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Mozilla Updates Firefox With Forget Button, DuckDuckGo Search, and Ads
Krystalo writes: In addition to the debut of the Firefox Developer Edition, Mozilla today announced new features for its main Firefox browser. The company is launching a new Forget button in Firefox to help keep your browsing history private, adding DuckDuckGo as a search option, and rolling out its directory tiles advertising experiment.
What is Firefox thinking? From the last paragraph in the article: "Firefox users should 'expect a lot more experimentation in advertising,' Mozilla Senior Engineering Manager Gavin Sharp told VentureBeat."
Google stopped funding Firefox and started funding chrome.
Google is an advertising Giant, Microsoft is an advertising Giant, both produce web browsers not to maximize utility but revenue.
We're talking about one company that, in the IE4 days, ran windows update through IE and wondered why everyone caught viruses through it; to this day disgusting webbies are still making feature requests and design changes to the browser with exactly zero consideration for security. Chrome is the same exact thing. In the end, the end objective of advertisers is to run full-blown applications on your machine, and to do whatever the hell they want to it, and track every purchase and data-mine every action you take.
And that makes them absolutely no different then the Russian Mob\Russian Hackers in that regard. This is the reason companies have started to install ad-blocking software at the firewall on back, and why users are installing Adblock. Not because the ad's are annoying, but because of the very, very real need to protect themselves. Cryptolocker wiped out tens of thousands of projects, and thousands of businesses; criminals were not prosecuted because files were encrypted on police file-shares, and people died because the same happened to hospitals. This is why Putin arrested everyone involved, and why the newer versions of it are not as virulent.
Where did it come from? Yahoo's web advertising network. That one is well-documented.
I've moved the majority of my users onto Seamonkey which has become a standard part of our deployment, adblock is implemented via GPO and is part of our NAC policy. Whenever users complain they can't get to site content because of it, I let the website owner know what we are using it and why, and if they complain my simple answer is "Are you going to pay for my time to re-image machines? No. Find a new revenue stream.". "Trust us our advertisers would never break your computer", and my answer to that is "Fuck you, fuck your website, fuck your mom, fuck your career, and again, fuck you. I will blacklist your ass on my firewall and tell my end user to find a new source before I allow your banner ad's in.".
Now these Webbies have gotten into the standards documents, and browsers are doing things that really, they have no fucking business doing such as DRM'd Video in HTML5. The ONLY Reason you do that is you want a full-page video ad to pop up and take control of the browser for a minute. There's no other fucking reason for that; netflix can easily provide a separate app for streaming video. Why is your MAC address in your IP address in IPV6? The ONLY reason is to track the device from location to location, because it's super useful to be able to have persistence and serve ad's based upon what an IP last saw.
The result of that is networking guru's have basically said "Fuck you we are using IPV4 internally until you give us a NAT RFC". They are engineers, not advertisers, they have no patience for bullshit, and if they want to go down this path, large networks are going to seek alternatives.
Expect MS and Google to continue pushing back against the likes of ad-block with feature changes, and expect those feature changes are going to enable the next crypto-locker to hit, except this time it's going to do a lot more damage. Eventually these companies' monopoly positions will be challenged.
The Advertisements may be disabled in the preferences. They're trying to diversify their revenue which currently is mostly Google. Over the last few releases they've been highlighting the various privacy features and ideology Firefox has in a bid to differentiate themselves against Chrome, so it' a little Ironic to see this Ad compromise.
The Ads only occupy unused thumbnail tiles i believe..so it's not obtrusive. As long as us techies can turn it off, I'm happy. Everyone else will hardly notice, and it'll pay the Mozilla devs.
And it's not this either, given that they're basically sponsored slots that pretty much only new installs see.
It'll only be a Chrome clone when they remove the ability to customize the UI via add-ons.
That sounds like the worst reason to slam the brakes on UI improvements. On the other hand, maintaining the flexibility of the add-on system is golden and lets people like me keep the UI pretty much identical to how it was in the 3.x days, rather than whining like a 4year old.