Mozilla to expand focus on advertising - "We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market"
Mozilla to expand focus on advertising - "We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market"
LAURA CHAMBERS, CEO, MOZILLA CORPORATION As Mark shared in his blog, Mozilla is going to be more active in digital advertising. Our hypothesis is that we n
Wow, utterly shocked that a company with a shit CEO that takes most of its money from Google would have these viewpoints.
I'm sure it is completely coincidental that ublock is about to die as well.
Can one thing please not be full of adverts :( I'll pay for the browser, I just want marketers to fuck off for a while lol
My problem with this in spite of the dire situation they face if Google is forced to cut funding by anti-trust court rulings (or not even forced but they make paying off Mozilla a moot point so they stop) is that they become an ad company. Ads become tied to their CEO compensation, to the salaries of the people who develop it.
They claim they're making a better kind of ad network, a privacy respecting kind. The problem is the ad industry doesn't want less data, they want more. There are no looming laws that would force the ad industry to adopt a more privacy respecting alternative or die and without that the ad industry is going to shun this and it'll be a failure and then they'll have a failed ad network that they can either discard entirely or adapt to industry standards of privacy invasion and abuse and continue to exist and then they'll make another "hard choices" post about having to do that.
And I can see it now. This experiment will fail and after some pressure from the ad industry and some devil-on-shoulder whispering Mozilla will begrudgingly start to enshittify. Their ad network will become less privacy respecting by tiny little steps, by salami-slicing or boiling the frog, the whole privacy-preserving measurement thing will be thrown out BUT they'll still claim they respect you more than Google and will at first perhaps but that will erode. Maybe they'll just implode at some point after that which given Google is being found a monopoly works just fine for Google and the rest of big tech who want a more centralized, locked down browser company that wants to help implement DRM that can't be circumvented, that wants to help lock down everything on the web to restrict users freedoms to choose what is displayed or if they can save it or record it or copy it to say nothing of blocking ads.
I used to work in a marketing agency, and had a few clients that heavily used advertising data.
I'd go as far as to say that while more data is nice, good data is much better. If Mozilla can somehow produce an advertising platform that is not intrusive, is opt-in, and has a wide enough reach to satisfy advertisers, they're on to a winning strategy. Furthermore, they would need to codify any changes into Mozilla itself to ensure that advertising never gets to intrude on privacy or the browser experience - with the removal of the CEO and entire exec team as the cost for triggering this.
With all that said, I think the threat of doing this is probably a good thing. Mozilla's track record of products is, frankly, piss poor. The thing is, everyone seems to be good at advertising, so there's no reason why if Google leaves they can't just say "fine, we're an advertising company now" and eat their lunch.
So long as they remain open source
I kept giving Mozilla the benefit of the doubt and telling myself things weren't so bad.
I was wrong.
I'll continue using Firefox because it's the least bad option, but I can't advocate for it in good faith anymore, and I don't expect it to last long with this orientation.
So it goes.
Ok sure, what do you want them to do instead then? 80% of their income is reliant on a tech giant's grace and is seemingly more and more likely to be cutoff soon. They need to survive somehow, and every monetised service they tried flopped thusfar.
I could see them trying to take themselves away from Google which wouldn't be a bad thing as that's where most of the money comes from for them ... Unless that's changed recently..
Mozilla's non-profit status needs to be revoked.
I think at this point they have a nonprofit and a company, the later being used for all their taxable income.
I know; they should not be allowed to do that.
This breaks my heart.
At this point, I don't see many other options to keep everything going for Firefox. If they somehow lose the go*gle money they use to keep themselves going, they need another revenue source and I severely doubt there are enough Firefox users willing to pay enough to keep it going as it currently does. Don't like it, but I'm gonna at least play devil's advocate.
It would be nice if they at least allowed for even being able to donate to the browser itself. All the options that I am aware of are either the paid extra stuff they have, or to the overall company. Which is annoying since I imagine that the current "donation" option means that the money is being used mostly for the upper execs and routed to the extra shit that already has options for paying subs.
Time to switch to other fork
Does anyone know if this will hit Fennec on Android as well?
What if we could have a world that wasn't powered by ads? I'd like to get past this "only one way to run the internet" train of thought.
I'm just so tired of ads, commercials and advertising in general. It's exhausting.
It's either that, a subscription model of some sort, going to pay to install models, or something else to fund themselves. I'd suggest going to a donation based model, but I doubt there's enough Firefox users willing to pay to even be able to keep it alive more than a year or two tops.
Well, do you subscribe to news sites, YouTube Premium, Kagi? The world you dream of is available to you today
Actually, I do. I have a YouTube Premium subscription and subscriptions for two news sites. And on top of that a ton of Patreon subscriptions and offline memberships. I am the one who
knockspays.Even of they reduced everything down to just Firefox, Thunderbird, and all in infra to run those products (Mozilla accounts, addons stores, hosting, dev/build services...), as well as continuing to pay for dev time on open source they use/contribute to, and the time their employees put into w3c and other foundation/standards/steering initiatives, I don't think you'd want to see the cost of a monthly subscription.
This stuff costs way more than people think it does, and behind the scenes Mozilla does a lot of work (with google, Microsoft, apple) on web standards, and trust me, you want them still involved seeing as each other browser group involved is well... You know... Much worse for privacy generally.
YouTube premium and kagi aren't even remotely in the same league for comparison when it comes to the cost and value a "Firefox" or "Mozilla" subscription would be.
In parallel to our existing consumer products, we have the opportunity to build a better infrastructure for the online advertising industry as a whole. Advertising at large cannot be improved unless the tech it’s built upon prioritizes securing user data. This is precisely why we acquired Anonym.
Catering to the ad industry is backwards thinking, imo. Securing user data is easy enough if you do not collect it to begin with.
Imo, the fact companies have changed the narrative in favor of advertisers and data collection, proves only profit matters, not the people.
Hey, Laura. Fuck you. Fuck your profits and your corporate greed. Enshit yourself till you close down.
We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market. But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozilla’s history. And that willingness to take on the hard things, even when not universally accepted, is exactly what the internet needs today.
But you're not doing the hard things. You're doing the easy thing. Capitulation to surveillance capitalism is the easy thing.
We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market... even when not universally accepted, is exactly what the internet needs today.
Every fucking tech corporation ever has said this.
She went on to work at eBay for 13 years, followed by PayPal, Skype, and Airbnb. source
why would Mozilla choose to be directed by an ebay+paypal+airbnb experience and can somebody with that background not think like this ☞
"Because Mozilla’s mission is to build a better internet. And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet, and the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible."
Advertising will not improve unless we address the underlying data sharing issues, and solve for the economic incentives that rely on that data.
thanks to Mozilla for assuming the responsibility of improving advertising
We can’t just ignore online advertising — it’s a major driver of how the internet works and is funded. We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it. For those reasons, Mozilla has become more active in online advertising over the past few years. - MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA source
if we stay with that metaphor of "We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it", it's not difficult to imagine Mark and Mozilla being swallowed by the monster he's "staring straight in the eyes" :/
i hope they can filter the shit Mozilla will include in Firefox from mull and mullvad
She's not particularly wrong, but this highlights the problem for me.
Why does the corporate arm behind one of the last "free" browsers out there need to become involved in this clear conflict of interest?
Why does this need to be developed as core functionality in the browser codebase instead of as an addon like most of the previous experiments?
There is repeated insistence that this is key to the future of the web. I don't neccessarily disagree. I disagree entirely that this should have any direct contact with the Firefox project. Create a separate subsidiary within Mozilla for this shit. Anything to maintain a wall between the clearly conflicting goals.
This all reads like a new CEO coming in hungry to make a mark rather than actually just be a steward to keeping business as usual going.
Does this mean they are gonna brick ublock origin and force me to Google's 3.0 shit? (I forgot the name of it)
Very unlikely. They will support new extension API's (they are already 90%+ compatible with manifest v3) bit Mozilla has committed to maintaining compatibility for the manifest v2 API's that don't exist in v3.
Claims otherwise are FUD.
They also are rolling out a modified version of Manifest V3 that restores the ad blocker capability that Google was disabling.
Manifest v3? I gather they're already moving towards this but not in a manner which harms ad blocking
Not everyone?
Does anyone?
Good thing we can fork, I guess, but it's kinda sad to watch a previously good org die
Fork, blah, blah, blah.
When one of these forks doesn't depend on Mozilla to do all the heavy lifting of security updates and compatibility fixes, then maybe we can talk seriously about forks. But no fork does fuck-all towards the hard part of maintaining a web browser engine. So forks mean nothing.
The enshitification of Firefox continues 😢
Cory Doctorow: "Disenshittify or die!" (YouTube)
Frankly, I'm surprised it took them so long to say this publicly. For over a year, Mozilla has had a de facto conflict of interest when it came to their stance on advertisements, so take anything they say about their necessity with a huge grain of salt...
May 2023: Mozilla purchases FakeSpot, a company that sells private data to advertisers. Mozilla keeps selling private data to advertisers to this day.
June 2024: Mozilla purchases Anonym, an AdTech company.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the Google ad monopoly case?
It's probably at least a factor, yeah. They've been trying to reduce dependence on Google for a long time, which was always a smash hit with the community (not), but if there's a very concrete scenario where will stop paying, then the urgency ramps up quickly.
Yeah, perhaps because advertisements go against the values that users look for in your browser?
fuck
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But at least forking is still an option. The instant they make any moves that inhibit forking or privacy on forks, Firefox will be completely dead. For now, it’s just gangrenous.
The thing is, people willing to maintain a fork could contribute to Firefox today, and reduce the development cost, reduce the need for income.
Sure, some people will be more willing to contribute, if it's a pure grassroots effort, or if they're left without a browser otherwise, but to just assume that a fork will fix it, that's wishful thinking.
I wish that most forks wouldn't be even worse. Pale Moon, the most interesting one, is a gang of patent trolls.
Pale Moon feels like it forked during the peak of Windows Vista, and hasn't updated its UI, or extension library since.
LibreWolf, Mullvad Browser, and Waterfox feel the most up to date, while being FOSS.
I switched to a fork of Firefox (Zen) without their bs..
Based. I switched to Midori
But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozilla’s history.
Is it?
I would rather have a world where Mozilla is actively engaged in creating positive solutions for hard problems, than one where we only critique from the sidelines.
Maybe your users don't.
In addition to your good points:
a world where Mozilla is actively engaged
That doesn't have to mean a world where Firefox itself is involved in this engagement, despite her insistence that it for some reason must be. Firefox is not Mozilla as a whole.
Yeah adblock plus said the same thing. A lot of companies have said the same thing. It always comes down to greed
Squidward on the floor saying "Future, future"
But actually hexbear does need a future Squidward. We've got others but we need future
Ladybird is not usable yet, but it's an independent browser and engine that accepts donations
repo - https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird
youtube channel with monthly updates - https://www.youtube.com/@LadybirdBrowser/videos
So is NetSurf, and has been for most of this century already. I mean, it's great to see people even caring about independent browsers, but NetSurf surely needs much more love (and more developers). :-)
Technically correct: literally no one does fit the criteria for not everyone.
Now imagine if they had something to advertise which people actually want!
Not good
I will go against the tide here and welcome this change. The web is powered by advertising and tracking. It will happen whether Mozilla is part of it or not. In that case, I would much rather have a website using a Mozilla advertising service that is more ethical and respects the user more than the ones from big tech. It's a lesser of two evils and I support this. I would of course rather have no ads at all but we don't live in a fairy tale world and evil companies exist. And like most ads currently in Firefox, I fully trust we will be able to disable them easily, just like we can right now.
I think this is a good thing that Mozilla is finally trying to distance itself from Google's money because it ensures that maintaining the nonprofit is more sustainable
If Mozilla starts being aggressive to ad blocking, I'll agree with the common opinion on this post. But for now I'm more less neutral. If the choice is Mozilla dies or they do some ad stuff, I'd rather the latter. Whether the current and former people running Mozilla have made the right decisions or not to get to this point is kind of irrelevant, because people do not want Mozilla to disappear (even if they claim otherwise) because Mozilla is still a major driver of privacy-oriented work in w3c and web in general.
Aside from that... The only real way to stop ads and tracking, or at least prevent selling and sharing of data outside of the 1st party collector, is a legal path. Whether Anonym/Mozilla is as private as they are claiming, their intent is at least what a realistic legal solution to web tracking would condone that would continue to allow for revenue via ads. There is no way ads will ever go away in a capitalist economy, so it'll need to do something, blocked or not.
How it's been going.