Mozilla to expand focus on advertising - "We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market"

Hey, Laura. Fuck you. Fuck your profits and your corporate greed. Enshit yourself till you close down.

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.

The enshitification of Firefox continues 😢

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.

Not everyone?

Does anyone?

Good thing we can fork, I guess, but it's kinda sad to watch a previously good org die

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.

Oh you mean one of the only two reasons I use this fucking thing? Ad blocking and privacy?

You're shitting on both. That's like... Idk, Craftsman making tools out of plastic and removing the lifetime warranty... Wtf do I even need you for then?

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.

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.

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.

I'm afraid they aren't wrong. The majority of people aren't going to pay for access to random blogs etc. So we'd end up with only the big players having usable sites.

People kick off about ads but rarely suggest an alternative to funding the internet.

Back in the day ads were targeted based on the website's target audience not the user's personal data. It works fine but is less effective. Don't see why they couldn't go that way.

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.

Mozilla's non-profit status needs to be revoked.

I feel like I’m reading a different article than everyone else. The comments made me think the article would be adding advertisements, but it seems to be trying to find a way forward to facilitate advertisements while maintaining privacy.

Without technical details I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. I know lemmy is largely “Mozilla bad”, but I’m just not sure the comments are in line with the proposal.

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."

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.

Literally no one but advertisers like ads. Anything that leads to more ads being shown is a negative to your community. Some might understand the need to make money, but that doesn't make anyone like ads.

It is time to fork Firefox. Mozilla has bern hijacked by people who don't care about its vision.

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.

I honestly never expected the final death blow for Firefox to come from Mozilla.

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

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.

This is just a huge fuck you to their community.

This feels like the turning point for Firefox that we all feared would come. They've now switched to outright gas lighting their users. They're trying to convince us that if they take a stab at doing ads the right way, that we can have a web filled with tolerable ads that work for both the user and the business.

Ads and user data collection are the worst part of the internet. Nothing has ever gotten better because of them. And there's already far too much focus in this area. Mozilla just wants to be another exploiter so that they can have a piece of the stolen value pie.

This breaks my heart.

Yeah, perhaps because advertisements go against the values that users look for in your browser?

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.

Squidward on the floor saying "Future, future"

The only ones who will embrace it are the advertisers....

Because of propaganda, people find it easier to imagine the end of the world before the end of capitalism. Just the same, theres lots of commenters here that could imagine the end of the internet before they imagine the end of advertising on the internet.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the Google ad monopoly case?

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

Time to switch to other fork

Does this mean they are gonna brick ublock origin and force me to Google's 3.0 shit? (I forgot the name of it)

Burn the phoenix again.

Not good

Technically correct: literally no one does fit the criteria for not everyone.

rockbottom: NOBODY wants to see the ads you throw in our faces. doesnt matter that, as you claim, those ad views pay you for your content. there is no good way to make those ads palatable.

The original developer has a great blog, and has commented on this

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

https://ladybird.org/

Google was recently successfully sued for being anit-competitive by paying third parties to set Google as the default search engine.

That payoff by Google is like 90% of Mozilla's income, which is probably disappearing. So yeah, they're in full panic to fill that gap.

I switched to a fork of Firefox (Zen) without their bs..

I don't see how they think it's a good move. I'm not speaking about people being upset. Most of the Firefox users are either people having at least some tech knowledge or people which use it because of a person with some tech knowledge.

And most of these people use an ad-blocker, know how to install a fork and so on. So, from the beginning, I don't know who think it's a good idea other than to kill Firefox.

So long as they remain open source

Well, Thunderbird gives me hope.

Now imagine if they had something to advertise which people actually want!

How it's been going.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QbBc3Oduc8

Hard fork incoming in 3... 2... 1....

Does anyone know if this will hit Fennec on Android as well?

Maybe if we support firefox we could reach the same amout of money than google