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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.'"
laugh... but you would have gone ahead with it if you could have gotten it past the "community".
We need a new Firefox, someone "pure" again.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
And I'll never use it again.
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.
And I'll never use it again.
Now who's being intolerant?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
[citation needed]
So, just let me get this entirely straight. A man was hounded out of his job for not having the "correct" beliefs*, and when someone objects or defends his right to an opinion, he, too, is "intolerant" (and according to the downmodded post, a "closet homophobe)? This is your definition of tolerance?
Scratch a liberal or "advocacy group" and you see the same rotten core you saw in 1933.
And the terrible crime here is that the man contributed to a *successful* change to the CA constitution, after a previous *successful* propostion to the same effect was defeated by the same pack of "tolerance" bullies?
Take a look at Pale Moon browser. It's built with FireFox source, but with a rational user interface layout.
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.
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.
The Pale Moon browser is a better version of Firefox. Pale Moon appears to have better management than the Mozilla Foundation gives Firefox.
Pale Moon Windows version
Pale Moon Linux version
Here are some of the advantages:
1) Pale Moon has a 64-bit version. Firefox doesn't. The 64-bit Pale Moon uses the Firefox add-ons; there are no problems except with some unusual add-ons.
2) The "Find in page" is better in Pale Moon. In Firefox the "Find in page" field is on the left of the screen and the "Highlight All" and "Match Case" buttons are on the right. In Pale Moon they are together so that you immediately see if something is chosen from a former search.
3) Pale Moon has backup software. Firefox has only Mozbackup, which works well, but isn't Mozilla Foundation software.
4) Pale Moon is said to be more stable than Firefox. The memory-hogging flaws in Firefox are so widely acknowledged that there are add-ons for re-starting Firefox: Firefox Re-start Add-ons. I use Restartless Restart.
5) Pale Moon is completely independent of the forces that guide Firefox. Pale Moon is in no way associated with Mozilla Foundation. The Mozilla Foundation seems to feel forced to change Firefox in ways most users don't want.
Migration tool: Pale Moon has a profile migration tool.
I am sure the gay employees at mozilla have spent private funds supporting their politics, and I didn't see that new ceo hassling them for it, even if he disagrees. Who's the better person here?
Anyway, none of this should matter because work is not a place where you get to hang out with the people you want to hang out with. You're going to encounter people who have beliefs and lifestyles that differ from yours. You're all there to work, not to establish little gay (or christian, or athletic etc) cliques and then demand the rest of society shield you from it. Whining and saying "I feel offended/unsafe" just to get someone fired for conflicting political beliefs is exactly the kind of systemic oppression people like yourself claim is such a problem. Nothing kills legitimacy faster than hypocrisy.
This is yet another reason that I'm a great fan of Firefox and Mozilla as a whole. Firefox (and Mozilla) remains the only major browser that has the user's privacy, functions, and security in mind; not to mention a great example of FOSS that is equally viable and usable to the neophyte as the guru. I'm glad that they backed off their latest endeavor in response to user worries, but we users need to figure out a palatable way to support Mozilla monetization soon!
Now personally, I didn't have a problem with the sponsored starting "quickslots" as I understood them. They only existed on a completely new install, were visibly marked as being sponsored, didn't send back any sort of user data or have other privacy issue, and vanished as soon as the user visited 9 web pages to take up all the "quick dial" slots with their own content! People being worried that it could bleed into something more is understandable, but we need to avoid lashing out at ANY monetization system, because we'll end up in a much worse state.
Like it or not, Mozilla needs funds to do what they do; acting the paragon of web virtue and privacy, having full time developers etc... isn't cheap. Especially in a market where the "bad guys' are offering "FREE SHINY SUPER CONVENIENCE FEATURE HEY LOOK AT THIS" at every turn, while simultaneously selling the user's data to the highest bidder (see: Google) , it is hard to offer a competing level of service and features with a better ethical bend; its even worse when the "bad guys" offer the biggest bucks (ie the reason that porn, faux antivirus sites, other dataminers and outright malware ads pay the most per click. On the other side, those like American health insurance companies, people search slime etc.. are willing to pay top dollar for your data if Google or whomever gathers it. Atop all of this, Google has to compete with "Joe User's" preferences. Though they do an excellent job bringing their support of an open web and privacy to light, Joe User still may like Chrome Widget A or Feature B, which is part of the reason that Firefox is trying to provide "Chrome UI styles" to those that want them in recent variants.
Ultimately, I want Mozilla to continue with its FOSS, openness, and privacy-focused mission and I am willing (and do) donate to the foundation in the hopes to help them do so. However, I know I am a minority - most people aren't going to donate and/or pay for a browser. If it is true that Firefox is going to lose a huge chunk of its revenue from including Google as one of its Search Bar default engines, they are going to have to make that up somehow. Honest and innocuous attempts to do so like the previous "quickdial sponsored starting pages" idea should likely be supported. Especially the tech and FOSS geek community shouldn't be rebuking any attempt for monetization, lest we end up with Mozilla either falling further and further behind as they don't have the money to keep up, or worse abandoning their principles to pay the bills. Instead, we need to be supporting Mozilla's attempts to make money that is still in line with their mission and our desires for openness, privacy, security and the like.
P.S. Despite being one of my favorite pieces of software, recently Thunderbird really needs some support too (especially, being able to detect the new Gmail Categories etc... that's something that the clout of Mozilla should be able to sit down with Google and work out a way to handle it) . Its sad that Mozilla hasn't the resources to invest in continuous improvements and have put the project on the back burner. We don't want to see this happen to Firefox too!
Firefox 3.x was the apogee of runaway heap allocations. With my usage pattern and plug-ins I was losing 600 MB per day on average. I would have six FF Windows open on half a dozen different desktops, each with 20 to 50 active tabs. When I decided to restart FF because it could no longer keep up with my typing in a textarea box, my session saver would restore all of my FF windows to a pile on a single screen of a single desktop, and then there would be a tab reload storm something fierce. It was a ten minute interruption to get all my windows back to the desktop where they belonged, and FF itself sufficiently quiescent again to promptly enact GUI interactions.
My current FF leaks somewhere on the order of 100 MB/day and when I restart FF, it at least puts all my windows back on the same screen, if not the same desktop, and the tab reload storm is forestalled by lazy loading.
By that point I certainly wasn't sticking with FF because it was sleek or svelte. On the contrary, I was invested deeply enough in my suite of FF add-ons that I decided to tough it out (though rather loudly on the FF bug tracker).
I don't understand why so many outspoken voices on this thread purport to be sanguine about Firefox slipping back to the second or third tier in the absence of Google funding. Has no-one here ever read the red-hating Agatha Christie? Oligopoly, triopoly, duopoly, monopoly.
Each little Indian cut off at the knees substantially alters the political culture and calculus on Internet Island. Firefox is Piggy with the coke bottle glasses. Soon after Piggy's demise, civics aren't much discussed.
Think of Piggy as The First Samurai.