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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.)"
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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"
...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.
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.
It's not? Last time I checked, the vast majority of their revenue is from the world's largest advertising company.
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!
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.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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/
They told us the sky would fall when the old leaky extension APIs were removed, and it did not.
It took over a year of hard work of many extension makers, and not all regressions have been fixed yet.
Right, but I think extension makers more than anybody knew why it had to be done. I thank them all sincerely for their great work, and that most certainly includes the Mozilla devs.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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.
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.
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.
Firefox marketshare collapsed. If that isn't the "sky has fallen" then fucked if I know what is.
1) Chrome overtook Firefox in 2011. Extension API was 2017 2) Firefox was displaced by Google "bundling" chrome and adopting other tactics reminiscent of Microsoft's war against Netscape 3) Firefox still has a major chunk of the browser market.
Firefox is basically an also ran browser that has a relatively insignificant marketshare now.
Firefox is still popular and is the only thing that stands between Google and complete internet domination like Microsoft had a few years back.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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
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!
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.
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.'"
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.
I actually would have donated to Mozilla, at least before they started making Firefox worse. Now, not so sure about it.
All they had to do was ask: "We are short on funding. Please donate, to keep Firefox ad-free."
But, if that had turned out not to be the truth..
Privacy begins with
Exactly. If it really happened outside their lab, in their released version, that's no "experiment;" they really did it!