Mozilla Says Ad on Firefox's New Tab Page Was Just Another Experiment (venturebeat.com)

Some Firefox users yesterday started seeing an ad in the desktop version of the browser. It offers users a $20 Amazon gift card in return for booking your next hotel stay via Booking.com. VentureBeat reached out to Mozilla, which confirmed the ad was a Firefox experiment and that no user data was being shared with its partners. From a report: The ad appears at the bottom of Firefox's new tab page on the desktop version with a "Find a Hotel" button that takes the user to a Booking.com page. The text reads: "Ready to schedule that next family reunion? Here's a thank you from Firefox. Book your next hotel stay on Booking.com today and get a free $20 Amazon gift card. Happy Holidays from Firefox! (Restrictions apply)." A second version reads: "For the holidays, we got you a little something just for using Firefox! Book your next hotel stay on Booking.com today and get a free $20 Amazon gift card. Happy Holidays from Firefox! (Restrictions apply.)"

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Excuses aside, was a shitty expirement

[UnknownSoldier]

Stop with the fucking ads already.

Try treating people with respect instead as mindless consumers where you obviously don't respect their time or space.

--
Atheist, noun; a spiritual blind man arguing color doesn't exist.
Theist, noun; a monochromatic man arguing other colors don't exist

Re:Excuses aside, was a shitty expirement

[slacka]

So you give yearly donations to Mozilla right? Is that why you are on your high horse?

Your browser is one of the most complex pieces of software on your computer. It took thousands of man-hour years to develop. It takes a team of hundreds of developers to maintain.

They need a constant source of revenue. Could they have handled this better? Of course, but considering all the good they have done to protect our privacy, I'm willing to cut them some slack here.

Re:Excuses aside, was a shitty expirement

[drinkypoo]

Your browser is one of the most complex pieces of software on your computer.

Scope creep. It didn't have to be complex.

I take a middle view, which I typically believe to be more correct than your extremes. The browser had to become complex. However, Firefox has become needlessly so, while at the same time losing functionality which mattered to users (particularly in the extension department.) Besides the much-maligned (by me) Pocket nonsense, there's lots of other stuff in Firefox which should really be in an extension. The new home screen and the developer tools both leap immediately to mind. The whole point of Firefox was to have a light, fast browser. Now it's going back towards being a suite. The lessons of history, reinvent UNIX poorly, etc etc.

Stick a fork in it [Re:No surprises here]

[Tablizer]

How come nobody is forking it? (Arguably other than Pale Moon.) Maybe there's not enough interest?

Having an alternative to Chrome that's slightly corporate may be better than giving in to a big near-monopoly. If FF stick ads in non-annoying places*, perhaps we can just learn to live with them so that we at least have choice.

* No jokes intended

Re:The more ads that are pushed

[Luckyo]

The problem here is "how?"

Essentially all of the most used sites on the internet have massive interest in serving ads and tracking. Should any browser that actually breaks those two things appear and gain significant market share, its functionality WILL be slowly but increasingly broken on those sites to get people to switch from it to browsers that conform to advertisers' and information brokers' needs.

Even Mozilla, the purported champion of free web is financed almost wholly by various search engines world wide, and depending on installation location, will set different search engines. That means it's in Mozilla's direct interest to not help users with blocking things like tracking and ad serving by these search engines to make such partnerships as lucrative as possible.

So what is the business model that would work that can work both against the interests mentioned in the second paragraph and the third one?

Re:Hee hee

[Desler]

It's not? Last time I checked, the vast majority of their revenue is from the world's largest advertising company.

Re:Hee hee

[Clit Boner]

Yeaaaaah, buddy. It's just an experiment. You got it right. It's like your 15-year-old daughter experimenting with heroin. Just an experiment; all is fine and dandy!

Re:No surprises here

[Tough Love]

Firefox lost its way long ago.

Really? Then why do I have such a strong preference for it vs Chrome, and why is Firefox my primary browser?

Running a bunch of good and essential Firefox extensions. They told us the sky would fall when the old leaky extension APIs were removed, and it did not.

They're trying to survive

[rsilvergun]

browsers are ridiculously complex now and need a lot of staff to keep up with all the requirements people have for them. They used to get a ton of money from google but these days they just get a bit from Yahoo. It's not as though they've got office monopoly money to fall back on or search money of their own.

Re:They're trying to survive

[lordlod]

The Mozilla Corporation received $542M in 2017.

Which has been enough to throw $30M at Pocket, fund rust, multiple poorly thought through attempts at entering the mobile/IOT/operating system space, attempt a single login system, but not enough to fund Thunderbird development.

The CEO received $2.3M in 2017, the treasurer $1.3M with various other directors earning about $200k.

Mozilla has more than enough money to maintain a web browser. I actually feel if they had significantly less they would focus more on the core browser and have less time to come up with great ideas to further annoy their user base.

Re:They're trying to survive

[AmiMoJo]

The standard MBA tactic when your core product (Firefox) is losing market share rapidly is to diversify into other areas and hope they make up for it. Fixing the product is too hard, easier to write it off as a changing market and shifting user preferences. Additionally they can sell off the unprofitable diversified bits to some chump a few years later, and pocket a nice bonus.

Re:Mozilla doesnâ(TM)t get it

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what happens when your browser company is run by people who aren't interested in hiring or retaining the most talented browser developers. When you focus on hiring people based on their genitals, skin color, sexual preferences, or ideology, it's guaranteed that your product quality will decline. That goes for people who will only hire white men, and for people who insist on not hiring white men. Anything other than selecting for the best candidate will have negative consequences.

Stop spreading FUD here, Mozilla employees!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, but considering all the good they have done to protect our privacy, I'm willing to cut them some slack here.

You've got to be kidding me - Nice try spreading FUD like someone who works for Mozilla. Let's start with these, just to name a few:

- Pocket
- Safebrowsing (calling home to Google for every URL accessed)
- Telemetry built in
- Removing the ability to disable javascript without a 3rd party addon

Re:No surprises here

[Anonymous Coward]

Sky did fall; adblock is about 100 billion times harder to use as it can not open list of urls to make rules for ans Firefox UI sucks ass as Classic theme restorer is not able to fix it. Previously one could still fix by plugins the idiotic changes Mozilla did, but not anymore.
Perhaps the main reason for the changes was that telemetry showed that people refused to use what their idiot management wanted and designers did. My way or highway strategy has worked and most people have moved away from Firefox.