Mozilla explains their recent foray into advertising - A free and open internet shouldn’t come at the expense of privacy : firefox

[–] JubilantJaguar 90 points 2 months ago (10 children)

This will be easy to hate on, but let's be careful not to get carried away.

Maintaining a web browser is basically the toughest mission in software. LibreWolf and PaleMoon and IceWhatsit and all the rest are small-time amateur projects that are dependent on Firefox. They do not solve the problem we have. To keep a modicum of privacy and openness, the web is de-facto dependent on Firefox continuing to exist in the medium term. And it has to be paid for somehow.

This reminds me of the furore about EME, the DRM sandbox that makes Netflix work. I was against it at the time but I see now that the alternative would have been worse. It would have been the end of Firefox. Sometimes there's no good option and you have to accept the least bad.

[–] RoyaltyInTraining 57 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I would love to give Firefox money, as long as they slash their CEO's ridiculous salary

[–] dojan 31 points 2 months ago (6 children)

And slash the CEO as well. Not literally of course.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago

I'm in the same boat. Mozilla can't be trusted with donations until they can prove they spend money responsibly. Money, like trust, should not be given by default.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (17 children)

Also, if firefox does better it'll forward the benefits of a better browser with more usage, more funding, faster features, and more on to the forks for those who want to use them. There is basically no downside for librewolf users here and its to their benefit to encourage for normie's to use firefox anyway

Getting angry at Mozilla for finding a way to survive by trying to offer something less evil won't solve the privacy problem in advertising. That has to be solved at the government level, and if anything, what Mozilla is working towards here is probably the best case scenario for a legislated solution in the US's economy.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 months ago (7 children)

A fundamental flaw in this, is it still involves user data, even if "anonymized". You can advertise without any user data. We do it all the time. Does a television channel know your gender? Does a radio station know if you bought a car recently? Does the newspaper know your hobbies?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Non targeted advertising isn't as profitable. (It lacks dark patterns)

For what its worth I still watch over the air TV

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

A fundamental flaw in this, is it still involves user data, even if “anonymized”. You can advertise without any user data.

Right. The reassurance is supposed to be: "don't worry, no personalized data is retained." So, ideally, no individual record of you, with your likes, your behaviors, your browser fingerprint, aggregated together with whatever third party provider data might be purchased, and machine learning inferences can be derived from that. Instead, there's a layer of abstraction, or several layers. Like "people who watch Breaking Bad also like Parks and Rec and are 12% more likely to be first generation home buyers". Several abstracted identity types can be developed and refined.

Okay, but who ordered that? Why is that something that we think satisfies us that privacy is retained? You're still going to try and associate me with an abstract machine learned identity that, to your best efforts, closely approximates what you think I like and what is most persuasive to me. I don't think people who are interested in privacy feel reassured at anonymized repurposing of data.

It's the model itself, it's the incentives inherent in advertising as an economic model, at the end of the day. I don't know that there's a piecemeal negotiation that is supposed to stand in for our interests to reassure us, or whose idea was that this third way was going to be fine.

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[–] Wooki 36 points 2 months ago (1 children)

We do not need a corporate structure to maintain software.

This stinks of C-suite justifying their existence when the alternative is well established and very successful.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Where else do you expect them to get the money needed to maintain a web browser?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Well, how did they do it in 90s-2010s? Genuinely asking. What's changed that they can no longer do this.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Web standards have grown dramatically more complex since then. (To me, this raises a question in and of itself, I think it would be good to try and develop standards intentionally easy to maintain to avoid embrace-extend style dominance from individual companies).

You now have HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, WebGL, WebAssembly, WebRTC. You have newer and newer layers of security, and you have multiple platforms (Apple, Windows, desktop, phone) to develop for. It's a mountain that has grown out of what was once just a unique type of slightly marked up text file.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Well, on the standards front, they tried

google just kept shifting the goalposts and forcing everyone to follow.

On the technology front, you could maintain these things with a very small team of developers whose total salary is but a small percentage of the CEO's current pay.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I entirely agree with you about Google perpetually shifting the goalposts, which increases complexity and works to their advantage. I would say I think of the standards and technology as being, in many ways, integrally related.

I think the idea though, is that it has indeed grown so vast that you need, effectively, teams of teams to keep up. There are browsers done with small teams of developers, but the fruits of those, imo, are not super promising.

Opera: moved to Chromium.

Vivaldi: also on Chromium.

Midori: moved to Chromium.

Falkon: Developed by the KDE team. Perhaps the closest example to what you are thinking of. It's functional but lags well behind modern web standards.

Netsurf: Remarkable and inspiring small browser written from scratch, but well behind anything like a modern browsing experience.

Dillo: Amazing for what it is, breathing life into old laptops from the 90s, part of the incredible software ecosystem that makes Linux so remarkable, so capable of doing more with less. It's a web browser under a megabyte. Amazing for what it is, but can barely do more than browse text and display images with decent formatting.

Otter: An attempt to keep the Old Opera going, but well behind modern standards. Also probably pretty close to what you are suggesting.

Pale Moon: Interesting old fork of pre-quantum Firefox but again well behind modern web standards.

All of the examples have either moved to Chromium to keep up, or are well behind the curve of being modern browsers. If Firefox had the compromised functionality of Otter it might shed what modest market share it still has, not to mention get pilloried in comment sections here at Lemmy by aspiring conspiracy theorists.

I do love all of these projects and everything they stand for (well, the non-chromium ones at least) but the evidence out there suggests it's hard to do.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There's ladybird too, but I hear you.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Oh shoot, that's actually the best example of all, and, in fact a great counterpoint to all of those examples above. If Ladybird does it and can sustain it, then Mozilla really has no excuses.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Netscape, which was essentially the predecessor to Mozilla, was a well funded VC-backed startup. That’s how they did it.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Users don't want ads and advertisers want something that can collect as much data as possible.

Mozilla as lost both

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Collecting as much data as possible is a means to an end. It's not valuable in and on itself.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

True but good luck getting the high paying advertisers on board.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I'm completely fine with anonymized ads being an option in theory, but there needs to be a way to compensate services w/o resorting to advertising. I think Mozilla should provide a way for users to pay to opt-out of ads, and get websites on board that way.

Websites want to get paid for their work, and advertising is the easiest way to do that. The solution isn't better ads, but alternative revenue streams for websites, and I'm 100% fine with Mozilla taking a cut of that alternative revenue stream. But I will not tolerate ads on my browser.

I hoped Brave would've solved this problem by letting users pay to remove ads, but instead they went to crypto to reward viewing ads. That's the opposite of what I want, and I really hope Mozilla has someone still working there in a position that matters that understands that.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Isn’t that exactly what brave did? I wasn’t a fan of their “watch ads to get BAT” system either, but the alternative was always to just buy BAT with actual money. I’d rather see Mozilla work with brave to collaborate and improve on the BAT strategy than to start another competing standard, personally.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (9 children)

Does buying BAT compensate websites? AFAIK, no sites actually signed up to be compensated that way, so it just ended up being a random cryptocurrency. Brave went crypto first, websites second, and that obviously didn't work.

Mozilla should do the opposite IMO. Go out and make agreements with major sites to make their content available w/o ads for compensation, and then get users to start using that service. What they use for payment isn't particularly important to me, but it should be stable and low-cost. I think GNU Taler is a good start to keep costs really low (no money is actually changing hands), and Mozilla can settle up with websites monthly, quarterly, etc.

It should be Brave collaborating w/ Mozilla, not the other way around, because Brave obviously has weird motivations. Brave can keep BAT to reward watching ads, I just don't think they should use the same system for rewarding ads vs compensating websites for not showing ads.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Isn’t that exactly what brave did?

I'm actually quite intrigued with Braves attempts at innovating here, but I don't know how effective they have been and, alas, Brave relies on Chromium.

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[–] tb_ 5 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Why's it gotta be crypto though

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

that's actually the first good idea ive seen somebody suggest mozilla do instead!

For the moment you can donate to sites you like while keeping the adblocker on.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Yup, and that's generally what I do.

I honestly just want to put $20 in a pool or something and have the browser deduct from that balance when I visit a site. The sites I visit more get more of my money, and I'll get a record of how much each site changes per visitor to decide whether I want to keep going there. If they use something like GNU Taler for the accounting, the sites can't track me at all, they'll just get micropayments and settle up with Mozilla at some interval.

Yet Mozilla seems to not consider this at all. Their entire messaging is "better ads," not "alternatives to ads."

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago

A free and open internet shouldn’t come at the expense of privacy

Free as in free beer, not as in freedom unfortunately

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Mozilla has a clear conflict of interest in their statements: they are now an ad company. Because of this, they must be approached with skepticism.

Every corporation invested in unhealthy ventures will say it is necessary, and they can do it ethically, regardless of how misleading or untrue it is. They will launder their bad behavior through an organization to make it appear more ethical and healthy.

Mozilla is doing nothing new under the sun. But for some reason, after burning through so much community goodwill, some people are still willing to give Mozilla the benefit of the doubt with a technology that they surely would not have given Google or Adobe or Facebook the same treatment.

Surely we wouldn't ignore the canary in the coal mine until it was too late. Surely, we wouldn't look at a huge corporation and say "this time it won't be the same."

When Google acquired DoubleClick, they positioned it as a net good for everybody in terms of privacy. DoubleClick was notoriously awful in those terms. Google said (and people, including myself, believed) that by owning them, Google can make them into something better.

Instead, DoubleClick made Google into something much, much worse.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Mozilla: For the foreseeable future, there's a lot of money in advertising, and we want some of it. It's all over the Internet. Why shouldn't some of the profit go to people like us, people who wish things were different even while bravely facing the harsh reality that there is no other choice but to devote ourselves to commercial advertising?

We know that everyone in our community will hate the idea, but surely this too is a sign that we are on the right path. By doing unpopular things, we demonstrate the courage that's needed to save the Internet from the kind of future where Mozilla can't get a piece of the biggest market on the Internet, the only one that matters, the market for advertising.

[–] Carighan 23 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Sure, you can see it like that.

Doesn't change the reality. Sarcasm doesn't pay bills and personel costs, and hence most websites directly or indirectly rely on advertising. As does most other content like podcasts or videos.

We can either keep being delusional and pretend we can magically revolutionize the whole internet and much of the business around it, or we can be a bit more realistic and try some reforms, like less privacy-intrusive advertising and analysis.

Which do you think has a better chance to actually improve the actual privacy for users? Hrm?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (7 children)

I think the fediverse has a better chance of doing more good, and Mozilla should've stuck with it.

[–] Carighan 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

But they did stick with it, AFAIK? They just took down their mastodon instance, that's absolutely not the same thing. Unless you mean to imply that all of us here, using this but not running our own instance, are also "not sticking it up for the Fediverse" or so.

Plus, let's not forget that by their underlying nature, Reddit and Twitter are not ad-driven via the ads shown directly. The real ads are in astroturfing, promotions and subtle pushing of products and ideas. And Lemmy, Mastodon, et al are just as susceptible to that, if not more so, lacking a usable central authority to curb such behavior if wanted.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (10 children)

They should find other ways to make money. There are so many different ways they could create value.

Also I'm not convinced that Mozilla would make much off of ads anyway as the ad space is very competitive

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago

JWZ was one of the main instigators of Mozilla/Firefox, and Mozilla’s launch party was held at his nightclub.

Some relevant posts from his blog:

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (4 children)

For now I installed Librefox on my devices until I am familiar with the json scripts stripping Firefox from these new features.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

*Librewolf

Nice choice though. I personally would recommend the resist fingerprinting toggle extension as well

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

“Keeping the internet, and the content that makes it a vital and vibrant part of our global society, free and accessible has been a core focus for Mozilla from our founding. How do we ensure creators get paid for their work? How do we prevent huge segments of the world from being priced out of access through paywalls? How do we ensure that privacy is not a privilege of the few but a fundamental right available to everyone? These are significant and enduring questions that have no single answer. But, for right now on the internet of today, a big part of the answer is online advertising.“ Advertisers always want more data on the people they are selling to. I hope you can hold the line. No one else has been able to that I know of.

[–] AtomicHotSauce 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

And I love how they keep pushing the "ensure creators get paid for their work" as if they're doing the lord's work paying small-time YouTubers and PodCasters when, in reality, it's corporations getting the money. Who are these "creators" you're talking about, Mozilla?

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[–] TeoTwawki 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

there are sites where I WOULD HAVE whitelisted them from adblocking if they had not chosen to make them functionally unusable or not stop nag me me. take youtube. I never minded those ad breaks..but that constant box nagging me to try premium is not acceptable. And then they just had to keep ramping up the adds and are now being a big baby trying to wage war on adbocking. Result: no more youtube. ty for convincing me to not even visit anymore -slow clap- good job ahole.

and ever been to a fandom wiki? used to be named "wikia" so that people could confuse their brand with "wiki". so many adds jammed into that thing browsers tend to choke if you aren't adblocking.

I mean sure privacy is great to care about, but nobody even pretends to care about usability.

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