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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."
The "new tab" page got hidden from the UI for no reason.
It was relegated to "browser.newtab.url" in about:config for a long fucking time, and I used it to specify the new tab page should be "about:blank" the instant they added the "new tab" page that showed your top visited sites, etc. because I knew the ads were coming.
It worked until they started putting ads on the new tab page. The browser.newtab.url setting was ignored.
People bitched and moaned. Mozilla and their dogs on the bug tracker made up some bullshit about how it was a security issue. They claimed malware was hijacking the new tab page via that setting. They did not provide any example of this actually happening.
They SHOULD have just re-exposed the option in the main settings page - use a url, use blank or use the tiles page.
But their "solution" was to ignore the setting and force everyone onto the shitty tiles page.
Choosing "show a blank page" on the tiles page options menu (yes, it has it's own options menu with a gear icon separate from the browser's main options menu) doesn't show you a blank page. It's loads the tiles new tab page with content hidden and the options gear visible. This "blank page" option was inconsistent with the "blank page" option for the home page (which gave you about:blank - a true blank page).
People bitched because they wanted to load a specific page for their new tabs, or wanted a blank page. Mozilla and their goons on the bug tracker started closing bug reports left and right without ever considering user feedback. As I predicted, it was all about the ads. Mozilla said that if users wanted this functionality they should install an addon. So I did. https://www.soeren-hentzschel....
Everyone laughed at how Mozilla said the change was done for user security and then pointed people to an unverified third party addon to restore functionality that used to be on the browser's main settings page.
And here I am laughing again. I'll continue to laugh as long as Mozilla continues to fail.
If you would like to laugh along, check out:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...
And all the dozens of other reports they've marked as dupes and closed. Make sure you expand and read all of the censored comments. (There were many more they outright removed.)
Pale Moon has their own problems. They're having a hate boner over VP9 and refuse to support it. Insisting it's Google's problem to make a plugin for it. Their suggested resolution is to use Flash instead of HTMl5 video. I just ditched PM back to Firefox today. I had jumped to PM with the mention of Mozilla going full retard with the UI in the coming months. I can kick the can down the lane and deal with those problems later.
Third (fourth?) AC chiming in.
It wasn't that there was a huge gap between 3.6 and 4.0. It was that 3.6 marked the demarcation between a browser with a status bar - which was something every browser had had since the days of Mosaic, and 4.0 was the one without the status bar, because the UX team, ignoring overwhelming negative feedback, had already made up its mind that the users didn't need one anymore, and if they didn't like it, they could always install a third-party extension.
The problem with "install a third-party extension" is that it effectively tells the community: we're not building a browser for you, we're making our own UX decisions and it's up to the community to spend its own efforts undoing our work if you want to keep the browser the way you wanted it.
To this day, two the most popular extensions have been Status4Evar, and post-Australis, ClassicThemeRestorer.
A UI team builds a user interface based on feedback from users. A UX team ignores the data and implements its preconceived notions of design aesthetic against them, creating negative value that the community must then work to undo.
The real irony about the rationale for the status bar was that it took up too much vertical space. 16 pixels. And the same group of webdevs - not the same individuals, but their contemperaneous collegues - in the same name of "advancing" the web for small screens and mobile, subsequently went on to design mastheads like time.com, nytimes.com, forbes.com, and pretty much any local TV news station with giant 60+ and 150+-pixel position:fixed things that remain visible at all times.
You can't have a 16-pixel status bar. Not even an about:config option to re-enable it. You can't have an option to put tabs on top/bottom. But giant CSS position:fixed mastheads that remain visible and limit the actual content to a tiny sliver of the screen, why, that's just fine.
Fuck this industry. I'm so glad I left.