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Ads Based On Browsing History Are Coming To All Firefox Users
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla has announced plans to launch a feature called "Suggested Tiles," which will provide sponsored recommendations to visit certain websites when other websites show up in the user's new tab page. The tiles will begin to show up for beta channel users next week, and the company is asking for feedback. For testing purposes, users will only see Suggested Tiles "promoting Firefox for Android, Firefox Marketplace, and other Mozilla causes." It's not yet known what websites will show up on the tiles when the feature launches later this summer. The company says, "With Suggested Tiles, we want to show the world that it is possible to do relevant advertising and content recommendations while still respecting users’ privacy and giving them control over their data."
How about no? How about some of us don't want advertising? How about you better give a mechanism to disable this crap?
What part of "not interested in your damned ads" is hard to understand?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
How is taking our browser history to serve ads respecting our privacy?
A search suggests they made $311 million in 2012, how much money is actually required to run Mozilla?
That's not an answer. Why the fuck would anyone bend over backwards to make Firefox usable when they can just download a different browser?
I'm with OP. Mozilla apparently has a death wish and doesn't give a shit about how they treat their users, so fuck 'em.
I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but in this case I have to ask, is there a clandestine effort underway to utterly destroy Firefox, and maybe even Mozilla, from the inside?
It's like every decision made over the past several years has been designed to alienate Firefox's remaining users, without bringing in any new users.
I'm talking of the unwanted UI changes. Then there were the release frequency changes that broke extensions every release for a long time. Then there were more unwanted UI changes, cumulating in the despised Australis UI. Then there was the switch to Yahoo for searches. There were the grid advertisements. Then there was the mandatory HTTPS proposal. Now there's this nonsense. All of this is being done when there are still many bugs to fix, some of them existing for years.
It's just one bad thing after another, even when Firefox users loudly object, and even with Firefox's ever-dropping share of the market.
I'd like to just blame it on ineptitude or incompetence, but these decisions are unbelievable, even in those cases. I just can't get over how obviously terrible so many of these decisions have been.
...Just look at some of the self-entitled and abusive comments here on Slashdot....
Those comments started out as constructive criticism. However, Mozilla pressed on with their determination to ignore and alienate users.
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Now Mozilla is getting the criticism they have earned.
Mozilla/Firefox has a problem. A big one. The first step in solving a problem is to identify its cause and not, as you attempt, to blame others for Mozilla's self-inflicted problems.