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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?
Part of me wonders what prompted this change.
"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"!
What's the purpose when so many people run ad blockers?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
Australis
What in particular is so terrible about the Australis UI? I think you're getting worked up over nothing. If you want Firefox to look different then use Classic Theme Restorer or something like it.
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.)
'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 ?
netscape and it kind of irritates me that their default "start page" asks for donations when they start doing bullshit like the ads tiles and pocket.
Yea, I turned it off, but I also know from experience a shit load of people don't know how and/or don't care enough to learn.
what Ads Disabled means?
or does it mean I need an ad blocker here too?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
But they need to raise funds to exist. Projects without funds are dead projects.
Besides, you turned the feature off. So you are complaining about a default setting that you can change yourself, and you did.
I mean really, who could have predicted that users wouldn't want to see more ads?
It's, like, so unbelievable!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
1. Moving things around without asking me
2. Stupid fucking hamburger menu button which I want nothing to do with and which periodically comes back all by itself, forcing me to continually re-customize and remove it. Which is helpful, because my constantly removing it is obviously accidental. I must want the hamburger menu, I just don't know it yet. While we're explaining what's so terrible about things, I'd love to hear what's so terrible about a hierarchical menu system.
3. Curvy chrome-alike tabs which uselessly take up more space, not good when you have many tabs open.
4. Removal of the status bar, meaning that the icons for the fuckton of addons I have installed all got migrated to the main (only) toolbar, making it a huge mess
5. Most importantly, no option to revert all this insanity. Going from something customizable to something which isn't. It's a step backwards.
If you want Firefox to look different then use Classic Theme Restorer
That's an excellent suggestion, and exactly what I did. It's also really helpful because I didn't think I had enough addons installed, and firefox wasn't using enough memory or CPU time.
Just installed Palemoon and Fossamail on my Windows laptop. Even though LinkedIn describes Firefox as the browser it works best w/, it fails to recognize Pale Moon. I installed Fossamail to check it out, and also b'cos Windows Mail has just stopped syncing any of my mail. Even the Microsoft store had told me that it wasn't ideal, and that I was better off using Outlook. Well, Outlook is overkill for what I need, so I installed Fossamail
The word that makes a customer cringe for he knows that it means the maker of the product is trying to either upsell or otherwise fuck with him.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What a waste of time! I went through the effort to remove them, and now Mozilla goes and takes them off anyway? Humpf!
Unless that blog poster is a human ad....
OMG!!!!
Collectively they're called Millennials or Hipsters. They've been the worst thing to happen to computer software ever. Their "design" ideas have ruined a large number of well-established software products, including Firefox 4 and later, GNOME 3, and Windows 8. They've also ruined many web sites (just look at the Slashdot Beta disaster), as you've pointed out. And they're also responsible for systemd, which has rendered Linux unusable on the server, and broken on the desktop. Everything these people are involved with turns to total shit.
I'm glad that they learned their lesson. Maybe if Pale Moon starts to be bad ever, I'll consider switching back.
"Our learnings show that users want content that is relevant, exciting and engaging."
I think that means that users want great fun advertisements. I think it's true. My favorites are the ones about pills for diseases I've never heard of before suggesting I ask my doctor for more information. I never have anything fun to talk to my doctor about, and these are great conversation starters.
$324M budget and this AC gets the user sentiment better than all the focus groups ever have.
MoFo will be a joke if they only wind up being a Firefox company - the grand vision roundly failed if several billion dollars couldn't even get a threaded/processed UI implemented for basically two desktop apps, e.g.. Remember when Firebird was the protest app against the extant leadership?
The Board could at least throw 10% of the budget at the evil-Kirk devs who would still be willing to go off and hoist the Jolly Roger and reestablish some competition inside Mozilla. While there are still options beyond liquidating the office furniture.
This is me not holding my breath for the yes-men
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I can't think of a single UI change Firefox has made in years that I liked. Some I've hated; some I'm indiferent to.
I don't like that FF still has performance issues compared to Chrome. Doesn't crash like it used to, though.
But the occasional ad on the new tab page didn't really bother me.
IMHO it's actually an example of the right way to do advertising. It was non-intrusive, it was differentiated enough from other content that you could tell it was an ad without being distracting. It usually contained something at least vaugely relevant and not boner pills and hot milfs. And it helped pay for something useful without costing me cash. If the internet obeyed simliar principles I wouldn't need an ad blocker.
Apparently I'm the minority.
Of course, I really only use it nowdays for firebug and a couple of other things when I'm doing dev or troubleshooting or whatever.
That might be the bigger problem for Mozilla: make me care enough about your browser to hate it sometimes.
"Our learnings show that users want content that is relevant, exciting and engaging." I think that means that users want great fun advertisements. I think it's true. My favorites are the ones about pills for diseases I've never heard of before suggesting I ask my doctor for more information. I never have anything fun to talk to my doctor about, and these are great conversation starters.
Ask your Doctor if Scratchicrotchi 80 grit catheters are for you!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
"Users want content that is relevant, exciting and engaging."
"We need to facilitate integrated synergies"
"The new Browser will engage visionary models"
"This will allow us to enable leading-edge content"
All these three word corporate bullshitisms courtesy of the Corporate bullshit generator http://www.novasio.com/bs_gene...
If there was ever a bad sign, it is when an outfit starts using the three word bullshit. And I defy anyone to tell the difference between the BS generator and what they wrote, other than we know they wrote it already.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Anyone still using Firefox, class, anyone?
Been using Opera Developer on Mint/Cinnamon for a few weeks and it's definitely ok. Only one crash (surprisingly, expected more) and very fast (unsurprisingly given the engine underneath). As a matter of fact, I was somewhat stunned that after getting to the bottom of this thread there wasn't any mention of it.
Random thoughts:
- One process per tab (ps aux |grep opera...whoa!)
- Lazy tab loading (enabled in settings)
- No multirow tabs afaict, didn't see an extension like Tab Mix on FF
- uBlock works great (extension)
- New tab gives a customizable dial page. It shows only the site name in different fonts unless it finds a logo, not a thumbnail preview. Still undecided.
- Dial page allows grouping of sites into one tile, gets close to the group your tabs concept in FF.
- No significant rendering problems with various sites like in the old days of Opera.
- Bookmarks sidebar is ok but not as polished as Firefox yet. Don't have a list of "gripes", just feel like it needs some more polish and TLC.
- Extensions are pretty cool embedded in the sidebar.
- Interface is definitely "slim" like Australis so it's not like going back to the pre-hipster interface days (e.g. Palemoon freezing FF). Probably fair to say it's not the holy grail of interface usability+speed, just a very decent alternative.
Lastly (and most importantly to me personally), what I really liked about FF was the group your tabs feature but then the announcement that it was going to be removed came up. That's why I gave Opera to see what features it had, it would be very cool to see that revived in Opera.
FWIW.
Now I understand what all the proxy block spam when I opened firefox at work....
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
Firefox is my primary browser both on my Win7 laptop, Mac, and B&N Nook HD+ tablet running CM12. I also use on a Linux box. Many changes have been made to Firefox in recent years that cost it points, and many of these are UI-centric. The UI is a lot like that for Chrome now, at least for the Android apps. I don't use Chrome, because its worse for what bothers me. Another reason is Google's primary business of Big Data. Although the UI for IE throughh v11 is the least offensive for me, it is my secondary browser. I tend to only fall back to it when Flash is needed or something seems to not be working in Firefox. I keep Firefox configured in such a way that it doesn't some commonly implemented crap design features.
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Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
> Right now I have 27
I don't like the tab UI design mostly, because the tab bar is vertical-space-wasting. I probably never have more than 10-12 browser windows open at one time in that rare instance when there are a lot. What about your workflow or usage warrants 27 tabs?
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Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
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.
Remember when Google was a search company? Yeah....
Yes. The worst parts of Firefox is when it copies Chrome; evolving to the same look, using the same ridiculously fast upgrade cycle, etc. Any browser I use must have noscript and adblock plugins, and that eliminates a lot of browsers. So I have firefox on the phone (where it's not very good, but the default google browser is braindead), Windows, Mac, and Linux.
I can remember when Firefox was actually innovative, stable, and a refreshing choice in a browser. Maybe that was only because IE 5 and 6 was so bad?
That's the reason. Now when Chrome and Edge have upped their game, Firefox starts to look quite crusty.
you are both complaining about tabs that take too much space and the lack of a status bar that does uselessly take space ... most of it was just gray area without information anyway.
If you saw the status bar as a waste of space, then you were using it incorrectly. Not only does it show you where links will take you before you click on them, but any good extension offers the option to move its interface there and clean up the top of your browser. Damn if the first thing I did when the status bar was removed was look for a way to put it back. I couldn't believe that removing the most informative and useful part of a user friendly browser would have crossed anyones mind. The browsers job is to present information, not hide. it.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Yes actually. I currently use FF, IE, and Chrome. FF for my primary browser, IE for my 2nd monitor media browser (YouTube/Twitch/etc), and Chrome as my backup browser that has no extensions installed in case I need to look at something and it is not working in my NoScript/AdBlock browsers.
Now am I a fan of what FF has done for some time now, not at all. In fact my FF is modded via extensions and the config files to resemble something usable to me. If for whatever reason I lost all of that I likely would just ditch it and look elsewhere for a main browser rather than go though all the hassle of re-configuring it all back to a usable state. (I honestly don't even remember all the changes I've had to make over the years.)
I also still, and I could be wrong about this, think that FF's extension pool is the most robust. However as I said I could be fully wrong about that because my IE's AdBlock works just fine and I know I could do even more with it and or Chrome. So if FF's extension's waver at any point I'll likely join one of the many who will switch away for good.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
not refreshing pages is the killer feature of the tons-of-tabs workflow:
It seems every browser decided to re-load all the page resources when you hit the back button (or.. trigger javascript events that end up requiring this?). This takes a bunch of time and also loses your position on the page. If you just want to peek at a link or two (say.. when reading slashdot...), it's much easier to open those links in tabs, read them in the order they finish loading, and then go back to the original page that hopefully hasn't helpfully auto-refreshed and lost your place.
All you need is for a couple of those tabs to also have links you want to peek at and you can expand to a couple dozen tabs pretty quickly.
Unnecessary, time-consuming page loads have trained users to manually cache pages by leaving them open in tabs.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Using it to reply to your comment, albeit heavily tweaked to look and act like the old versions.
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Is there any way to reënable the HTTP:// beginning of URLs?
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