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Mozilla Ditches Firefox's New-Tab Monetization Plans
hypnosec writes "Mozilla has ditched Firefox's new-tab monetization plans because they 'didn't go over well' with the community. Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla's VP of Firefox, said much of Firefox's community was worried Mozilla would 'turn Firefox into a mess of logos sold to the highest bidder' and that users wouldn't have control over this or see any actual benefit. 'That's not going to happen. That's not who we are at Mozilla.'"
FTA: "But we will experiment. In the coming weeks, we’ll be landing tests on our pre-release channels to see whether we can make things like the new tab page more useful, particularly for fresh installs of Firefox, where we don’t yet have any recommendations to make from your history."
Or how about just not recommending anything to me? That too complicated a concept, or just not enough money in it?
Funny thing about the web - I get to decide where I go and what I see and when. Any attempts to circumvent that control, whether by obnoxious advertising or regional access controls or even hijacking my new blank tabs with anything other than a new blank tab, people will push back against. And people will succeed, because you ain't the only game in town - And yes, that includes Mozilla, it includes Google, it includes Microsoft. Give us what we want, not what you wish we wanted, or we will move on and leave you to die from prolonged irrelevance.
You can have a "default" just give the user a choice, if they want to use it or not.
That's my thing really, so tired of updates on my phone and computers that don't take how the user feels into consideration.
A perfect example is Windows 8, another would be Unity.
Let me leave my GUI the way it is while still getting security updates and feature sets (other than GUI features obviously) give *ME* the choice.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Indeed! Australis (FF29 in general) has very nearly pinched my last nerve with Firefox. What the fuck is going on at Mozilla? The last two versions have run like complete and utter shit on my systems, from freezing windows to outright random crashes. What happened to my lightweight and reliable browser?
(Side tangent: Also, when will we get text reflow back in Android?)
Sex. Drugs, and Unix.
More importantly, for contributing $1000 to a political campaign in favor of an amendment that explicitly attacked a segment of the populace, on top of repeatedly (and publicly) supporting congressmen who regularly express bigoted attitudes towards homosexuals. So yeah, he was given the lead position on Mozilla and people flipped their shit because he backed politicians that spew bullshit to demonize them.
No, this is the old "you must be tolerant of my intolerance" nonsense. No one has to sit back and accept being walked over, particularly when the basis for it is entirely hollow.
Wait, what? Is this an indirect Godwin?
What does it having been successful have to do with anything?
What are you referring to?
It is different. That doesn't make it unusable. Seriously, the browser is not unusuable because the UI elements changed slightly.
The point is that Mozilla can't operate for free. If they could they would. If donations were enough to sustain them, why would they care? But the browser world is such that not even Opera could maintain their own browser engine, and they weren't a non-profit. Nobody seems to give a shit about Mozilla's needs, only their own. And when you dare to mention that, you're the bad guy for playing into the idea that "browsers cost money" and that "Mozilla should be trying harder to make money that everyone agrees is from ideologically flawless sources". And the worst part? The same users wouldn't donate to the cause if they had to, because they're too damn selfish and upset about tiny UI changes and bogeymen they think they're successfully evading by running Tor and NoScript.
In this kind of environment, you're guaranteed to get a Firefox that spends more time trying to find out how to make money than a Firefox that can fix its bugs and please everyone. You do it to yourself, Firefox users. That's why the vocal minority is beginning to be rejected with some things, and why the userbase is fragmenting and losing the more obnoxiously selfish users to forks that would go under the instant Mozilla went under.
Firefox has grown to the point were it is more about money than the users. Google's dominance was the first big shot across the bow of its mission. Now this and the continued Chromification of the UI.
So it is decision time. Abandon the mission or the money. Unfortunately, I've seen this movie before and I know how it ends.
Mission is still the same, regardless if you're on the train or not.
Time for a fork...
People have already done this long ago. Not a lot of poeple using them though. Turns out most people may actually like these changes.
That's what the UX people said when Win8 previews came out with a registry key that could disable Metro.
That's what the UX people said when they took "tabs on bottom/top" with regards to the about:config preference that is no longer respected within Australis.
That's what the UX people said when they came up with /. Beta (just biding their time...)
That's what the UX people said when they destroyed Gmail.
That's what the UX people are saying when they talk about removing the URL from the Omnibar in Chrome.
When a UX person says they'll give you the option to disable their UX "innovation" with a preference setting, they're lying. They intend to remove that preference setting as quickly as possible.