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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.
I sincerely hope this is optional.
Not all of us are willing to accept ads. Especially not from the open source browser which is supposed to help be more private.
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."
Please share here ways to get away from ad loving, privacy sucking browsers.
I'm still on Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090624 Firefox/3.5 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729) with adblock/scriptblock/grease monkey :)
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
I assume Fedora will be dropping FIrefox and replacing it with IceWeasel as Debian did long ago. Pretty sure adverts won't fit into Fedora's philosophy very well.
Netscape was dead in 2004. IE was closing in on 90% market share by the end of 2000.
I remember finally making the switch to IE from the Netscape 4.76 series that summer after my friend asked why I didn't use IE and showed me it was better. To be fair, IE had surpassed Netscape at that point. I believe that was IE 5 or 5.5. Prior to that Netscape was better hands down but it stagnated after Netscape 4.
(I don't need a button to help me forget things!)
Good for the chumps who believe the marketing fodder.
But as the saying goes... if you're not paying, you're the product, not the customer.
They added two new features:
1. A "Forget" button for your privacy, and
2. Ads, that remember everything forever.
Sounds like a case of giving with one hand, and taking with the other!
I did it when they force-fed us Australis and have never looked back. I'll never go back to "Fireplop" now. Liberation is available at www.palemoon.org
Fuck advertising
Is this an April Fools joke?
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
I guess Mozilla just signed thier own death warrent. sudo apt-get delete iceweasel. Fuck them.
Get your free Dropbox account with 2 GB Free storage!
...and stay with Pale Moon.
At the very least I'm disabling automatic updates on Firefox.
Please look into Pale Moon.
Built from Firefox sources, it is the closest thing to the lightweight and flexible browser that Firefox promised to be that I'm aware of.
Linux, Windows, Mac, Android, etc.
Kid-proof tablet..
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.
> What is Firefox thinking?
I suspect they are thinking that it sure was nice to have Google paying them millions of dollars for so long, but with Chrome already having twice as many users, Google won't need to keep doing that. They've built an organization that has expenses in the hundreds of millions. Close to 90% of that is for using Google as the default search. Right now, Google has the power to make the Mozilla foundation vanish. That means, of course, that Google can exercise power over them just by a vague threat, or even simply expressing displeasure with a Mozilla decision.
Each November the foundation releases their financial statement. When preparing this financial statement and the last one, they must have seen that the reliance on Google is a problem. They made some small deals with other companies, like including Bing as an _option_ users can set as their default search, but the other deals don't come close to covering their expenses. So to stop being completely reliant on Google, they need some other revenue stream. Somebody sketched a proposal for how they could run ads in a fairly unobtrusive way, in a way that doesn't seem sneaky or underhanded, and that revenue could cover their expenses.
I don't want ads in my browser. I think clumsily adding ads to Firefox could backfire in a huge way. I also think it would be stupid for the Firefox devs to NOT be looking at clever ways to include fairly acceptable ads, new ideas on how they could generate ad revenue if needed without pissing everyone off.
It CAN be done, and even without being all too clever. Slashdot users are generally less tolerant of ads than the general population, yet there are ads here. We deal with it in one way or another and those ads make money. If Firefox can find some elegant ways to place ads and avoid being dependent on Google, they would be smart to at least have that _plan_ ready in case Google stops paying.
Again, I don't WANT ads in Firefox. I also don't WANT to die, but I do buy life insurance so my family has some protection if that happens.
I think ie4 was already getting better.
Netscape was getting buggier with versions, and it was a disaster on the barely existant web standards. I used opera on Linux, and ie4 on Windows. Though opera had a lot of sites that refused to accept it.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Sounds like a case of giving with one hand, and taking with the other!
Advertizing a free handjob, while it is actually a part of a reach-around.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I use Pale Moon on Win7 but there's no Mac version AFAIK. On OSX I use Seamonkey, which is also superior to FF but breaks more extensions:
http://www.seamonkey-project.o...
Slashdot is at it again. You people refuse to understand that nothing is free in this world. No one makes anything out of the goodness of their heart. Would ypu work for free?
Without Pale Moon i would be forced to use Chromium. And Firefox gets more user-unfriendly by the minute.
Seems Mozilla has sold out. Which makes their choice of DuckDuckGo as default search engine interesting: have they sold out too?
The thing with DDG is, I'd be happy to believe their no-tracking pitch, but I can't quite understand how they're gonna make money out of a free search engine without it...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
So you don't understand how DDG can make money without ads, but you don't understand why the Mozilla foundation must add ads to survive. Wow. Simply. Wow.
Firefox: Add SQLite Manager addon - take a look at the data that's being stored that shouldn't be. Experiments that are downloaded to gather data without your consent/knowledge. Data submissions if you go to the health report page, regardless of your settings not to participate. All sorts of crazy stuff.
The doubleclick thing is easily remedied in Firefox just install the opt out extension
I think I figured out what experiment they're running. They're seeing how low their market share can go by pissing off their users. Chrome tried it and shaved off at least 30%.
Re: Akamai
Yeah, that's a tough one. About the only thing I can think of would be to just disable them entirely, as you said, breaking 'much' of the 'Net, just so you can be an informed data consumer.
But I'm the kind of person who disabled Flash entirely and uses Hosts & NoScript to break the 'Net already, so that would be a small step for me.
Good luck to all of us.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
I've seen you post this info a few times before it seems...
Got me thinking about the hosts option.
So I use the one listed here
and still use ad-block plus, script block, etc;
I'm curious why you post your info as AC...?
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Firefox needs a "Forget Firefox 29" button - they need to roll back to their previous version, quit ruining their browser, and cool off on these unnecessary new features until they get the browser right.
Firefox existed before it was a huge business and it will still exist if the huge business aspect falls apart.
Specifically, the Mozilla foundation had revenue of $5.8 million in 2004, when Firefox was launched as a branch of Seamonkey, the Mozilla browser. They still had some support from Netscape, who had developed the browser while they were worth as much as $17 BILLION. Really, Firefox was created by Netscape, a mutli-billion dollar company.
Mozilla M18 was when I switched from Opera, with one of the earlier ones getting usable, Netscape 4.x was horrible by the end though, completely unusable and slow.
On older systems I used Dillo, which was way more pleasant for static HTML, which used to exist.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
What you say would be true for 99.999% of web sites. Since Firefox has a couple hundred million users or whatever they can make advertising deals directly with advertisers including Microsoft, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Netflix, etc. For a multi-million transaction, there's no need to give a cut to a middle-man.
Can your solution block these annoying posts about itself? If yes, then i'm in.
I'm not really here, it's just more probable that i'm here, than anywhere else.
I was tempted to check out your program until I read your last paragraph. Way to screw yourself, dude.
WTF ever. If your product is anywhere near as good as your marketing approach of browbeating and insulting people for not using it, I figure I'm not missing anything.
Will this feature axe my google search/NSA history too? Didn't think so.
Everyone KNOWS you "Open SORES" bullshitters just steal others' code like mad anyhow
Yea, fuck open source. Stop using Slashdot, Reddit, Java, Firefox, Chrome, Linux, Apache, ...
ps - what's WITH the random uppercase?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire