Despite its emphasis on protecting privacy, Mozilla is moving towards integrating ads, backed by new infrastructure from their acquisition of Anonym. They claim this will maintain a balance between user control and online ad economics, using privacy-preserving tech. However, this shift appears to contradict Mozilla’s earlier stance of protecting users from invasive advertising practices, and it signals a change in their priorities.
Mozilla sold out a long time ago, they are nothing like they used to be. Everyone should be ditching Firefox for forks if possible. Yes, Firefox is still miles ahead of anything Chromium-based but we can’t trust Mozilla to not screw over their users anymore (and it’s been apparent for YEARS…Pocket, “Sponsored” shortcuts and links, Mozilla VPN popup ads, this behavior is hardly new). What can we trust? Firefox forks with the bullshit stripped out, mostly. I’ve been using LibreWolf for several years on my Linux, Windows, and MacOS systems now. I originally switched because of the Mozilla VPN popups but at the time, complaining about those popups was met with a bunch of Mozilla apologists going “it’s not that bad” “they’re a big company and they need their precious monies”…no. That was ADVERTISING front and center, and it was in Firefox years ago. So was Pocket. So was having Amazon links auto-filled on the new tab shortcuts. Go to something that isn’t run by money. Go to a community-maintained and sanitized fork.
Been called an idiot for saying that I wouldn’t trust Firefox as far as I can throw it like 2 months ago after they made telemetry opt out.
I can’t believe that someone who is privacy conscientious would just stick to their guns rather than watching out for their privacy.
I just hope someone else picks up the shards and runs with it and then we can all just focus on making them better instead of getting riled up over a god damn browser lol.
This is such an ignorant take, this preserves privacy, did you even read the fucking article??? Like seriously this comment is purely false assumptions
I did, and I disagree with their decisions.
I can condense their article down to “we need money, and we can get it through ads, so we built our own ad network to preserve privacy”.
But I don’t like that. This decision does not exist in a vacuum. This comes after a number of other decisions leading me to believe they are shifting priority to making a profit. Telemetry being opt-out, pocket, selling ads on home screen, …
This is the icing on a shit cake and I’m sorry, Mozilla destroyed their value proposition about half way into their chain of bad decisions.
If you still wanna use Firefox, fine. I don’t care about that. I don’t understand why, but that’s ok, it’s your god damn decision. But I wanna alert everyone else that Mozilla is not who they used to be and it’s time to reevaluate why you use the browser you do.
Saying this is an ignorant take is invalidating all the experiences I’ve had configuring Firefox back to being privacy friendly, and I don’t appreciate you calling me ignorant for that. If you disagree, that’s fair, but you can do it without attacking my credibility. And doing so by giving actual reasons would definitely help your case.
You do understand those forks do 1% of the work required to keep the Firefox codebase performant, standards compliant and technically sound?
If Mozilla disappears those forks will too.
Hopefully Mozilla employees will kick out their money sink CEO with double legs before the browser disappears for good.
I don’t know if it’s the CEO, the board or the wider leadership team but I agree they haven’t been laser focused on building a better browser and that isn’t good enough.
It’s crazy how for me the worst thing about Firefox is how much people complain about it online, never had a single issue with it
I hope everybody criticizing the move either do not use products from Mozilla or, if they do, contribute however they can up to their own capabilities. If you don’t, if you ONLY criticize, yet use Firefox (or a derivative, e.g. LibreWolf) or arguably worst use something fueled by ads (e.g. Chromium based browsers) then you are unfortunately contributing precisely to the model you are rejecting.
So just to be clear, people aren’t allowed to criticize ads in Firefox unless they’re open source developers actively contributing to Firefox or they only use… What, Opera?
I thought saying
contribute however they can up to their own capabilities
was actually very clear but seems I wasn’t clear enough so that means… literally doing ANYTHING except only criticizing. That can mean being an open-source developer, yes, but that can also means translation, giving literally 1 cent, etc. It means doing anything at all that would not ONLY be saying “this is good, but it’s not good enough” without doing actually a single thing to change, especially while actually using another free of charge browser that is funded by advertisement. Honestly if that’s not clear enough I’m not sure what would be … but please, do ask again I will genuinely try to be clearer.
Mozilla could have focused on being user-supported through fundraising like Wikipedia. Instead they chose the comfortable path of being funded by their biggest competitor, who is an evil monopoly spyware ad business, which has been compelling Mozilla to kill Firefox and become the badies on the way down.
If you were implying that I said being funded by Alphabet/Google was a good thing then let me be explicit, I did NOT say that nor believe it to be the case. Now, once again, cf my actual comment about pragmatic better alternative we can rely on and support today. If you meant to suggest better and are supporting that, please do share.
You can donate to Mozilla.
Perhaps they should’ve put that more front and center. But if they add a prominent donate button the people on here would probably lose their shit too.
What on earth would that do? The poisonous leadership would not use it to improve the browser nor would they start working for donors instead of Google.
My point is that there is a funding model that they could have pursued when they still had goodwill and trust. And my hope is if the government finally puts the boot in with Google, then this current version of mozilla will collapse, the rats will leave the ship and hopefully a good browser will emerge the way firefox emerged from netscape.
I’m not interested in my computer striking a balance between my needs and the needs of people seeking to manipulate me into buying things.
I paid for my computer, it serves my needs. Yes I do run Linux, how did you guess?
But that isn’t the balance that’s being struck. Mozilla is trying to balance between useful services being available for free and people’s right to privacy. If you’re using any websites that has staff employed, they’re more likely than not being paid for by advertising.
Honestly, despite the crypto, good on Brave browser for trying to subvert the advertising model by providing an actual monetization alternative
What does this even mean? Brave didnt find something to “subvert the advertising model”, they have a subscription lol. Mozilla is trying to keep its browser free and safe, especially now that it’s losing its billion dollar google funding.
The model for most the content on the internet doesn’t work without advertising. The people who are “zero tolerance” on ads are going to prevent possible compromises from being made and just encourage an arms race. I don’t think we win that arms race, we get more insidious forms of tracking and brazen advertising.
Whatever compromise anyone tries to come up with will be ignored and exploited as hard as advertisers possibly can.
A compromise that actually works would depend on advertisers actually complying. The advertisers that do will be vastly outnumbered by the advertisers that don’t.
So we’re getting the arms race either way.
I’m so glad that Libre Wolf fork exists, that doesn’t change a fact of Mozilla foundation goes in a really wrong direction :/
Edit: typo
Don’t quote me on this but if I remember correctly, Mozilla foundation has nothing to do with Firefox development and was also kind of shady for some reason.
I need to send an email to Mozilla soon. The fact that I’m highly convinced that these three Linux youtubers would do a better job than the current management should tell you a lot about what’s happening at Mozilla (yes, it’s that bad).