the dirty tricks the publishers are going to use to inflate their numbers. Thanks a bunch Mozilla.
"giving users a better ad experience"? (Score:3)
"giving users a better ad experience"? Just about the only way to do that is to not experience ads... and I already have an extension to do that...
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It will be no ads.
What a Woot! (Score:2)
Just my 2 cents
You know what would be a better web? (Score:1)
Can you please fuckin stop re-inventing the wheel over and over again?? ... sockets. ... OpenGL. ... $anything. ... virtual machine. ... underlying OS.
Inactive tabs are bookmarks!
Hell, the tab bar is a task bar! (Hierarchical [one-click switching] task bar anyone?)
Websockets
WebGL
Web$anything
Firefox
HTML5
I swear, can somebody please eviscerate Firefox and
* make the layout engine, HTTP fetcher, and VM standalone components, allowing any permutation of layout engine, scripting engine, add-on, (network/offline)
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Websockets ... sockets
Underlying TCP and UDP sockets are incapable of enforcing a same-origin policy.
bog-standard OS parts like OpenGL
When operating system publishers are pushing for Metal and DirectX instead of OpenGL, OpenGL becomes less "bog-standard" over time.
Firefox ... virtual machine
Would this be designed for x86, x86-64, ARM, AArch64, or some other instruction set?
Meaningless article link (Score:3)
The article is absolute clickbait, says absolutely nothing, and every single link on the page is a tracker. The URLs are stuff like link.axios.com/click/__giant_unique__string. I have no clue what Scroll is, but whatever it is looks like the antithesis of the "open web" Mozilla claims to stand for.
Mozilla's announcement is more informative (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed. That article is complete shit. Here is mozilla's announcement of the program [mozilla.org].
Sounds decent to me. No ads, no tracking, publishers get paid. I subscribe to a few sites I visit regularly, but I'd much rather have a Netflix-like all you can eat subscription to help support the sites I visit occasionally than to have to deal with paywalls or leave them high-and-dry because I use a tracking blocker.
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I'm with you. I'll definitely pay $5/month to support the sites that I visit. I'm glad someone finally came up with a solution. I'm honestly not surprised with Mozilla supporting this, they seem to be heading in very good directions recently on a lot of fronts.
Readers will need to buy multiple subscriptions (Score:2)
Scroll admits that its service leaves paywalls in place [scroll.help]. Nor does the service offer a more expensive tier that skips paywalls. This means readers of The Atlantic will need to buy multiple monthly subscriptions: the first to The Atlantic to be allowed to read more than a single-digit number of articles per month, and the second to Scroll not to see animated advertisements on the articles for which the reader is already paying The Atlantic.
So it's not quite the same as Adult Check from the late 1990s, which w
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I don't mind publishers having multiple tiers. I don't expect to get full subscriber access to NYT etc as part of Scroll, as it it is intended to replace the ad-supported tier, not the full-subscriber tier, and is priced accordingly. I do hope that more publishers sign on and start allowing Scroll members to view their sites with tracker-blocking enabled, like they did before people started using private-mode to evade article limits.
But yes, if any publisher tries to show me ads when I am paying for a subsc
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IMO sites that have paid subscriptions should not publish ads to their subscribers - that should be covered by the subscription fee.
I don't know if *any* paid subscription site works like that though. Not the ones I've used.
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IMO sites that have paid subscriptions should not publish ads to their subscribers - that should be covered by the subscription fee.
Website operators would use the excuse that print magazines and print newspapers have had both a subscription price and advertisements since before either of us was born.
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People didn't mind advertisements the way print magazines and newspapers did it. If we went back to that, things would be great. The trouble is that web ads track you, play videos with sound, cover over the articles, impersonate download buttons, etc.
signup page (Score:3)
The signup page is at https://firstlook.firefox.com/... [firefox.com]
I just signed up, $2.50 USD/month for the first 6 months. This is a technology I'm definitely behind; I've been hoping someone would implement this for years. Personally, I'm glad it's Mozilla, too. Good for them.
The idea seems similar to Brave Browser. (Score:2)
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Yes, Brandon left the CEO position of Mozilla to form Brave. He was insufficiency woke, so Mozilla had to 'partner with' Scroll, for Justice.
Woke goes broke, so bet on BAT which seeks to fix the web's economic model, not to "stop Brandon".
Brandon also co-created JavaScript and Mozilla. He's usually early on technology.
Coincidentally, I just replaced Chrome with Brave on my commercial OS machines yesterday. I don't mind complaining about Brave's missteps, but I'm also supporting them. It was the same when