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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"!
If you say APK in the bathroom mirror 3 times he appears and edits your hosts file. I bet you're too chicken to try it though.
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.
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?
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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.
Can adblock+ do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:
1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (past ads)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop C&C communique
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop C&C communique
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop C&C communique
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phish
10.) Protect vs. caps
11.) Get you past a dns blocking
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up surfing by adblocks & hardcoded fav. sites
14.) Work on anything webbound (ie email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily controlled data
16.) Do all that & block ads better than addons more efficiently in cpu cycles + memory usage
* ANSWER ="NO" to each above on ab+ doing it as well or @ ALL + hosts = already on every device natively.
APK
P.S.=> Ab+ does less than hosts & less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried).
Mozilla didn't do it right. There's no correct way to do ads. Ads are harmful.
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.
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.
Why bother existing if your purpose was to be the open source users-first browser but you've ended up as the only browser that forces ads onto users and your commercial competitors feel less commercial?
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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.