Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions
Learn about Firefox Suggest, a new feature that's a trustworthy guide to the better web
There is something seriously wrong with Mozilla leadership. They keep alienating the small privacy-focussed userbase they have left, and then act surprised when Firefox's marketshare keeps shrinking...
Baker needs to go and be replaced by someone who cares about Firefox long term viability instead of only caring about how many millions more they can add to their obscene salary while destroying Firefox and everything else that Mozilla built over the years.
They are just milking the Firefox cow to death. Their salaries are increasing while the revenue and marketshare is rapidly decreasing. Mozilla is a sinking ship, and sadly we have to alternative.
Yeah their decisions make no sense. It's honestly very depressing seeing such a foundation/company in charge of a project like Firefox doing so much shit... Firefox could be so great and have a much more prominent presence, but they keep failing and failing and failing and completely missing the point.
yikes sweaty, mozilla's ceo is a proud bipoc trans woman. stop being so hateful
No one mentioned that, at all. Are you another troll account for @[email protected] ?
People are going to complain no matter how they try to make money, but this should at least have been opt-in with clear consent. The alternative of course is being beholden to Google search referrals. They can't photosynthesize funds.
Vivaldi, Brave, and their stans are getting their pitchforks ready, forgetting that they don't have to do the hard work of developing an engine because Google already does that for them.
Vivaldi, Brave, and their stans are getting their pitchforks ready, forgetting that they don’t have to do the hard work of developing an engine because Google already does that for them.
I don't know about how Vivaldi works, but Brave stans can shut up. Their ad system is a hundred times worse than Mozilla's.
I mean, I don't like how they went about this either, but considering the alternative of a 100% Google dominated browser space, and the fact that you can just disable it and the base Firefox code is still open source, it's not a huge deal.
Yeah, I'm not really defending them (from my point of view any feature that does something without my knowledge or consent being turned on by default is unacceptable) but from my point of view they'll always have to dance with a devil of some sort. I say people are going to complain no matter what based on past experiences: e.g. the "sponsored content on new tab", where they made sure to run all the "recommendation" logic locally so that no data was being sent out of the browser, that still wasn't enough because "ads are bad." So maybe from Mozilla's point of view there is no incentive to try to make these folks happy. People complained whenever they tried to offer Pocket or the VPN thing or the password manager because those weren't "core products" but they're also not allowed to monetize the "core product" either. It's like these people expect Mozilla to be able to synthesize money from air.
And, I am not really sure of the value of suggesting Vivaldi (which is vehemently anti-free software) or Brave (dodgy crypto scheme) which also further Google's dominance over the modern web as a side effect, when we have community versions of Firefox such as LibreWolf or IceCat which are basically the Gecko equivalent of those shady Chromium clones.
I think I'm starting to come around to Drew DeVault's position that it is impossible to implement the web as it exists today.
Yeah sure, but I'm not very convinced this is the best way for them to make money. And you also have to keep in mind that company internal decisions have been really bad, which got augmented by covid. The whole absurd CEO salary is a fine example of the downhill path Mozilla is taking...
When you can't find the settings they describe on the page, it is, because it's just for a small amount of users in the U.S.:
Note: Firefox Suggest is currently available for a limited number of users in the U.S. only.
I think it makes a certain amount of sense if you're an internet company trying to monetize but it sure does seem tone deaf.
This isn't that different from what DuckDuckGo does. They show you ads based on the words you're typing in. They just promise not to build profiles on you and track you around everywhere. I bet Firefox is trying to take the same approach.
I think it just feels different though because when I'm typing stuff into the bar, I'm actually intending to search the internet with ddg but Firefox is inserting itself into that equation and trying to display ads. Plus, firefox is software installed on my computer and not a web portal... that just makes it feel not so great. imo
https://twitter.com/ladyaeva/status/1445834339917320194
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28780285
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https://twitter.com/ladyaeva/status/1445920324906885123
also whoever posted my tweet to the orange website, fuck you
Off-topic: this flow made me lol.
fyi I also posted this I originally intended to title the post as this but when I looked in the settings, I did not find this option. So I deleted it. Later I found out its only for some users in the usa. 😂
What a shame - ads really do have a way of injecting themselves into everything. Who wants to take bets on how ads will make their way into lemmy?
