Mozilla Junkbuster-like Feature Removed

The source code for this news story is the bugzilla report, so read the source if you really want to know what's going on. Mozilla's M15 build has a feature to block webpage images that come from another site: it blocks banner ads. The feature's a little buggy, but it could probably be worked out. Four weeks ago, the feature was removed: "it went the way of management decree" says a Netscape employee. It sounds like AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape didn't want an ad-unfriendly feature in the web browser they're financing. But Mozilla contributors say this has been misinterpreted. What's the real story?

"Please don't jump to conclusions." That's the advice from the developer whose bugzilla postings got people concerned in the first place. OK, so let's take this slow.

Oh, and - this is the second story on Slashdot today that puts generous, overworked open-source contributors under the microscope, and I feel a little bad about that. I hope they understand we're not denigrating their efforts, and that we are grateful for their work.

The feature at issue here lets you block images from a webpage if they come from a foreign site. If you're reading www.slashdot.org, any images from www.foreignsite.net will simply not be loaded. Say, hypothetically, www.doubleclick.net. That would be one example.

Is this the most important feature in the world? Not really. But is it important? Yes. Not just because it blocks most ad banners. It also eliminates what Richard Smith calls web bugs: a technique which can track you across the net without your knowing. The extra privacy is probably a good thing.

(On the bright side, the feature that blocks foreign-site cookies is still in place; this is a very good idea.)

One thing that complicates the issue is that the image-blocking feature was having a few problems. The example given was that, on AltaVista's homepage, the "submit" button graphic comes from a domain owned by the same parent company - but because the domain name is different, the button does not appear. There was concern that users might not understand this. A proposed alternative was to add a dialog warning of such unexpected behavior, and/or to give users more options for how graphics would be blocked.

My thinking is that the problems could have been solved. The person in charge of UI design issues suggested a design workaround that probably would have made the feature quite usable.

I should point out that just because this bug has been marked as WONTFIX, that doesn't mean it won't be reopened; this has happened thousands of times. Actually, now the bug has been marked INVALID, indicating the removal of the feature from the menu is not considered a bug but ... a feature. Well, OK, so its removal was intentional; will the feature be re-added later? Possibly.

But why was this feature removed? In mid-April, shortly after it had disappeared from the current build, one volunteer spoke to a Netscape employee and summarized events as "management had told them to strip the feature."

This sounded uncomfortably like AOL influencing the browser design to suit their needs. I suspect that the Time-Warner media empire might take in a few dollars from banner ads. I suspect they might not like giving users a way to block almost all banner ads with just a few clicks. They don't mind a small percentage of us using a squid proxy, Junkbusters, or creative /etc/hostsing. But to turn that power over to everyone would seriously threaten their revenue stream.

As one might expect, the preview release of Netscape6, the "AOL version" of the browser that was spun off of the Mozilla project, has a preferences dialog that looks a lot like Mozilla's except when it comes to this feature. The foreign-cookie blocker is in place; the foreign-image blocker is not. (But they spun it off an earlier release - maybe the feature wasn't written then; I don't know.)

One of the volunteer developers, at least, has been loudly protesting the implication that anything is wrong. On kuro5hin.org, they are free to state their case and there's some good discussion. And this morning, the same volunteer who originally logged the "went the way of management decree" message appended another log entry, worth reading in full:

"This has gotten a little out of control. The only thing Steve Morse informed me was that as of now, the image blocking prefs have been *publicly* removed from the build. This means that though you CAN still retrieve the feature if you so desire, the menu options and interface are not -- by default -- accessible. This is done often for testing purposes; if something you're working on seems to be conflicting with the image blocking module, you can simply opt to turn it off to complete your work. Who the heck said anything about it being removed permanently? Admittedly, my note wasn't clear, but I think blaming AOL for the supposed 'removal' of this feature is absurd and a little conspiracist, don't you think? To the news sites carrying this: I'm sorry, but what we have here is a nonissue. [...]

"To clarify: the ONLY piece of information Steve gave me was that the feature, as of now, did not appear to be in the latest builds, but really was. His words that the feature 'went the way of management' decree simply refer to the fact that 'management' (NOT AOL management or even AOL-related, mind you) told him to turn the image blocking preference off by default in the latest nightly builds (probably so some technical issues that the feature's causing can be ironed out). That's it - I apologize for the ambiguity of my original words, but they never meant to imply the removal of this feature. Nor did Steve's."

I'm a little skeptical of what would be accomplished by removing this feature from the menu and dialog, but then I'm not the one who's working on the source, am I?

I'm less skeptical about all this now than I was this morning. Part of what worried me was this same volunteer's earlier comment on kuro5hin.org:

"...there's still quite a easy way to get the image blocking preferences back (IMHO, I believe they were removed in the first place because it is ads that heavily supports Netcenter), by adding a certain line in your prefs.js file."

But in email today, he said that this was just a guess and he no longer believes it's true. Fair enough.

Getting any developers to talk about this bug has been like pulling teeth. Only one of the developers I contacted (repeatedly) even bothered to return my email.

What's important to understand is that having to restore the preferences by editing a Javascript preferences text file isn't the same as having it in the right-click menu. If people could block ads with a right-click and just a little poking around, the nature of the web would change drastically.

Finally, here's the same volunteer, again on kuro5hin.org:

"This has been blown way out of proportion.

"I am now hearing from other NSCP employees that this feature has only been taken out temporarily due to complications with the PSM module.

"Furthermore, can you all _please_ stop assuming things from Steve's statement? Steve said it went the way of management decree. This means whatever happened to the image prefs, it came by way of a couple people labeled 'management' (not AOL management, nor AOL-related in any way, mind you). _I_ was the one who suggested the feature was stripped. In reality, this feature may be being improved on, may have been removed temporarily (this happens often to many commonly used features in testing), or a number of other things that would explain its current disappearance.

"Please don't jump to conclusions."

OK. And those are nice hypotheticals for what could be something perfectly ordinary. If the explanation is that simple, though, I wish that someone else had just answered my email to say so.

The nice thing about an open-source web browser is that, even if M16 comes out with a NoPrivacy(tm) feature that uploads everything you do directly to whitehouse.gov, we're all free to fork our own project with the M15 source. We can include this feature or any other.

Conversely, Mozilla is not Netscape 6; AOL is free to add or remove whatever features they like when they release 6.0.1.

But, the official release of Mozilla will be widely distributed. I hope its functionality will be all it could be. If you want the Mozilla development team to make this feature work, and keep it in the next builds, post a comment below to let them know it's important to you. And be nice. They work hard.

Comments

This should not even have been posted.

[Blue Lang]

The bug report states that the whole thing was a misunderstanding, that the feature was only removed from the menu, not from the code, and that it was done pending code cleanup.

The report also has something to say about news sites carrying the story without confirming that facts...

So, this is here, why?

--
blue

Content Free Reporting

[blizzard@mozilla.org]

Wow, that was an amazingly long article considering it was essentially made up of questionable quotes from a couple of different sources and large amounts of speculation.

Did slashdot try to talk to the mozilla.org people? Doesn't seem like it. I didn't get email and no one else reports having gotten any either.

The Real Story - there isn't one

[Gerv]

The feature is not "gone". It never went. You can enable it using a JS pref (as is said above). The UI is currently going through major upheaval as we head towards Netscape feature freeze date on the 16th of May, when all the Netscape engineers working on the project will stop checking in features (as they have a perfect right to do).

The current Mozilla builds are nightlies, downloaded by a few people for testing. If you download one, you'll find green and purple lines surrounding half the UI elements. Why? Debugging. Ugly? Yeah. A Slashdot story? No. Just more evidence of UI changes.

My point: this is _not_ a big deal. No-one has said this feature is going away from the code available from mozilla.org. Any feature that is destabilising the build could be deactivated. Tooltips are currently not working either, when they were last week. No fuss about that...

Gerv
(Declared interest: mozilla.org external QA volunteer) Please help: Get involved with Mozilla QA

Not necessary

[jesser]

I'd love to have this feature on a browser. Is there any chance that someone else could re-implement it? This is an open-source project, right?

Not necessary. Find your prefs.js file and add this at the end:

user_pref("imageblocker.enabled", true);

Note that if you want to go back later to turn it back off, it probably won't still be at the end of your prefs file because mozilla alphabetizes your prefs list each time you close the program.

--

Comercials

[Chemical]

. If you can block out advertisements, you are no longer paying. You are essentially stealing.

So is it stealing to switch channels or change radio stations durring commercials? Is it immoral to fastforward commercials on recorded TV programs? Or the real killer: should TVs with features that automatically mute commercials or change the channel for you be banned?

Of course, just like radio and TV commercials, I dont "block" them I usually just tune them out. Never even pay attention. I think most people have that sort of "viewing habbit".

Re:They should get rid of it.

[Robotech_Master]

Some content on the internet is free, but some content you must pay for. Viewing advertisements it paying with your time. If you can block out advertisements, you are no longer paying. You are essentially stealing.

Personally, I regard these advertisements as stealing my meager 33.6KBPS bandwidth from me, and in some cases holding the rest of the webpage hostage until they load themselves. The animated ones are especially bad in this regard, as they're essentially not just one image, but several. And this is saying nothing of the privacy issues that allow people like DoubleClick to track where you go from page to page with them even without using cookies. No thanks; include me out.

Furthermore, almost no money is ever made from banner ads anyway; most people ignore them and almost nobody ever clicks on them. Incidentally, the technology to block ad-blockers does exist. Mind's Eye Fiction uses it in their "read our stories for free by viewing banner ads" payment option. If places really wanted to force their viewers to see the banners, they could use it.

I regard banner ads as being similar to spam email, and feel justified in using whatever means I can to block them.

I also use the "mute" button on my TV set during commercials...does that make me a bad man, too?
--

I've been following this pretty closely...

[jamienk]

At first I was overcome with conspiracy theories, too...but I now think its because the initial implementation was not so good, and the the interested coders are doing something much more ambitious...

I read all the news.mozilla.org newsgroups pretty regularly (IANAP: "I am not a programmer"). Around a year or a year and a half ago there was debate about an image-blocking feature. Many developers took the attitude of "Banner ads are how many many sites make money; we think that including this feature would result in sites that we support losing money."

I, and others, disagreed with this: it was debateable who was making money with banner ads in the first place, and furthermore we felt that their argument could be made about cookies and a dozen other technologies. Users clamor for the the ability to control their browsing experience, and Mozilla, an org with users, not a corporate strategies, as their motive, was refusing to implement this feature.

Time passed. The double-click scandal broke. Image filtering shareware/add-ons appeared in earnest. Icab (a great Mac web-browser) appeared with amazing image-filtering capabilities.

And then, one day, image filtering appeared in Mozilla! There were almost no discussions of it in the newsgroups, and my attempts to start threads failed. But I was VERY happy.

The functionality was part of the cookie-filtering scheme they had in place. You could check "ask before accepting a cookie" and "ask before accepting an image" from the prefs, and then you'd get a dialog box saying "the site images.slashdot.org wants to load an image..." You could accept this one time, refuse this one time, or have your decision remembered for the future. I quickly refused for all time "doubleclick.com" images and cookies, and quite a few others. I didn't only block banner images; I found that a site like moviefone.com works MUCH faster with no images, so I perminantly rejected them.

Then, one day, the image-blocking functionality was gone. I asked and asked why on the UI newsgroups, but no one responded, excpet with the standard "If you want it, you do it." I finnally decided I WAS going to try to add the functionality back, if I could. (I was hoping that any C++ programming was still in place, and that the only code that was removed were the XML and JavaScript files that make up Mozilla's user interface.)

I poked around, and learned a bunch. (Mozilla is going to be really good, I think.) Before I got deeply into it, I found a post by Mike Shaver on the LAYOUT newsgroup (I think Netscape pays him to work on Mozilla). I include most of his message below becaue I think it points out a few things about Mozilla:

* Mozilla is composed mostly of developers who are working, not bothing to explain their thoughts to other people who aren't familiar with their projects;

* Different people involved with building Mozilla disagree about different stuff...after watching them, I'm convinced that their heirarchical structure is sound, that is, good, open minded, smart-as-shit people who seem to be good at managing other contributors are Module Owners;

* The pace of development is fast as shit.

I asked Mike to clarify his thoughts and he did. It seems to me that he wants to make "content blocking" broader than "image blocking;" that this fucntionality will be part of a general "zones" pref where users can block according to zones. There has been MUCH discussion about this in Mozilla for a while, and it seems like it's going to get done "the RIGHT WAY."

Here's Mike's post:

Subject: lighting a candle: nsIContentPolicy
Date: 26 Apr 2000 01:44:16 GMT
From: shaver@zeroknowledge.com (Mike Shaver)
Organization: evil evil evil men
Newsgroups: netscape.public.mozilla.layout

I dislike a number of things about the current image-blocking infrastructure, namely:

- it causes core layout functionality (imagelib) to depend on the ``cookie'' extension,

- the control interfaces are mushed into the cookie manager, which seems to me to be unrelated, and

- it's insufficiently general: I might well want to block or or or the same way.

So I spent some time thinking about this, because it's really not helpful to just bitch (thought I confess that I did a fair bit of that, too), and came up with the attached.

Basically, I have a general interface for controlling the loading of certain kinds of out-of-line content, and for controlling the processing of certain kinds of in-line content. (I'm not so sure the latter is useful, but it's nagging at me that I'd like to do something with it, and I with the current state of API pressure I'd rather get it in and have it be unused or disabled later than have to champion it during more conservative times.)

I will add to this by providing an implementation of nsIContentPolicy, which will in turn load all the registered policy widgets (via a "content-policy" category). The attached patch is not by any means complete, and is probably not worth applying, but it shows where I'm
headed. I'm going to hack more on this week's SFO round trip, batteries willing, and see if I can't get it ready to land. I hope to adapt split
the cookie manager into a new extensions/content-policy component, but I
might need some help with that.

Comments welcome, of course.

{patch snipped}

Re:Where's the return for publishers without the a

[PhiRatE]

In my opinion, no solid statistics, all statements extrapolated from personal experience.

This is silly. Lets face it, banner ads exist now not because they're actually worthwhile, getting linked in a single article on /. will drag in far more hits in one day than the banners on the top of the page will get in a month, they exist because they're the only form of currency the web has.

Most of the advertising "revenue" made these days is not in fact revenue at all, invariably its part of a banner-swapping deal, I'll run banners for you if you run banners for me. Even in the cases where there is money paid, in plainly doesn't make sense:

Site A gets money for ad views
Therefore Site A is more profitable if it gets more hits
Therefore Site A pays other sites to advertise, to increase its hits, so that those hits translate into ad views...for other sites...

The only places that are actually playing this game effectively are sites with valuable content, which are populated by word of mouth more than anything else (/. being a prime example), and sites that are making real sales on their website (Amazon etc).

These are a small fraction of the web, the rest is populated by mediocre content attempting to increase its hit rate by getting banners everywhere it can, a pointless exercise as users have now almost entirely done the job Mozilla would only complete, they've tuned out.

Even if they do read the banner ad, they've been stung so many times by clicking on an ad to find a boring, pointless or overly complex page that they no longer bother. The ads are intrusive but we appear to be mentally well equiped from years of TV to filter them out without even realising it.

How many of you even notice ads on /. anymore?

The massive popularity of banner ads is a simple result of human need for a solid number. We can't estimate our websites effectiveness in terms of brand awareness, we can't develop a solid business plan for a website based on word of mouth, we need numbers. We got n hits, we sold n ads, we bought n ads, next month we will sell n ads and buy m ads and get n hits. Pretty graphs, but utterly useless when you realise that the revenue is actually n-m, often a negative number.

Doubleclick and co know this, they've seen it coming, and they're desperately trying to increase the effectiveness of their trade. Targetted ads, profiling etc, but it isn't really working because its too late, they overdid it at the start and now we're filtering out anything that looks vaguely like an ad.

I don't however expect a recognition of this from either ad companies or businesses that buy and sell ads. Why? its like every other currency that we have, a vast portion of it is illusory, its a convinience that gives us a justifiable excuse to do something. Does anybody ever believe the US will pay off its national debt? no. Does that stop them trading with the US in US$? no, its the currency itself that has become important, not the backing behind it.

But if you want to create a successful website, as opposed to a website with pretty graphs, you need to listen not to the accountants, but to the users. The Cluetrain (http://www.cluetrain.org/) has it all there for you in nice bullet points.

I say putting advertising blocks in Mozilla is merely acknowleging the truth of the situation, its being honest and it may well have the effect of having website operators start building their websites with a view to how the web really works, instead of the current communal delusion.

My 2c :)

I thought this was better than avg /.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a journalism major, I tend to view articles with a critical eye. This article, though, I thought was quite good.

Overall, I have been quite pleased with the quality of news that Jamie reports on. I was especially impressed with her series on library e-censorship. Most articles are simply a link and a short opinion commentary. This was more than that. It is clear that Jamie went out of her way to e-mail developers and verify the facts that she could. Sure, she could have e-mailed various execs at AOL to find out what happened, but it is unlikely that she would find a response.

I don't dislike the normal format. In fact I find it somewhat refreshing that Slashdot culls its news from its users. But I think that there is room for this sort of journalism too. I personally don't have the time to e-mail developers from the Mozilla project to find out exactly why this feature (which I like) was removed.

I felt that this article did exactly what it was intended to do. It brought up an issue of contention within the Open Source community, and then it explained some of the views and rationale behind the feature removal.

No, this wasn't a "Whoa cool, we have practical worm holes now" sort of article, but it was informative. It is also abundantly clear that Jamie cares about producing "News for Nerds."

I say "Bravo!"

Kudos for some of the better journalism that I've seen on Slashdot.

Blocking Ads is Not Stealing

[L Fitzgerald Sjoberg]

I run a site that gets all income from ads, plus a few T-shirt sales. I like to sell ads. I like to get money from ads. I like to spend the money I get from ads on fun stuff like huge servers and tiny cel phones. And yet, with all that, it strikes me as unmitigated nonsense to claim that not viewing ads is stealing.

It's completely unsupportable to say that by reading my page, you've entered into some sort of contract, the terms of which are hidden from you and changed according to how I'd like to make money. Yes, if people turned off all ads, it would affect my income. It would also affect my income if people stopped buying the stupid crap they see in ads (like tiny cel phones, for instance), or if they didn't want to wear T-shirts with the name of my site on them, but I'd laughed off the net if I claimed that there was some sort of invisible contract that required you to buy a shirt after enjoying so many features.

Publishers of free content, myself included, are taking advantage of a series of coincidences, that's all; sometimes these coincidences verge in such a way that someone spends some money, and thousands of companies are designed to make this happenstance more likely. It's a sign of naivete (on the part of readers) and hubris (on the part of the aforementioned companies) to claim that this thin thread of chance constitutes some sort of fundamental right to not only make money, but to make money the way you're used to.

Anyhow, all this back-and-forth could be avoided by making the invisible contract visible. Just require readers to register and sign a contract stating that they will read all ads assiduously and consider them deeply. And then you can watch as the readers fail to beat a path to your virtual door. Sometimes chance is more effective than certainty.

So what happens if banner ads disappear?. I'd be sorely surprised to see the entire Web roll over and close up shop (to mix metaphors rather badly). The very fact that paid ads for free services exist is a tribute to the ability of those who want money to get it from those who have some to spare. And if the money isn't there? Personally, I'm insulted by those who claim that all art and entertainment would dissolve into wisps if they didn't pay big bucks (not that they do now, not on the Web at least). Do these people really think that I put up cartoons about masturbating Chinese food because of the favorable cost/benefit ratio? Sure, I have no problem making money from it, in the same sense that I'd have no problem with being paid to eat tri-tip sandwiches. But the reason I do it is because these things are in my brain and I take sick pleasure in making sure people know it. The same applies to any artist or entertainer worth the name.