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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.)"
Because it is good and it is not controlled by a major tracking firm.
Firefox lost its way long ago.
Its reputation as the Anti-IE keeps its market share at 10%, otherwise it'd be less than 2%.
It is telling though, that their "experiment" went the way of advertising disguised as gift-giving.
What will they think of next....
-- Karma whore? You betcha. --
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
My Home and New Tab pages are set to be a Blank Page. In addition, all the Firefox Home Content check boxes are unchecked - as is the "Recommend extensions as you browse" item. Furthermore, these things are specified as disabled in my "user.js" file -- along with a *bunch* of other crap, like Pocket, etc...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
the more "users" "experiment" with quality script and ad blocking.
Keep pushing ads and users will embrace any brand that stops the ads.
People want a browser on their desktop, their cell phone.
Make the browser great again not. Not more ad delivery software.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
What's the point of this browser, when in real life its behavior is not much different or even worse than Chrome's?
...Mozilla over Chrome is the lack of advertisements. I would be open to any suggestions for a browser that isn't money hungry though.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Its the last line of protection against ads moving from the internet down into the OS.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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
Table-ized A.I.
Yeah I use a little thing called safari. Maybe you have heard of it. It just work right out of the box. No spyware. No malware. No unrenderable pages. No bloat. It is very nice. You should try it some time!
Awesome! Now where can I get an .rpm or .deb for it?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
It's not? Last time I checked, the vast majority of their revenue is from the world's largest advertising company.
"Ooops, we accidentally telemarketed you during your Sunday dinner 58 times." (Mostly true story.)
Table-ized A.I.
Because it is good and it is not controlled by a major tracking firm.
Except for the fact that Mozilla gets nearly all of its revenue (approx $300 Million a year) from Google.
Mozilla is not "independent". Mozilla is owned and controlled by Goog.
This seems like an oddly unique situation to ditch a whole browser and sign up for all of google's tracking over.
That's because they're less about the browser these days, and more about how they can use the Mozilla Firefox brand to spread all the feelgood diversity stuff they constantly bang on about.
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!
Unfortunately it seems that browser development is too resource intensive for a community-driven solution to be feasible.
You're kidding, right?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Ya, well the IT department got sick of their shenanigans and this little "experiment" just resulted in a group policy update which removed firefox across the entire Corp desktop space. Over 50k installs gone in an afternoon. Now I need a three page software justification form, signed off by my VP, if I want it back.
The problem is trusting liars. "Not an ad?" BS.
They are outright lying to everyone.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I always start with a blank tab, but that's because I changed it to do that.
download firefox's source code, edit out google, compile, use it.
You all laughed and rejected it when Opera was ad-based.
And, even then, that many years ago, Opera had a bucket more features and a ton more respect for the users.
Pity it got sidelined and turned into the shit-show it currently is (with the only "successor in interest" being nothing more than a Chrome clone with skins, that they have changed the icon for FOUR TIMES but not added most of the Opera features of old at all).
I've never seriously used Firefox or its derivatives.
And to which browser to you switch?
I bought a Samsung TV 6 weeks ago. This fucker serves me ads every time I change inputs to TV, and when I use the program guide. Really? I don't remember reading that you would serve me ads when I signed the paperwork required to bring this thing home.
The UI sucks ass. Looking at my firewall logs this fucker is like a needy 12 year old girl on the phone to her 30 y/o "boyfriend"
I suspect that by the end of the week I'll be taking my TV off the internet. The plusses I get with having the smart part being smart are way outweighed by the minuses I get having this PoS connected to my network.
tl;dr: don't buy a Samsung TV. It spies on you, shows ads all the time, and on top of that the UI is the worst PoS I've seen since the 90's, when companies rushed to slam GUIs on top of their command line tools.
Because they are using Chrome, which to any tech- or usability minded person is a laughable piece of garbage?
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.
None of us like ads, but there is not another financial system that works on the internet. Ads rule everything. There is so much money in ads, that companies can accidentally dump tens of millions of dollars into bot farms where no one sees the ads, and this is considered an accepted loss.
It is false that there is not another way to monetize the internet. It is true that no one has been able to come up with a compelling financial vehicle to run the internet.
No doubt people have had it with ads, but most people won't donate $5 to the cause either. Until people put their money where their mouth is, and the people that own businesses follow along, this is a moot point.
In a world where people could see a common problem, and come up with a common solution, this could be dealt with. Because in most places this is called government, enough people would rather spend their lives campaigning against it, even if it saved us from ourselves.
--
There is nothing permanent except change. - Heraclitus
Firefox is going to hell in a hen-basket. Perhaps it's time for a major exodus and fork.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
They have always been out of touch, going back to the Netscape days.
The AOL/Mozilla Foundation days was just more of that. If it hadn't been for the developer of Phoenix (who WAS NOT a Mozilla developer, and did without their support, until it became popular enough they offered him a job, coopted the project then backburnered him.)
While XUL worked out in the end, the original Phoenix was so fast and low memory usage because it was a gtk wrapper over the bare gecko engine with none of the XUL crap in the way. It could support a hundred plus tabs in 512M of ram on Win9x. I know. I used it like that.
The success of Firefox was directly a result of Phoenix and all the nerds grassroots promoting it, which allowed mozila with google's funding to advertise it in a big way to the plebs who were just becoming seriously interested in the web as myspace and company took off. The problem was the inherent mangement issues in the Mozilla Foundation, which had carried over from AOL and Netscape before it, never had time to get darwinned out, and now Mozilla is in a terminal death spiral not altogether unlike the US Government, where the leadership has been insulated from the reality of their customers(nee citizens) needs, and the TRUE ECONOMIC and SOCIAL position of what they are supposedly helming.
Many of you will scoff at me and say 'if only xxx is in charge, all will be better', but the truth is the rot is from top to bottom, and without pulling away the funding and mindshare (or even if you do) neither group is going to come back to reality before it is too late for their respective organization.
Watch and see. Short of a concerted community fork, either is going to survive the next 10-20 years.
Less cruft to update. The package does all those things, and it's still a smaller download than Firefox. And, it doesn't look like Chrome
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
This is one reason why they have sucked for the past year. They used to be for the users. Now they are for the advertiser.
Corporatism != Free Market
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
You can tell they're running out of option and well on their way out. This is what happens to a an initiative that becomes so large that its only purpose is altered to only sustain itself.
Brendan Eich was forced out as CEO of Mozilla for the horrible crime of expressing a political opinion shared by the overwhelming majority of the American populace and considered obviously-correct for all of history until the last five years.
Down with democracy! Down with the moral teachings of all major world religions! Down with happy healthy childhood! Long live financial oligarchy! Long live sodomy! Long live emotionally damaged children!
This is the Progressive future. Don't like it? Too bad - it's going to be forced on you literally at gunpoint. Why? Fuck you, plebians, that's why!
Check your about:studies if you downloaded a recent copy. Make sure it's not pre-populated with active studies if you previously opted out of studies. Whether or not it's relevant to the ad, Firefox 64 started having pre-populated studies even for those who opted out of studies in a previous version. (Firefox doesn't really update, one uninstalls, preferences and such are preserved in the registry or elsewhere in the system, then a new version is fresh installed that preserves all previous settings.) Chrome is even more suspect with all the chrome:// experimental flags set at Default, but Mozilla isn't necessarily innocent of being less than transparent and surprising users.
Posted at 2:11am CDT. on 1 January 2019, let's see if this post stays or is mod-deleted even though relevant.
I recently (re)installed FreeBSD. Tried to go with Palemoon. Heck, wanted to stay with Palemoon.
Palemoon is clearly promoting ads, and no *useful* adblocking extensions that do not promote "responsible ads"...
So, uninstalled it. It is sad Chromium is providing a much better user experience nowadays once you load it with the right plugins.
(Posting AC because of points given)
What is the model please? In which country did you buy it?
Thanks!
My 2017 LG is subtler: It only shows ads (one) when you go to the apps page to open one. Still that's one too many ads.
Precisely: use your software freedom with Firefox—make Firefox do what you want it to do yourself, or ask someone to edit out the stuff you don't like, or pay them to do this on your behalf, or get together with others and pool your development/funding efforts. You have options with free software which you don't have with almost every other major browser because they're all proprietary (Microsoft's, Apple's, Opera's, and most cell phone/tracker browsers). Google Chromium might also be free software. Every time Mozilla does something I think is foolish with Firefox (and this is hardly the first thing they've done with Firefox I don't agree with), Firefox's saving grace remains the same. Firefox has the same advantage to the user that any free software has: you have the freedom to make the software do what you want so the limits on your willingness to do this are up to you.
I'm not entirely convinced that "no user data was being shared with its partners" until someone looks into the code that implements this promotion—if this markup/style was downloaded ad-hoc, if anything in that code caused Firefox to download something ad-hoc, then the claim is untrue because that data you get had to come from somewhere and there's a privacy problem. But privacy issue or not, this is a mild annoyance.
Digital Citizen
Unlike with Vivaldi and other forks of Google Chromium, Mainline Firefox extensions are not always available on its forks and you will lose some of the more obscure functionality, needing to research for replacements.
The addons store itself sometimes leaves you without a download link and shows a silly "Get firefox" link that obscures the actual download package --this kind of misdirection is one reason I hate mainstream app store control-freaks with a passion. The situation is compounded on mobile, because you soon realize that even the standard Firefox build for Android has unexplained lack of extensions that you know by name on the desktop. Extension stores are unashamedly hiding results without any warning, but that has been a practice copied over from Android's app store silently hiding results without telling you it's your device that is getting filtered out.
I've found myself messing around with page source code, old version hunting (because you must now also deal with the 2017 Quantum split and find an elusive pre-quantum version to download from the "previous versions" link) or "hacking" the extension to lie about browser compatibility to try make the browser allow the extension anyway.
I hate the scant performance improvements of quantum and leave it as a thirtiary option or worse. Palemoon does house support for adblock, Greasemonkey, Firegestures, etc. but you will sometimes find disappointment in assuming that the fork will be treated as a first-class citizen by sites and extension markers.
With all due respect, buying a Smart TV is a dumb move. I realize it's hard to find a dumb TV any more, but it's worth some effort and expense. The "industrial" models for signage and such tend to be the best-made anyway, and they have none of that junk in there. Plus, they often have additional, interesting interfaces which can be used to control them. The best argument, though, is that Smart TVs are just more prone to failure. Even if you trust in your ability to prevent them from spying on you, or being compromised remotely and used as part of a botnet, most of them won't work at all if the "smart" bit fails.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
To a long time fox user this is a disrespect. WTF Mozilla Firefox?
... so what does Mozilla do? Simple - piss off the few remaining Firefox users it has left.
Exactly. If it really happened outside their lab, in their released version, that's no "experiment;" they really did it!
which makes the experiment line just a bunch of bullshit.
they rolled out ads for some people on new tab. it's bullshit.
it's already at the point where I'm quite near to going back to chrome for a while at least.
Just make the browser actually fucking lighter. that's what people want. don't mess with the window styling. don't mess with the api's. give options to disable web push, web workers and all of that shit easily.
like, right now I have facebook and slashdot open. it's using 1800 megabytes of ram. WHAT THE FUCK GUYS WHAT THE FUCK?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Tell me again why the browser matters?
Because you do not want a single entity which makes its living from tracking and selling you to be in control of all web browsing.
I've been using Pale Moon for quite some time now with noscript, but now they are suggesting people not use noscript because it causes problems with Pale Moon. I'm still using it anyway, of course. What's sad is that the Pale Moon site suggests using uMatrix with Pale Moon... which you can't do without patching it, or running a seriously old version.
What's keeping me on classic Firefox is Scrapbook Plus. I want captured pages in my sidebar. ScrapbookQ flat out doesn't work, I've tried it on both Windows 7 and on Ubuntu and the installation instructions produce a non-working install on both platforms. And sadly, the install fails in different ways on each, and oh by the way it requires trusting an external binary.
Making it impossible for extensions to access files directly under any circumstances was a garbage move. The right way to do it is to only allow them to write to certain locations. That's hard, so the Moz foundation threw up their hands and said "fuck it". Well, they need people who can solve problems, not just give up on them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"