Firefox Now Shows Ads As Sponsored Address Bar Suggestions (bleepingcomputer.com) 140
waspleg writes: Mozilla is now showing ads in the form of sponsored Firefox contextual suggestions when U.S. users type in the URL address bar. Mozilla says the feature was introduced with Firefox 92 in September to fund development and optimization. Mozilla describes Firefox Suggest contextual suggestions as opt-in, in BleepingComputer's tests and from what users have reported, the feature is on by default.
Furthermore, Firefox doesn't tag the ads displayed via Firefox Suggest. There is no clear way to identify what a sponsored suggestion and what a regular unsponsored suggestion should look like.
The only way Firefox users will know whether a sponsored suggestion is an ad would be by looking at the URL, but, in many cases, the URL is not clearly visible.
Furthermore, Firefox doesn't tag the ads displayed via Firefox Suggest. There is no clear way to identify what a sponsored suggestion and what a regular unsponsored suggestion should look like.
The only way Firefox users will know whether a sponsored suggestion is an ad would be by looking at the URL, but, in many cases, the URL is not clearly visible.
Okay. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been using there work for free for like 20 years now.
They do good work, and are the only viable alternative to Chromium. I'm okay with them trying to figure out how to be financially sustainable.
Re:Okay. (Score:4, Interesting)
They get a LOT of money from Google every year (among others) to make google the default search engine.
It's about $400 million per year, IIRC.
Re:Okay [to the money Firefox needs] (Score:2)
Actually this might not be as terrible an idea as it sounds. It depends on (1) How intrusive the ads are, (2) How relevant the ads are, and (3) Whether Mozilla can convince me they erase the search history within 5 seconds of my decision about the ads.
Oh, wait. They can't do (3) and still get paid for the clicks, can they? So much for that line of analysis. But let me be optimistic and hope that the thoughtful Slashdot discussion will persuade me to be more optimistic. (Why is my oxymoron alarm beeping?)
But
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You're forgetting the first rule of conspiracy theories: Never let facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory.
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Especially since both Brendan Eich and our own roman_mir have worked there...
Re: Okay. (Score:2)
Why would they send all that money to a single Jewish woman?
Re:Okay. (Score:5, Insightful)
They’ve been collecting several hundred million a year for quite some time now. Most recently:
https://www.androidheadlines.c... [androidheadlines.com]
Paying the few programmers they actually need to maintain their actual products could be done using just the interest from that money, if they weren’t perpetually trying to turn themselves into something else.
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I'm okay with this.
It's a multi-national company that is trying to compete with Google, Apple, AND Microsoft with the intent to keep anyone of them from doing to the internet again what MS did to the internet in the early 2000's. Seriously, MS almost made the entire internet a Windows Application. Google and Apple would do the same if allowed.
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The only one stopping Google from doing this is Apple's "Safari only on iOS". FF's share isn't big enough. Except for Safari,all non-Chromium browsers have a lower combined share than non-IE browsers at MS's highpoint.
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Most of it comes from 1 company (Score:2)
And I don't think it's a few programmers. Modern web browsers are *insanely* complex. Like, more so than operating systems complex. Seriously, I haven't compiled FF in a long, long time by I remember it taking about 3-5 times as long as my kernel.
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It doesn't matter how many programmers there are, Mozilla is spending more money on advertising than on programmers, Mozilla spent more on Pocket than programmers... Programming is the job of lowest importance at the Mozilla Foundation, which is why the death of Firefox is inevitable. I only hope that someone who cares more about the user winds up controlling the dominant fork when it dies.
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Seems like Mozilla wants to develop other revenue streams so that they are not reliant on search engines to keep them afloat.
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They did lay off lots of people recently but I don't think their expenses in the salary of "techs" are small
Re:Okay. (Score:5, Funny)
Ads in the windows start menu? Blasphemy! Ads in the Firefox url bar? Oh this is nice.
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One you pay for, the other you do not. Ads in free software are nothing new. Ads in PAID software are a scourge caused my overzealous marketroids and greedy sociopathic CEOs.
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It's the ad that is a nuisance, everywhere, everytime. The ad doesn't become a tad better through being placed before me by something I didn't pay for. I'm not responsible for the organisation behind it not being able to become profitable through other means. If it cannot manage without showing me ads I don't want to see, that's not my problem, as long as I still have a choice.
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I haven't either because Mozilla has demonstrated that when they get money they don't spend it on making the browser better, but on future revenue-generating scams. They took out the ability for add-ons to write to the disk (which was needed for extensions like Scrapbook+) and then they spent $20M on Pocket, and integrated it into the browser when it should be an add-on, and pretended it was a substitute. What they really did there was remove a feature that provided an alternative to Mozilla spying on what
I'm torn on this... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm torn. Knowing that they need money to keep up the mission of F/OSS makes me want to donate to them. I don't want them to have to rely on ads and piss-off the user base. On the other hand, I don't want my money going into...well... frankly anything that they have done in the last 5 years or so. How much do I need to donate to have them just put it back the way it was before UI changes + pocket + ads? Then just maintain it with the latest protocols, security, and javascript / HTML / CSS / etc compliance?
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I might actually consider moving back to Firefox if they did that, although I've been more than happy with Vivaldi ever since I changed a couple of years ago after Firefox had simply become too slow to run on the slowest of the machines I still had in use back then. (And, funnily, Vivaldi was significantly faster despite its load of features than any other Chromium based browser I tried.)
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How much do I need to donate to have them just put it back the way it was before UI changes + pocket + ads?
This could actually be a revenue source for them. A de-bloated, subscription-based version, with periodic votes on new features and proposed changes, and the company following the will of the majority of the paying subscribers.
If that majority were the very power users who so much decry what Mozilla has done to Firefox over the years, Firefox would go back into being a browser for power users, rather than perpetually running after Chrome's worst design choices in the hopes of one day out-Googling Google.
I d
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But then it's FOSS, so someone just clones it and POOF there goes the revenue.
Power users would pay for the right to vote and set its development roadmap. Being FOSS is relevant only in that it'd attract more power users to it.
Wikipedia is a similar case. It's CC, used for free, and yet tons of people donate for it to continue being exactly as it is and, more importantly, ad-free. Not ad-free for paying users, ad-free for everyone.
Re: I'm torn on this... (Score:2)
I would also pay $20/year, been using Firefox since it was in beta and Mozilla Suite before that.
Re: I'm torn on this... (Score:3)
Ironymeter: pegged.
Firefox was originally Mozilla's de-bloated browser.
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Let's make a back of the napkin estimate. Wikipedia has it that they have a multi-digit million budget per year -- AFAIK 3 digits account for the Google / Yahoo / Baidu / SearchEngieOfTheWeek deals, which is, give or take, 90% of their finance. So they have a 2-digit budget from other sources -- donations etc. This probably means 40-50 mio, but let's just go with 10.
Honestly, how many developers does it possibly take to build and maintain a browser? Because 10 mio will easily buy you 50 or so.
Mozilla should
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Because 10 mio will easily buy you 50 or so.
Oh, and I'm being extremely generous here. $100k will buy you top-shelf developer by a good margin anywhere in Europe.
Re: Okay. (Score:2)
Check out the Brave browser. Itâ(TM)s what Firefox used to be.
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I've been using [their] work for free for like 20 years now.
They do good work, and are the only viable alternative to Chromium. I'm okay with them trying to figure out how to be financially sustainable.
How about if Mozilla only implemented features the users want badly enough to pay for?
Re: Okay. (Score:2)
Re:Okay. [With paying for your benefits?] (Score:2)
You need to divide the question to conquer it. Some features have ongoing costs that need to be supported beyond the developmental costs. (Therefore I advocate a solution approach that would fall back in a fail safe way from such features, preferably while encouraging wannabe users to fund them again.)
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Exactly.
Do you think screwing up the UI comes without cost?
Another nail in the coffin. (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's optional, apparently, and off by default.
https://support.mozilla.org/en... [mozilla.org]
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That's what they say, but not what they do, as the article clearly states...
Re:Another nail in the coffin. (Score:4, Insightful)
It won't be tomorrow, when they start ignoring the about:config settings for that like they do with the Proton shit. Yah, right.
MY Firefox won't ever display ads, because I froze it at 90.0.2 forever, turned off updates and turned of nags with the policy file fix trick. Between the Proton fiasco and now Ads? Nope. Sorry. It's been a nice ride, but I'm stuck on the last semi-decent version until someone comes up with something better, and I don't care for Chrome or it's similar drool-proofed cousins. They are dumbed-down a bit too much for me.
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ignoring the about:config settings for that like they do with the Proton shit.
Are they really doing this? I thought maybe I just missed a setting somewhere. Fuck.
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No, it's true, the next major version 92 flat-out ignored some of the about:config settings, they took the old menu structure and icons, and nice tabs, etc. and just cut that out of the code base completely so there is nothing left to turn on of the old code. That way they don't have to support a dual path and 2 UI's, basically.
Well, I hate the new Proton interface, it's made for mobiles or touchscreens, and I don't use FF that way, just as a normal desktop browser on a PC. Proton is double-spaced and the
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tabs that can actually be differentiated between the background and each other!
Yea, I fucking hate the mobilization shit too, and this really hurts functionality. I use a lot of containers.
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What's the alternative though? Everything else is either just a Chrome skin or a half dead open source project.
The state of the browser market is pretty bleak at the moment.
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Yes! We need something like what the Fedora project was to RedHat. PaleMoon and WaterFox were close, but they went off on another path and started developing their own plugins, etc.
What would be nice is a complete re-work of the browser with all the nonsense like Pocket, etc. removed, but with the browser still capable of using the latest FireFox plugins. Nothing quite like that exists, unfortunately. That's why I settled on a frozen copy of FF v90 for now. I know this will become a security problem,
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Part of the problem is that Firefox is very hard to actually work on. Building the main app isn't too bad, but for example the layout engine is a separate project that I couldn't get to build under Windows or Linux. All the guides are out of date, especially for the Android side if you are trying to fix bugs there.
There are lots of fixes I'd like to make but even if you can get it to build, finding where you need to make changes and meeting all the requirements for patch submission is no easy task.
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Apparently, you misread or misunderstood my post.
My anger was not at them ignoring the about:config settings, it was the complete removal of the old menu and tab code I was pissed about. I stated in my posts that I knew the config settings were deprecated because the code they controlled no longer existed in v92, I understood that.
Additionally, my anger also came from the fact that both menus co-existed in v90 showing they could in fact have both styles of interface, but I never was angry about them "ignor
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I was less impacted by the changes, as I've maintained a copy of Waterfox Classic ever since they switched to WebExtensions in 57, which I use in conjunction for access to all my old addons and UI comforts. While my primary browsing is in current version Firefox, I switch across to Waterfox for the additional functionality now missing f
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It's indeed optional -- assuming that unchecking it in settings does actually disable the feature. However, I had not known about this feature until reading it here, so I checked my search settings, and found that it was turned on. FWIW, Firefox never prompted me if I wanted to turn it on when I upgraded. So I'd say that any claims by Mozilla that the feature is off by default come from a spox who doesn't have all of the details or are deliberately misleading.
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Yea, this is my experience as well.
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There's always Chrome...
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Fork it! (Score:2)
Why not fork its source codes into a new web browser like its original Phoenix from Netscape's death?
B.S. (Score:2, Insightful)
Mozilla says the feature was introduced with Firefox 92 in September to fund development and optimization.
Bullshit. Mozilla gets $450 Million a year from Google. Why can't that be used to fund "development and optimization"?
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They seem to work on everything besides being a browser. Pocket? Screenshot tool? Video chat feature?
Stuff (Score:2)
A sort of re-hash of Second Life - Hubs.
An Internet of Things central controller
A few VR projects
Voice recognition and reader projects
Some sort of "in real life" stories portal
A geolocation service
A single sign on service
I mean, you have money, might as well spend it on absolutely everything.
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They seem to work on everything besides being a browser. Pocket? Screenshot tool? Video chat feature?
When I launched Firefox a minute ago, it told me I should try "Firefox VPN".
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I'm just waiting for the integrated email client [catb.org].
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Although what you link to is funny, actually FF went in reverse - as Netscape Navigator, we had a browser and email client integrated! Then they split it into FF and ThunderBird as separate programs.
I know, I ruined the joke, but it's funnier when you think of how it had went the other way in reality! :)
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I know. Just remember that JWZ was part of the mozilla team.
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Although what you link to is funny, actually FF went in reverse - as Netscape Navigator, we had a browser and email client integrated!
Not quite true :)
Netscape Navigator was - as its name suggest - just a navigator. Netscape Communicator was Navigator + a mail client. And it was great as a mail client.
Re: B.S. (Score:2)
I remember using Netscape's built-in email client with Netscape 3, meaning before Communicator existed.
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That $450 million is contingent on Mozilla ensuring that there are no "superiour" features in Firefox as compared to Chrome, and that anything that can be customized to provide security shall be removed.
Mozilla accepted the contract and now they are hard at work fulfilling their obligation to turn Firefox into Chrome.
Surreptitious advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
In addition to everything else, from TFA: "Furthermore, Firefox doesn't tag the ads displayed via Firefox Suggest. There is no clear way to identify what a sponsored suggestion and what a regular unsponsored suggestion should look like."
This is not just ads, which, the way they do it, would be bad enough, this is surreptitious advertising, which actuallty is illegal in quite some countries, and for good reasons, too.
Yes, it would be nice to have at least one browser left that isn't Google's. But not at that price.
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Worse, it's a third party network not something they developed in house. FTFA:
"Mozilla says it will only work with partners that meet Firefox's privacy standards, with the preferred partner for now being adMarketplace."
The network's privacy policy clearly states that they'll be slurping up every piece of data they can including mobile ids, the same as every other scumbag ad network out there:
https://www.admarketplace.com/... [admarketplace.com]
"4. What Personal Data do we Collect?
Search informatio
A recipe for disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's now imagine a multi-story apartment building, with one connection to the Internet and one shared IP address. You'll have middle class adults searching for adult beverages, legal pharmaceuticals and adult websites sharing that connection with children who's searches are G rated, and teens hoping to find adult sites that they're not supposed to be looking at all sharing that one IP address. Imagine what that's going to do to this kind of targeted advertising, even if you don't add a paedophile or political extremist into the mix!
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Being illegal everywhere except the United States is probably why this drivel only targets the United States.
You whipersnapers are too young. (Score:4, Insightful)
Firefox deserves your support. If it wasn't for Mozilla and Firefox, then the entire internet would have become a feature exclusive to Windows -and MS almost pulled that off. There was a time (2000-2002ish) when most websites just didn't work with anything except Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer had ActiveX and web developers liked that. Netflix was collapsing, so IE built up 95% of the user market. MS even ported a weak version of IE to Mac OS 9, just to fend off some anti-trust claims. Internet Explorer stiffed development of the entire internet for years.
We are right back there now with Chromium. The internet needs more than one Browser.
you are too young (Score:5, Insightful)
bullshit, always have been alternative browsers from 1990 to now.
There are alternatives now as always.
Firefox gets hundreds of millions from big corporations already. They don't deserve to ram ads down anyone's throat nor to enable spying.
I wrote the subsmission in Firefox 93 (Score:2)
(mostly copying pasting from the article, really). I've been using FF since it was called Navigator. This shit makes me sad. I wish they would fucking stop ruining it for Google Graft (TM).
Netflix vs. IE? (Score:4, Funny)
Netflix was collapsing, so IE built up 95% of the user market.
Tell me more about this mythical Netflix browser. Sounds fantastic!
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Sure. The Netflix browser had great support for video; the trouble was that that was all it did. No text, no static images, just video. This, of course is how we ended up with Flash - we needed a way to display non-video in the Netflix browser. Flash also allowed us to have fullscreen video that looked less crappy than the upscaled 144i that our typical internet connection allowed back then - and even that took hours to download for 30 minutes of viewing. Then a small band of rogue coders started working on
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You're right about the past, but that's now the past. Firefox has stopped being a good browser for me some years ago, and it just keeps getting worse. Serving ads without people's consent and not even marking them as such really takes the biscuit. I don't like this more than anyone else, but If that's the only competition that's left against Google, it's game over. Google has won.
Of all the changes Mozilla has introduced to Firefox over that last five years, I don't remember one that would have been a chang
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While there's something to your sentiment, it would be a Pyrrhic victory if the alternative engages in even more dubious advertising/tracking behavior than Chrome.
I don't know the extent to which the same mindset and people that reclaimed share from IE in the late 2000s are still involved in Firefox today.
I'm not sure whether an alternative rendering engine and javascript runtime is helping any more than participating in the shared open source common to Chrome, Chromium, and Edge.
I do know if the browser st
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Mobile really badly needs more than one browser. At the moment it's basically Chrome (Android) or Safari (iOS).
Firefox for mobile is progressing extremely slowly and has many very very long standing problems that get ignored. It's incredibly frustrating that they concentrate on experimental new features while ignoring basic stuff that makes the browser unusable on many devices.
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The browser works just fine. It's hardly a "dumpster fire".
You don't want to live in a world where the only options are different flavors of Chrome. We've been down that road. We were lucky to escape. I don't know that we could, given how much more complex the modern web has become...
*sigh* (Score:5, Insightful)
Like MS, Mozilla seems to be doing everything in their power to sabotage their core products these days...
Utterly failed business model: Double suicide. (Score:4, Insightful)
First, they were dependent on Google. Which of course was suicidal.
Now they try to free themselves by switching to... ads?? ;)
(Bonus points if they are using Google's ad services.
Yeah, ... no. Advertisement by definition means I will lose money because in an act of assault on my brain I'm brainwashed into by buying more expensive, inferior products. It is always a crime. Just still legal, that's all. :)
But if you got any morals at all, you will both block them and never ever make a pact with the devil and use them to finance yourself.
Morally that's analogous to IBM manufacturing the tabulating machines for the Holocaust. (And before anyone complains: Same axis, not same intensity, duh.
So I'm really happy my Firefox is always built from source, and already heavily patched by now.
But I'm beginning to get the same feeling as when I still used Windows: If the first thing you do is heavily modify it to get something usable, maybe you shouldn't be using it in the first place. But maybe you only are due to the lack of choice. (Chromium-based/Apple obviously is not a choice.)
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Now they try to free themselves by switching to... ads??
It is the way of the world. This is my attitude to news websites. If a website is providing quality original content, the money has to come from somewhere. I subscribe to a couple of news websites, but I can't afford to subscribe to all of them that I might want to look at from time to time. A site strewn with ads might be a bit annoying, but if I can get at the content, then I guess the ads are the fee.
I did run an ad blocker for a while, because of some particularly intrusive ads on one site I use regular
All in all (Score:3)
While I wish they would do a better job identifying them as what they are, I don't really begrudge Mozilla for trying to diversify their income streams. It's only a matter of time before Google decides to stop paying them to keep their search engine as the default, at which point I think the technical term for their financial situation is "well and truly fucked."
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I don't think Google wants to be seen as a monopoly in the browser market as well. At least, funding Mozilla shows good faith on their part.
Remember when Bill Gates bought $150M of Apple stock back in the days? It was not out of a good heart. They just did not want to be the sole OS builder in the PC market, by fear of being a monopoly.
So I am not sure Google will ever stop funding Mozilla. But on the other hand, of course, it's smart to not put all your eggs in the same basket.
Where does all their money go? (Score:2)
Seriously, there's no way it should take half-a-billion dollars, to do what they do. Where does the money go?
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The money goes in the pocketses.
THere is no rational connection between "the money" and what the Mozilla fuckwads do.
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People actually entering stuff in the adress-bar? (Score:2)
Inconceivable!
Used to be great, now utter trash (Score:2)
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Chromium and Edgium are far far far far far worse at memory management. I have removed Edgium because it is perposterous that an application program (any application program) uses more than 32 GiB of RAM to do ANYTHING, let alone nothing -- and that Chrome shit is no better.
Android FF? (Score:2)
Need some decent forks of Firefox (Score:2)
At this point, Firefox is pretty stable as far as browser software goes. Mozilla devs aren't implementing important security measures but instead modifying the UI in ways that users REALLY dislike.
Forking Firefox and just applying bugfixes/security patches and adding important security features doesn't seem like a bad option. Waterfox, Pale Moon, and Basilisk are based on older, now outdated forks. So something that forks pre-Proton + latest security patches would be fairly welcome. Forking a browser re
Lets keep it simple here (Score:2)
We are now at a crossroads here with only two streets to go down:
1- Keep dealing with an internet that is only going to get more user hostile, more government/corporation control freak friendly, more privacy invading, more manipulative, more everything that no sane decent person ever wanted.
2- Start over from scratch, with a firmly enforced "Users' Bill of Rights" to prevent the aforementioned abuses.
Maybe it's time to... (Score:2)
Dump Firefox to save it (Score:2)
Firefox is like the National Rifle Association in that both forgot their core mission then chased profit instead.
FF doesn't care about the geeks responsible for its previous success. I'm done with it until the next "Phoenix".
"know whether a sponsored suggestion" (Score:2)
is this the setting? (Score:3)
browser.search.suggest.enabled
it was set to true by default
Good timing, Mozilla (Score:2)
Had they done this 10 years ago it may have worked. They're doing it now after fumbling their market share, losing users through terrible design choices, side projects that went nowhere, and fringe politics. They're also launching this at a time when privacy has become a mainstream concern, potentially further annoying their remaining users.
A reasonable idea coming far too late.
Willing to pay (a little) for Firefox w/o ads (Score:3)
TL;DR: they should have a paid very low cost version with no annoyances to ensure revenues (unlocked by signing in to the browser), and the default free experience with only very minor ad-related annoyances.
Switched back from Chrome some 3-4 years ago, after Firefox sold me on how it tries to handle privacy, as well as the browser being pretty slick and working just great for mostly everything.
However, I truly hate ads, especially when it appears contextually in places where it is hard for me to filter out (my brain has pretty much developed the ability to completely ignore any ad on web pages), especially when there is no way to distinguish between ad content and legitimate content.
I hate ads enough that if I search for some company on Google, and the first hit is an ad that takes me directly there, I will look further down to try to find a non-sponsored link to the same site, and if I don't find it I will usually type in the URL myself rather than clicking on the ad. That's just my petty way of "sticking it to the man".
So ... what to do? Well, I use Firefox a lot. On several computers, tablet, cell phone ... even on an Oculus Quest which is collecting dust somewhere. And similarly to how I accept paying more for e.g. organic food because I assign more value to those products and I know they cost more to produce - well, I assign value to having one of the most important things I use throughout the day (a browser) that does supposedly not try to **** me over.
For me, a low-cost subscription which gets rid of all shenanigans like "sponsored URL bar" would be ok. So I could sign in with my Firefox user on all my browsers, and I would get the non-annoying experience. They just have to make it cheap enough this is a no-brainer. At most around $15 per year, but to get real traction so people who are more price sensitive than me also buy it, the product should be cheaper - e.g. $6.99.
Supposedly the Mozilla Google deal is worth around $450 million per year [zdnet.com], which with around 200 million users [tomsguide.com] that is a little more than 2 bucks per user per year. You don't need to charge a lot to more than cover any lost revenue.
So ... a free version which still protects your privacy and is only slightly annoying (otherwise Firefox will lose too much market share and thus will be doomed to fail), and a paid version which removes any remaining annoyances for a low "I don't even have to think about whether I think this is worth it" price.