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Mozilla Ends the Advertisements In Firefox's New Tab Tiles (mozilla.org)
An anonymous reader writes: For some time, Mozilla has been experimenting with advertisements in the "suggested tiles" on new Firefox tabs. They received a lot of criticism from the community for it, and now (using linguistic gymnastics), Mozilla has decided to end that experiment. They say, "We experimented with all content – including advertising. We proved that advertising can be done well while respecting users. We have learned a ton along the way. Our learnings show that users want content that is relevant, exciting and engaging. We want to deliver that type of content experience to our users, and we know that it will take focus and effort to do that right. We have therefore made the decision to stop advertising in Firefox through the Tiles experiment in order to focus on content discovery. We want to thank all the partners who have worked with us on Tiles. Naturally, we will fulfill our current commitments as we wind down this experiment over the next few months."
Our learnings show that users want content that is relevant, exciting and engaging.
Do people who speak like this not realise how fucking ridiculous they sound?
"We have therefore made the decision to stop advertising in Firefox through the Tiles experiment in order to focus on content discovery."
I feel the need to pick this sentence apart and read between the lines. What fresh horrors do they have in store?
"Our learnings show that users want content that is relevant, exciting and engaging. We want to deliver that type of content experience to our users, and we know that it will take focus and effort to do that right."
People do want this. But not from you. Provide a good web browser and then get out of the way. It's this same logic that prevents users from setting a homepage on Android. That's right, Mozilla doesn't want you to change the most basic web browser setting on Firefox for Android. No, I don't want to put a link to my home page on your home page. Stop trying to provide "an experience"!
The latest browser usage stats are showing Firefox at only about 8% of the market. That's just the desktop market only, too. They have almost no mobile presence at all (Firefox for Android is at 0.04%).
Is Mozilla finally realizing that people are fucking fed up with all of the utter stupidity that has infected Firefox for the last several years?
Are they finally waking up to the fact that their whole organization will soon be irrelevant once the remaining Firefox users move to Chrome or the other browsers?
Fuck, I sure hope so! I hope that their next blog post talks about how Australis is being thrown away in favor of the Firefox 3.6 UI, which was actually usable.
And I hope the blog post after that is about them finally getting around to fixing the goddamn performance issues that make Firefox so much slower than Chrome.
I really do hope that Mozilla has realized that treating their users like total shit hasn't helped them.
Maybe they are learning that when you treat your users like shit, and force one unwanted change after another on them, that they'll move to the better products that competitors are offering!
I really hope that's the case.
I hope that Mozilla is getting a grip on the reality that they're facing.
Do what Firefox's users want. Don't force idiotic changes on them. Don't force ads, of all things, on them.
'our users' relevant, exciting and engaging, experience.
Marketing has taken over the asylum, nothing but fluff words and miss understanding the relationship, users of firefox are users of firefox, not your users. Not part of the flock you sell at market.
But should pick at holes given their commitment to mimic chrome until there is not reason to pick firefox over chrome. How can an organisation with one main product not understand that the only reason the vast majority of the users of that product only stay is because of the third party plugins inspite of moves to mimic chrome. Then deprecate the third party plugins ?
what Ads Disabled means?
or does it mean I need an ad blocker here too?
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But they need to raise funds to exist. Projects without funds are dead projects.
Projects with too much money tend to get worse because they attract the type of leadership that sees money as its top priority. The type of leadership that has NO IDEA WHY the project is popular in the first place. Mozilla and Dice come to mind.
Mozilla didn't do it right. There's no correct way to do ads. Ads are harmful.
Except they have a valid point. If the changes that these people made had been rated as good by the general public, there would have been an increase in their marketshare. In this case the opposite has held true, and it reflects directly back on those that mozilla has hired meaning that the millinials/hipsters are the cause of mozilla's massive loss in marketshare in the last 8 years. This entire thing could be summed up as a learning experience: Don't change what isn't broken, and don't shove garbage down the users throats.
Om, nomnomnom...
It got hidden from the UI for a very good reason: if you have a feature that you want to remove, you hide it from the UI and then use the drop-off in usage stats from telemetry collected from "average" users to claim it was never wanted in the first place.
Then you present those skewed metrics to the clueless bosses in order to implement the user-hostile, advertising-friendly, and design-fashionable thing you wanted to implement in the first place.
You don't need tabs-on-top. You don't need a checkbox to enable tabs-on-top. You don't need an about:config preference to re-enable tabs-on top.
You don't need a status bar. You don't need a hidden about:config to enable the status bar.
You don't need to disable Javascript. You don't need an about:config to selectively disable javascript.
You don't need to see the http:/// part of the URL bar. You don't need to see the fully-qualified domain name or the complete URL. You just need to know you're connected to AOL. (Thankfully this one got shot down before it made it to production in Chrome, let alone Firefox.)
Firefox started out as a powerful browser under control of the user. With every feature deletion, they lose market share.
This has been the pattern from UXtards in every product over the past 5 years. CEIP (telemetry) was opt-in in Win7. Was opt-out in Win8. Can be forcibly disabled in Win7. The telemetry of error reporting cannot be opted out of in Win10 beneath Enterprise.
The clued users disable the shit on sight, leaving only the clueless. And metrics-driven UXtards never realize they end up producing products that can only be used by morons, because the only metrics they get are from morons. They could get the opinions of thought leaders by simply asking them, but no, that's not "Big Data" or otherwise buzzword-compliant. So this is the shit we get.