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