Students Embarrass eBay With Firefox Add-On

An anonymous reader sends along a posting from the Grooveking blog on a group of Stanford students who got together to help promote Firefox and ended up releasing a long overdue eBay Toolbar for Firefox before Mozilla and eBay could release their jointly developed extension in Europe. Mozilla's COO said the preemptive release of the eBay Toolbar had ruffled some feathers among European eBay execs. "Besides basic search features, it removes external ads on the site and allows users to see thumbnail pictures on ALL search items, even those sellers didn't pay for. An eBay toolbar has been long overdue... eBay can't be too enthusiastic about this toolbar since it cuts directly into its main sources of revenue: ads and thumbnail fees. But eBay users get a really good deal."

Comments

Suspension

[phorm]

Because they were suspended for making them based on their schools?

Re:Makes sense of this slogan

[Columcille]

No, the topic was submitted by an anonymous reader. Anonymous cowards are a different breed.

Re:Makes sense of this slogan

[mollymoo]

I am NEVER going to be browsing CNN and suddenly decide to buy flowers from an ad I see there.

Not even if you happened to be browing CNN a couple of days before Mothers' Day? If you are as advertising-resistant as you claim (which I doubt - even scattergun advertising hits the mark sometimes), you are highly unusual and thus irrelevant to CNN's advertising strategy. Advertising works; people do buy flowers from companies they see advertised on CNN. As a result florists will pay CNN for advertising space which means CNN can afford to continue to produce the content which took you to the CNN site in the first place. If CNN perceive (rightly or wrongly) that blocking ads significantly hurts their bottom line they will take measures to protect their revenues.