Mozilla will become an ad company
Mozilla will become an ad company
LAURA CHAMBERS, CEO, MOZILLA CORPORATION As Mark shared in his blog, Mozilla is going to be more active in digital advertising. Our hypothesis is that we n
:(
the web is dead. long live the web.
This is why Mothra is the most advanced web browser. The only one to have a fully integrated "moth mode"! However, for us mere mortals I am excited about the ladybird browser as an alternative (in a couple of years most likely).
Even though not technically a rug pull, this is a rug pull. The end of real growth in the tech sector turned the internet into a cesspool. Not happy with stable returns these companies repositioned themselves as cybercriminals. They abused source contributors, collected donations as seed capital for launching for profits, and stole the data of billions. Taking inspirations from the villains in their beloved cyberpunk novels, they crafted a very real dystopia.
Welp, time to start figuring out how to use Gemini (or alternatively RETVRN to Gopher).
In reality, the best parts of the web are (and have always been) text-based. I mean, obviously we have lots of fun with our emotes on Hexbear, but the essential feature is being able to communicate with each other via text. My favorite little corners of the internet are inevitably someone's niche blog or fansite which is almost 100% text-based. And, pivot-to-video be damned, the most effective and useful technical tutorials are text-based, especially since they can be easily updated and maintained.
I tried to read the blog post but doublespeak and marketing crap gives me an insta-migraine so I checked Reddit.
Mozilla now doubling down on ads in Firefox
Did whoever wrote that pile of marketing gibberish actually say a goddamned thing?
Oh, they said something. They said they believe it’s right and proper for advertisers to intrude into our lives and steal our time and attention, and they’re going to help them do that while claiming to be the “good guys” by inventing some nonsense that “protects privacy” a little more. Never mind that everyone’s main objection to ads isn’t that they compromise our privacy; we object to ads because they intrude on our experience, waste our time and disrupt our ability to focus on the content we seek.
The obvious corollary to this is that ad blockers will eventually be crippled, just like on Chrome, no doubt with the same “security” excuse.
From another thread
"Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers" - founders of Google in 1998.
But the siren song of money always wins.
Fuck the ad-based Internet right back to the putrid hole it came from. The second uBO stops working is the second I stop using that browser.
I wasn't always this way. I used to not block ads to help support creators. I used to have ads on my website 15 years ago. And for this transgression, I sincerely apologize.
Now I make money at my day job and everything I post, which is a substantial amount, is free and untracked (except for 5 days of web server request logs).
Sure I can't write full time with this model, but we're billions of people. If we each just made 10 minutes of good content a week, that's more than we can possibly consume.
And I'd rather have more good content than I could possibly read than the mountains of AI-generated SEO tripe that advertising brings.
S P O N S O R E D L I N K S B Y P O C K E T
The fucking nerve to say any of these Ad funded services are free or even services (does someone robbing you count as a service?) is enough to justify using guerilla warfare against these fuckers. We need to start documenting, sniffing out, exploiting, and flooding the APIs of all these ad driven sites till they become unusable. Just claim we are doing AI research. If I have to switch to command line web browsing, webscraping, and undocumented API calls via scripting to not see ads then so fucking be it.
Scratching one more company off the very very short list of software corps I think I could work at without experiencing total self-loathing
Firefox has long been going this way. I started exploring alternatives some years back, when Firefox started serving me ads on desktop, tracking me for marketing purposes on mobile, and talking about the "importance of collaboration with the private sector". This is really just a natural progression from there.
It's still the best browser (rock the LibreWolf branch), but it's, ever more, just the best of a bad bunch.
I understand that a high quality web browser in this modern age is really expensive to develop. Mozilla, which is like an ant compared to the gorillas called Apple and Google, needs to find the funds it takes to develop that browser and pay the people who work on it.
That said, it's really the bigger picture here that's totally fucked. The web browser is supposed to be a tool for the user, not for the advertiser. I don't give a shit about someone else's advertising, or their ability to reach me and to target my attention span. But in many ways the advertising model props up the entirety of the modern web as we know it. It's kind of a condemnation of the entire ecosystem, but I don't know if anyone has thought of a sustainable alternative model.
Further, I view it as a kind of condemnation of the modern WWW that web browsers must be so complex. It feels like half of the development of web browsers is just based on supporting advertising in some way or another, and making sure the 700 ad scripts that run when you load a page don't bring the browser to a screeching halt (a form of supporting advertising). Another 25% is dedicated to making sure crap web frameworks like React run well.
There is real innovation in the web browsing space. Wasm, WebGL, and so on. The fact that you can play a fully interactive 3d game in your web browser without having to download and run it locally is impressive. But is it all really worthwhile?
The worst thing is I don't have an answer to any of this. I realize most of this stuff is extremely dumb and pointless, but it feels like the Internet has been totally overwhelmed with AI spam, shitty websites that necessitate javascript to even view them for basic information, and endless ad and user tracking. This announcement is especially rich because Firefox is still both better than Chrome & basically second class compared to it. Many web devs (or their employers) treat Chrome like the standard and Firefox as an afterthought. I just imagine now Mozilla taking that beautiful little fire fox and caging it and poking it with cattle prods to see if it can find new ways to make its ember glow.
I'd love for an alternative to the WWW to spring up, and you'd think something like the Gemini protocol could be it. But if you've ever used it, you'd realize it kind of sucks to use. A website like hexbear wouldn't even be possible on Gemini. It had its heart in the right place but doesn't meet the moment, and IMO never will.
The chuds told me Mozilla was woke though?! Are you saying they're just scummy?!
we may have to start making excuses for the lack of terror
I guess we've got to hope that the LadyBird project succeeds and we get a usable browser sometime before 2030 https://ladybird.org/
Nonono they’re pinky promising that they’re gonna be “””ethical””” so it’s completely ok now or something
FUUUUUUUUCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK
We really don’t need the modern web.
fuck mozilla.
ill be using a fork until an alternative comes around.
did i mention fuck mozilla?
Neat of them to remove the onereason I use Firefox.
Will try out librewolf or, sadly, go back to chromium forks.
Welp,
god damn how they are making creeps like RMS and ESR almost look like good guys in comparison
This is good for GNOME Web
this is so disappointing
w3m it is
Get the Mozilla hater apology form out
I'm just cracking up at all the people who were OMG HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY USE CHROME WHEN FIREFOX EXISTS THEY WILL NEVER DO ANYTHING UNETHICAL as if basically every company won't eventually sell all your data anyway. I can appreciate trying to use the Internet while keeping your personal data safe but it's also a completely unrealistic pipe dream. You can do all the open source homegrown browsers and websites with no script and ad block on a homegrown OS and you're still going to be tracked. Your ISP knows what you're doing, or your VPN does, and it's a dream to think they won't or aren't using your data for something nefarious. Your phone certainly is. Your bank is. Your social media is. Your deviantart or Etsy account is. You name it someone somewhere somehow is tracking you in ways you aren't even considering.
If you don't want to be tracked don't use the Internet. It's just so ridiculous when folks who live under the immense yoke of capitalism pretend like you can magically will yourself out of it by making a personal choice like using a different browser.
I'm gonna get flamed to hell by this post but I really don't care because you know I'm right. You aren't protecting your identity from capitalist exploitation by using Linux or an open source browser. There are certainly plenty of other reasons to do so but that ain't it.
