MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA Keeping the internet, and the content that makes it a vital and vibrant part of our global society, free and accessible has
MARK SURMAN, PRESIDENT, MOZILLA Keeping the internet, and the content that makes it a vital and vibrant part of our global society, free and accessible has
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
The web today has no privacy or openness. It has gmail accounts, russian propaganda bots, and AI SEO article spam. Does it matter which rose tinted browser you care to view or interact with this shit through? I'm approaching 40 and the web has been a fundamental part of my life to the point that I am sometimes bewildered about what I'd do without it. It is a sinking ship though, and at this point I'm much more interested in seeing alternatives to HTTP rather than trying to save the mess we built on-top of it.
This analysis strikes me as a nice mix of cynicism and revolutionary thinking. In my own analysis of history, cynicism has never achieved anything except worsen what it claims to hate. As for revolutions, they mostly never even happen, and when they do happen they achieve nothing except heartache and backlash. The only way forward that actually works is slowly, one step at a time, building on what you have.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
“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.
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?
People who complain about this seems unaware that mozilla can't make money from thin air. You don't pay for the browser, so.... Put 2 and 2 together...
If you would actually consider paying for software you use all the time, companies could make quality stuff.
I would pay 5 dollars per month for Firefox, no problems. I don't like subscriptions but I would do it for Firefox. Been using it since the very first version of Firefox came out.
Mozilla gets millions in donations, but they give millions to their CEO and millions to political activists. Had Mozilla demonstrated they couldn't survive on donations alone I (and presumably others) would be a little more forgiving. But right, from my perspective, it looks like the board is using the Mozilla coffers as their personal piggy bank instead of making a good faith effort to do anything that would allow them to survive without enshittifying.
I don't see anybody complaining about the act of Mozilla selling a VPN service, email masking service, or even their data removal service (until it was revealed their partner had a horrible track record, but Mozilla agreed with the community on that one).
Hell, I even saw partnering with Google as a necessary evil, although apparently Mozilla looked at the company famous for abandoning their "Don't be evil" mantra and decided to take a page from their playbook.
Maybe, people are complaining about a company doing bad things.
You are assuming advertisers want something that is user focused. I don't think this is going to be that successful as targeted ads need lots of user data.
Also they only make money if you click on an ad. How often are you doing that? Spoiler: you shouldn't
What I wish they would do is create a way I could compensate websites from the browser. I want a monthly subscription that donates a small amount to all the websites I visit.
Tangentially related: Mozilla's big "draw" to this for advertisers is that they claim it will be able to (anonymously) track coversion rates. Not just click through but through to actual purchase. So advertisers can get true feedback on what works and what doesn't, because clickthrough doesn't directly correlate to sales.
Guys.... don't you think this has already been circlejerked to death on Reddit and Lemmy? Do we really need to hash this out yet AGAIN? Getting real tired of this...