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
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.
I would love to give Firefox money, as long as they slash their CEO’s ridiculous salary
And slash the CEO as well. Not literally of course.
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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.
I’m paying for a VPN on a monthly basis, as well as for cloud storage - I’d pay for Firefox too. However, they didn’t come up with the idea of subscriptions, but damn ads…
They have subscriptions to finance Firefox, including a VPN - it’s just Mullvad with a different name plus some integrations with the browser, but if you need a VPN and want to help Firefox it’s a good way to do it
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.
what Mozilla is working towards here is probably the best case scenario for a legislated solution in the US’s economy.
No thank you, I don’t want an ad company dictating legislation. Even if it wasn’t in bed with Facebook, I wouldn’t want that.
If it were up to me, ads wouldn’t be legal but we live in this society and it has an economy that won’t ever get there without sweeping change.
Ad companies do and will continue dictating legislation in the US, so I’m not sure why Mozilla now being an ad company and the parent foundation historically being involved in privacy law and lobbying for privacy measures matters to you so much. Its not like the Mozilla foundation has been that radical historically anyway.
All this mozilla hate just further divides the people wanting something better. We domt all have to agree on what better vs best vs perfect is if were all pushing in the direction of better for now.
I can’t believe I need to explain this (and I kind of already have), but you should never put any corporation on a pedestal just because they are proffering the second worst option instead of the very worst.
Ad companies do and will continue dictating legislation in the US
And we shouldn’t normalize it.
Normally, I would mention Facebook driving the way Firefox ads function, but you seem to have no issue with Facebook or even Google being in an incestuous relationship to various degrees with Mozilla, I guess that’s not even a point you’ll care about.
All this mozilla hate just further divides the people wanting something better.
People say this about Mr. Beast and his repulsive children’s snacks and chocolate bars, which he says are a healthy alternative to the very worst options. Or Elon Musk and his electric atrocities. I would be aghast if the government handed monopoly political power over to either of those people.
And yet here you are, insinuating the government should legislate monopoly power over advertisements and simply hand the reigns over to the corporate interests that want to maximize profits at any cost.
And yet here you are, insinuating the government should legislate monopoly power over advertisements and simply hand the reigns over to the corporate interests that want to maximize profits at any cost.
I have no idea where you got this idea I’m advocating for an adtech monopoly.
You continue to put words in my mouth and come at this thread with aggression and demanding statements. You dont just get to demand a debate, and you certinally aren’t going to sway someone’s opinion by putting someone on the defense, putting words in their mouth, and attacking character right out the gate. Edit: apologies, someone else was doing the more aggressive responses. Difficult to keep track of this stuff on mobile sometimes.I have no idea where you got this idea I’m advocating for an adtech monopoly.
You continue to put words in my mouth
what, concretely, do you believe they are offering that is less evil? Their proposed ad tech is no more private than Google’s or Apple’s.
And they can’t afford the army Google and Apple employ to prevent data leaks.
What concrete parts of the Mozilla proposal do you believe is an improvement over Chrome and Safari?
Anonym isnt built into firefox, so idk why you’d think any of this has to do with other browsers.
From a privacy perspective, Anonym is only providing its customers anonymized data which has no direct reference to individual users. That’s way better than say, a site using Facebook pixel being able to learn a hell of a lot about other sites you’ve visited and ads you’ve seen that are served by facebook.
Web platform security isn’t about having an army of people. That’s a gross oversimplification. And Mozilla already operates some massive online services that are juicy targets for hackers anyway, so it’s not like they’re new at this or something.
So by your silence, do you concede that Anonym provides no privacy not already provided by Chrome and Safari? Why are you comparing it to Facebook pixels?
> Anonym isnt built into firefox, so idk why you’d think any of this has to do with other browsers.
Google ads is not built into Chrome either. And yet for some reason Chrome takes more and more control away from the user.
The only reason people use Firefox currently is that people used to trust Mozilla. If Mozilla decides to throw away that trust the obvious decision is for people to switch from #Mozilla #Firefox to a more mainstream browser like Chrome or Safari.
Since you can’t name any reason Anonym is more private than Google Ads, people might as well go with a company that has vastly more expertise in cryptography and security.
> Web platform security isn’t about having an army of people.
Google physically secures data centers across the globe. Both they and Apple have world class expertise in cryptography and hardware, including discovering the family of speculative execution bugs that plague processors. They thoroughly understand the limitations of SGX and related technologies and have designed custom ways to mitigate them. They have world class cryptographers working at the edge of what’s possible with things like homomorphic encryption and MPC.
Let’s be realistic, Anonym is going to run on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. The security will be backed by one of the tech monopolies, and Anonym/Mozilla are now the weak point in the chain.
If I’m choosing between two implementations of the same ad spyware, why would I go with the upstart with less experience and who just did a 180 on their mission?
Dunno why you’re being so aggressive about this.
My first comment that you replied to was primarily about how firefox getting more money through Mozilla being more successful would only serve to benefit forks like librewolf. Its a win-win for Firefox forks for firefox to be more popular and have more resources.
And I also commented about considering what Mozilla is stating their goal as to be a possible better state than the current situation and likely representing the best case, realistic scenario out of the US government in regards to ads and privacy. At rhe end of tje day, the default state of privacy is based on the US laws , bit that doesnt mean that more countries doing better on preivscu legislation otherwise won’t help.
Instead, you are demanding answers from me. I wasn’t here to argue. You could, idk, maybe do some of this leg work yourself rather than demand it from people? If this truly upsets you so much, maybe do something to more productively understand the situation rather than punch people around you who generally also want a more private future with less ads.
So by your silence, do you concede that Anonym provides no privacy not already provided…
What part about my description of Anonym was silence? You could maybe… Go to their site? Read some of the other Mozilla blog posts about it? I’d love more openness from them about how exactly their tools work, and I hope more is shared over time.
Why are you comparing it to Facebook pixels?
Maybe you dont know as much about advertising and tracking on the web as you think. Facebook sells a lot of ads through their sites and apps, but also hosted through clients sites. the data they track to know which ads to serve to eyeballs is gained through Facebook Pixel, which lots of people install on their web sites to gain analytics data from, which both tells facebook who you are when you are on one of their products and also tells other sites using pixel who you are to then target you while present from facebooks dataatores about your activity elsewhere. Putting it on your site also gives you some advantages for selling ads through Facebook, since it gives you targeted data about customers to your site so you can advertise to them where they are anywhere else on the internet. It’s a self-sustaining network of ads > data > ads. Facebook pixel, by its ubiquitous nature, is everywhere which allows facebook to track people across websites to a high degree of accuracy. It’s a big reason you may still feel targeted by ads despite being extremely privacy conscious and blocking ads nearly everywhere. Its just that level of ever-present.
Google analytics provides similar benefits to google for their ad network, it’s just not as blatantly insidious since google doesnt really have a social network to drive more addictive advertising.
This is how targeted ads function. The ads dont have the data, its the other stuff that gets rhe data back to the ad network.
The only reason people use Firefox currently is that people used to trust Mozilla.
Don’t let your bias color your opinion. That may be true of people on the privacy side of the fediverse but its certinally not the only reason people use firefox.
Since you can’t name any reason Anonym is more private than Google Ads, people might as well go with a company that has vastly more expertise in cryptography and security.
See thats the thing: web users aren’t the customers of facebook ads, google ads, anonym, and other ad companies. Businesses are. Businesses either care about being more private, or they care about the appearance of privacy, or they don’t care at all. We as web users have no say in those decisions or priorities in most cases other than to make it such that advertising via trackers is unpopular, ineffective, or pushing to make it illegal.
If you spent some time reading about anonym instead of punching other people in the community, you might have noticed thay Anonym is looking to bypass tracking via tools like facebook pixel and instead using the data that a company has based on user registration, use of the product, etc. Then, they use ML to make assumptions without needing to resort to the level of data collection things like Facebook Pixel do. Plenty of information used to determine what ads to show to someone through detailed tracking can be just as effective as some educated guesses from context in data the company looking to sell ads already has from you being a customer or having provided some intentional information for sales and marketing use, which is exactly what ML is good at. If they truly can provide as good a value to people as Facebook Pixel + Facebook Ads or google analytics + google ads and other competotors without resorting ro invasive tracking, and especially if they can do it cheaper and give companies a marketing win to say they dont use trackers, then there is a chance the future of ads doesnt include tracking. Products being out in rhe market that work well without invading privacy also decreases rhe likliehood of lobbyists blowing up any bills thay would increase privacy. Or at least has way less of it. Its literally the goal of Anonym to provide ads without gaining targeted leads via trackers, but if you didn’t already know that from easy, intentional research, then you aren’t here to get answers, are you?
I’m not here to say Anonym is perfect or that no concerns are valid, but i am here to say that flipping tables and fragmenting the community further isnt going to help anyone. If firefox dies, so too do the forks, so theres reason to hope for the best here and not tilt at windmills.
Again you’re misrepresenting the state of ad tech.
Anonym has trackers. They’re called “private measurement” on their site.
Google and Apple already do what Anonym wants to do. Measurement is privacy preserving, using tools like differential privacy, and the algos are run in Trusted Execution Environments.
It looks to me that Anonym is a copycat solution that has no differentiator over what mainstream browsers are using.
Is there any single reason to prefer them and #Mozilla other than that #Meta doesn’t want to be left behind?
Don’t let your bias color your opinion.
In another comment, you endorsed the AdTech industry lobbying to create an advertisement monopoly. Charitably interpreted, you could only have meant one of two things:
- Mozilla is uniquely positioned to lobby on behalf of this
- All AdTech companies, even Google and Brave, should get a crack at lobbying their products
But since you don’t seem to be very pro Google, I believe it’s the former… And based on Mozilla providing nothing more substantial than any other company engaged in the incestuous and corporate PATCG, it sure does seem you are the one engaging while wearing rose tinted glasses.
How did you get an endorsement for adtech industry lobbying out of my other comments? And how would my comments insinuate that I want them to create a monopoly? You’re engaging in some heavy reframing and redefining of what I’ve stated.
Mozilla deserves criticism. But i dont think it makes any sense to campaign against firefox as is happening all over this post. You are the one who began demanding an argument about Anonym on a comment where I was suggesting that firefox itself is still a net good, especially for people who want to continue to use forks like librewolf. Whether this path Mozilla is on ends up working out or not, firefox is still far superior in all sorts of other domains of privacy and user choice when it comes to a browser, and that allows the forks to exist, too. People should use forks if they want to, but they shouldn’t discourage people from using firefox if they aren’t interested in a fork.
I don’t actually give a crap about Anonym, aside from the mission seeming better, nor do i believe I’ve endorsed Anonym anywhere. All I’ve said is thay they are steps closer to a realistic possibility for the current US political, legal, and economic environment to have any measure of privacy in advertising. You are the one trying to put the endorsement in my mouth and reflavoe my words as advocating for an adtech monopoly.
I’d rather Ads not exist. I’d rather tracking not exist. But Mozilla planting a flag on that hill only means they go extinct unless the political, legal, or economic environment of our society changes. And Mozilla going extinct also means the forks will most likely go with it, and that is a far worse outcome than Mozilla doing some ad stuff in a different business unit.
And based on Mozilla providing nothing more substantial than any other company engaged in the incestuous and corporate
I agree the PATCG is a pit of scum. But while it exists and it influences how Firefox will need to operate to be competitive and work with web standards, why should they be faulted for being a part of it?
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.
Ok, let’s try to narrow this down so our exchanges aren’t vague. To me going from propellers to jet engines would have been “revolutionary”, but to you it may have just been incrementally expanding on the concept of a wing that keeps aircraft afloat.
So for clarity, I’m not suggesting a complete replacement to HTTP. I don’t envision a world where the web as we know gets fully “replaced”. But, I do think that it has out lived its purpose and ultimately we should be seeking a better protocol for information exchange. Or, in other words, I don’t think formulating a solution that can provide privacy, integrity, etc should be restricted to being built on HTTP just because that is what we essentially consider the web to be today.
Fair points. Talking of revolution was indeed a bit vague.
Perhaps I am just more conservative in temperament. I focus on the value in keeping things and improving them. Software lends itself to iterative development where the result can still end up being revolutionary. So my intuition is that if there’s a problem with HTTP then let’s solve that problem rather than throwing the whole thing out and losing all its accrued value. In this case 3 decades of web archives and the skills capital of all the people who make it work.
Sure, HTTP is suboptimal, and as a sometime web developer I can see that HTML is verbose and ugly and was only chosen because XML was fashionable back then. Even the domain name system suffers from original sin: the TLDs should come first, not last!
Human culture is messy. Throwing things out is risky and even reckless given that the alternative is all but certain not to work out as imagined. Much safer to build upon and improve things than to destroy them.
It’s one month later and I am back to reply:
I don’t want to replace HTTP, or the web. But, I also absolutely don’t want to build anything in greater complexity than what we have today. In other words, keep it for what it’s doing now, but having an isolated app/container based platform efficiently served through a browser might just be a good thing for everyone?
5 years ago I was writing rust code compiled to web-assembly and then struggling to get it to run in a browser. I did that because I couldn’t write an efficient enough version of whatever the algorithm I was following in javascript - probably on account of most things being objects. I got it to run eventually with decent enough performance, but it wasn’t fun gluing all that mess together. I think if there was a better delivery platform for WASM built into browsers and maybe eventually mobile platforms, it would probably be better than today’s approach to cross-platform apps being served via HTTP.
This seems to be the argument that the web was designed for documents and that we should stop trying to shoe-horn apps into documents. Hard to disagree at this point, especially when the app in question is, say, a graphics tool, or a game. I still think that, in the case of more document-adjacent applications, a website implemented with best-practices progressive enhancement is about as elegant a solution as is imaginable. Basically: an app which can gracefully degrade to a stateless document, and metamorphose back into an app, depending on system resources and connectivity, and all completely open source and open standards and accessible. That was IMO the promise of the web fulfilled: the separation of content from presentation, and presentation from functionality. Unfortunately there were never more than a tiny minority of websites that achieved this. Hardly any web developers had the deep skill set needed to pull it off.
I was once skeptical about WASM on the grounds that it’s effectively closed-source software - tantamount to DRM. But people reply that functionally there’s not much difference between WASM and a blob of minified JS, and the WASM security can be locked down. So I guess I accept that WASM is now the best the web can hope for.
Hardly any web developers had the deep skill set needed to pull it off.
I’m personally of the opinion it’s not so much an issue of a lack of talent that prevented graceful fallback from being adopted, but simply the amount of extra effort necessary to implement it properly.
In my opinion, to do it properly you can’t make any assumptions about the browser your app is running on; you should never base anything on the reported user agent string. Instead, you need to test for each individual JavaScript, HTML, (or sometimes even CSS) feature and design the experience around having a fallback for when that one singular piece of functionality isn’t present. Otherwise you create a brand new problem where, for example, a forked Firefox browser with a custom user agent string doesn’t get recognized despite having the feature set to provide the full experience, and that person then gets screwed over.
But yeah, that approach is incredibly cumbersome and time consuming to code and test for. Even with libraries that help with properly detecting the capabilities of the browser, you’ll still need to implement granular fallbacks that work for your particular application, and that’s a lot of extra work.
Add to that the fact devs in this field are already burdened with having to support layouts and designs that must scale responsively to everything ranging from a phone screen to a 100" inch TV and it quickly becomes nearly impossible to actually finish any project on a realistic timeline. Doing it that way is a monumental task to undertake, and realistically it probably mainly benefits people that use NoScript or similar – so not a lot of people.
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?
Non targeted advertising isn’t as profitable. (It lacks dark patterns)
For what its worth I still watch over the air TV
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.
Yes, they actually CAN know those things.
How come?
Maybe they’re referring to demographic statistics of listeners/watchers (via surveys or something)
Thats a good point, those ads are far less profitable though, and as a result if mozilla offered that kind of service nobody would use it
Yes they have known these things for decades
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.
Where else do you expect them to get the money needed to maintain a web browser?
Well, how did they do it in 90s-2010s? Genuinely asking. What’s changed that they can no longer do this.
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.
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.
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.
There’s ladybird too, but I hear you.
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.
Netscape, which was essentially the predecessor to Mozilla, was a well funded VC-backed startup. That’s how they did it.
and only now the investors are asking for their return? Or the investors aren’t re-investing and that’s the problem?
Netscape exited to AOL in 1998. The Netscape founder Marc Andreessen has since then been a successful venture capitalist who loves cryptocurrencies and Donald Trump.
oh dear
Mozilla Corporation – which makes Firefox – is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation. The foundation is a nonprofit.
A nonprofit can’t generate a lot of business income unrelated to its mission. Firefox used to generate a lot of income, so it had to be spun off into a taxable entity called Mozilla Corporation.
The corporation doesn’t have investors in the usual sense.
Christ that’s a messy inheritance model. Hopefully Firefox will be spun off to, and will have to focus solely on the browser.
The web got WAY more complicated, at the time all websites were mostly just static.
Users don’t want ads and advertisers want something that can collect as much data as possible.
Mozilla as lost both
Collecting as much data as possible is a means to an end. It’s not valuable in and on itself.
True but good luck getting the high paying advertisers on board.
A free and open internet shouldn’t come at the expense of privacy
Free as in free beer, not as in freedom unfortunately
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.
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.
Exactly how I feel, which is why I’d be psyched if Mozilla joined in so that system could be extended to the browser I use lol
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.
I’d also love if they could do it this way, but I just don’t think it’s realistic tbh. In brave’s system it’s just up to the specific content creator to accept rewards - someone on YouTube could opt in without requiring google themselves to stop showing ads on the site in general (not gonna happen imo). Also, it’s not a reality I’m happy with, but Firefox and brave together are negligible for websites compared to chrome (65% of users use chrome 😭) so expecting websites to globally remove ads for non-chrome specific features is unlikely. Web devs could show ads based on user agent, sure, but that’s more work for the devs themselves compared to just blocking the ads and allowing them to say yes or no to be rewarded for their content.
BAT vs taler wise, I personally don’t care - I feel like the system works with either, so if they wanted to stick with BAT or switch it up I’d be happy either way. The part that’s important for me is the ability to reward creators independently from the websites that host them - like rewarding both is great, but in the case a website hasn’t/won’t done the work to disable ads (cough cough YouTube, Facebook/ig, etc)I still think creators should be able to benefit from the system. The last time I used BAT (which was very early after it launched tbh, things may have really changed) you could buy BAT (or watch ads for it, but the experience was truly shit and I immediately turned it off) and donate directly to websites (I gave some to Wikipedia iirc) or creators (I don’t watch YouTube but I heard some had signed up on there) or just let brave watch the time you spent on sites and divide your BAT between them proportionally monthly(?). Literally the only downside was like you said, adoption wasn’t incredible back then - but keep in mind that Firefox has 2.74% of users and brave is a rounding error. Firefox coming on board could dramatically increase engagement if all websites have to do is say “yea sure” to getting money from a small subset of their users, but I just really don’t see the majority of devs bothering to write new logic and fundamentally change their sites for the fraction of the Firefox+brave users who choose to donate (who are already a tiny fraction of their traffic).
Endgame ofc I agree should be to make tracking ads a thing of the past, but tbh I just don’t see the benefit of convincing websites to stop but only for a fraction of their users - like if you stumbled onto a random website and saw they said they’d opted into the program and wouldn’t track you / show ads… would you disable your adblocker? Imo until a system like this gets EXTREMELY wide adoption we have to be using adblocker anyway, so expecting devs to do a lot of work just so we can run the blockers on their page seems less than ideal to me.My main issue with BAT and crypto in general is value fluctuations. If a website is going to get on board with something, they don’t want to build a system that adjusts the price with the value of the token, so I don’t think it could ever replace ads, only be supplemental.
So that’s why I’m interested in Taler. It can be pegged to whatever currency we want without having any concern for transaction fees or anything like that, even across borders. But honestly, I also don’t care what the currency is, I just want a way to pay a website without seeing ads and without making an account.
The implementation doesn’t need to be that complicated, just a header that provides a unique identifier (can change every request), the entity to get payment from (e.g. Mozilla), and a cryptographic signature from that entity that guarantees funds are available. And then the response would be the same as if the user had a no-ads account, and the website would settle up with the payment entity at some interval. So:
- user interaction - load funds, and a local ledger is kept tracking transactions, which is periodically synced with the browser vendor
- website owner interaction - receive and validate headers in lieu of account details; send invoice each month to browser vendor (same overhead as dealing with one customer)
It wouldn’t need to be Mozilla-specific either, it could be a standard that websites could adopt if they so chose. Mozilla and other browser vendors would be motivated to get sites on board because they’d make a cut from these transactions, and they could build plugins for the more popular platforms so adoption is easier. I’m thinking the big news agencies would be the perfect initial customers here, and they could branch out from there.
Picking a ten transaction tool (like Taler) could simplify things, but honestly anything could be used. Mozilla probably wouldn’t be able to convince Google to join, but it could probably be an extension, and they could maybe convince Apple to join.
I like the idea of GNU Taler a lot. I honestly didn’t realize it was still around. I’ll have to explore its source code sometime.
> But honestly, I also don’t care what the currency is, I just want a way to pay a website without seeing ads and without making an account.
This is what I would like too. I think there are a few reasons it will be hard to switch to this model. Perhaps the main one is that the advertising model allows sites to charge more and more attention for the same (or degraded) service, and that’s harder to do if people see their money being spent. Another is that sites want to be able to charge more for popular content. That’s easy with advertising, but with real payments as the price increases demand will slow down. So it will be harder for sites to get massive views. Finally, I think most sites overvalue their content and direct payment may increase the amount of spam.
> Mozilla probably wouldn’t be able to convince Google to join, but it could probably be an extension, and they could maybe convince Apple to join.
I don’t think Mozilla is interested in this sort of solution. Meta needs Mozilla and the Anonym ad tracking tech to fight the attacks from Google and Apple made in the name of privacy. Meta has tons of money to make that happen. Previously Google needed Mozilla to prove it wasn’t a browser monopoly. Now that source of cash is gone and Meta’s executives are inside Mozilla. Remember when Facebook made a bunch of people sad just to see if they could? Or when they spied on teens’ phone usage through a VPN app? The people who made those decisions are now making decisions for Mozilla.
I think there are a few reasons it will be hard to switch to this model.
It’s the same model advertisers use though. Here’s the flow for ads:
- Ads load from the advertiser, with metadata about which website to pay
- Periodically, advertisers pay the website for showing ads
All that’s changing is the browser vendor is paying instead of the advertiser. So I guess think of Mozilla “paying” for ads, but not showing anything, and Mozilla’s non-ads would show if a given header is present.
Another is that sites want to be able to charge more for popular content. That’s easy with advertising
Sure, and users could decide to see the ads or pay the premium to avoid them.
And yeah, I agree that most sites overvalue their content. This makes that more transparent, so users will gravitate toward the better value. I personally avoid a lot of high quality content because viewing it is too much of a hassel, a privacy violation, or too expensive (I’m not getting another subscription to read a handful of articles).
I don’t think Mozilla is interested in this sort of solution.
Agreed. But unfortunately, Mozilla seems like the best chance we have here. Brave replaces website ads (big no-no for many sites), Chrome doesn’t EB want ad blocking at all, and Microsoft is cooking its own ad network.
So the most obvious niche left is an un-ad network, where you can pay to not see ads. Yet Mozilla wants to make “ethical ads” or whatever, which doesn’t really solve the problem for people who hate ads.
IMO a solution that doesn’t use a blockchain is better. The premise of a blockchain is that either (1) everybody keeps a copy of every website everyone visits, or (2) there’s a trusted party (or parties) somewhere that compresses the database.
We already have trusted parties on the web, and recording that much duplicate data is bad both for resources (bandwidth, energy consumption, disk usage) and for privacy.
There’s a whole field of blockchain forensics and it will get even more interesting as quantum computers with more qubits start spinning up.
Really sites and visitors just have to agree on a signed bill/receipt and hand the transaction over to any existing payment processor.
Your other points are absolutely valid, but privacy-wise I’d much rather have my data associated with an anonymous wallet ID than any payment linked to my real identity
Good point thanks for catching that. The receipt itself can name any anonymous identifier like a crypto address. I was just intending to note that the blockchain is essentially a wasteful timestamp server that doesn’t seem needed for this application.
As a practical matter, the website has your IP, when you visited, what you looked at etc. So you already have to trust them with your privacy. And there’s a question of whether public policy would allow web traffic to be untraceable by default. But certainly the payment processor doesn’t need to know things like which websites you visit.
Minor correction: the website has my VPN’s IP 😂 I don’t trust random websites with shit, personally. The payments not being tied to your real identity would also not make the web any more or less private than it currently is - just the alternative would remove privacy. Again tho, I’m not tied to crypto specifically and would be perfectly happy with any payment system that maintained user privacy. I just don’t want to see a feature roll out that gets people jailed for visiting lgtbq+ sites or some shit when their payment providers are controlled by fascist governments
Why’s it gotta be crypto though
Would you want your full identity being associated with every page you donate to, especially if the donations happen based on you just visiting? Idc if it’s crypto or another alternative personally, but it absolutely has to be properly anonymous or at least have the ability to be. Especially at the time BAT launched, crypto was the only way I personally knew to achieve that - if Mozilla wants to get on board and switch away from crypto to something equally anonymous, I’d be thrilled, but imo this is a good use case for crypto anyway so it doesn’t bother me.
You could have some sort of account with the browser company. They aggregate site visits, then do a monthly payout.
But that would mean storing history for users? Though surely there’s a way to anonimize that.
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.
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.”
This is exactly what I’ve been saying. Shove a virtual tip jar in the browser and let it pay out to websites based on viewership. I could even imagine a model where sites simply say “you must have at least $x in your tip jar to view this site, or pay us directly $y per month” for sites like Wall Street Journal that now paywall everything away
Exactly. I don’t want to have a dozen small subscriptions, I want one pot of money that handles all of my online stuff, with no recurring monthly obligations. If they continue to produce good content, they’ll continue to get my money, and that’s how it should be.
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.
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.
My guy… you linked to a youtube documentary about the questionable economics of gold and a blog post about an unreliable certification group associated with Rainforest Alliance. Not because of anything specific to gold or certifications, but… to illustrate the general idea that corporations can be bad?
The level of generality you have to zoom out to, to associate those to Mozilla, is the same level of zooming out typically used for Qanon conspiracy theorizing.
This is exactly the kind of thing that people make fun of with Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. If you’re willing to zoom out to six degrees, you can connect Kevin Bacon to anyone in the history of cinema. It doesn’t prove that Kevin Bacon is personally connected to everyone in the history of cinema, but what it does prove is the frivolousness of reasoning from such stretched out connections. That goes for historical connections, but also funding connections, and, perhaps most importantly here, for conceptual connections. And I would venture that trains of thought hinging on such remote connections are a hallmark of fuzzy thinking, which is why it’s terrible to go from “Rainforest Alliance bad” to “… and therefore Mozilla ad privacy is bad.”
That’s not to say one shouldn’t be concerned about Mozilla’s venture into advertising, but that this is a terribly incoherent way of showing it, that’s as liable to produce overextended false positives connecting anything to anything as it is to produce any insight.
My entire post was about recognizing trends, catching bad behavior before it’s too late, and did not having a corporate heroes. I’m not sure how you interpreted what I wrote so differently.
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.
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?
I think the fediverse has a better chance of doing more good, and Mozilla should’ve stuck with it.
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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You know the fediverse doesn’t make its own browser right
It serves here as an example of what an Internet without ads might look like. Mozilla has the kind of resources that could’ve really helped its development if they’d been capable and determined enough to succeed in turning whatever crazy project they had in mind when they launched mozilla.social into something practical. If they’d built something good it could have earned them much goodwill and prestige, maybe brought in a little money somehow or other, and gone some way to ridding the Internet of the infestation of adtech that currently afflicts it.
“somehow or other” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Not really. It’s just an aside for the bean-counters.
… but you know, it’s not difficult to think of possibilities. They could have a shiny new line of business providing hosting, spam detection, admin, support, moderation, and other services for whatever new and improved flavour of fedi instances they can create in accordance with all the principles they used to talk about. They could use their marketing team, their money and connections, to become the provider of choice for corporations, governments, and NGOs who don’t yet realize that they need their own instance.
Would’ve been worth a try. Instead, after so much fanfare, they ran a small mastodon instance for a little while and then cancelled the project. I suppose it’s likely that the same kind of fate will befall the new ad tracking stuff before too long.
Maybe the fediverse could define a limited subset of web standards, such that creating an alternative browser capable of rendering all services remains tractable.
Podcasts, by their very nature, do not use any kind of tracking whatsoever (well, besides IP address regions, anyway).
Absolutely no reason for a browser developer to get in on this besides shameless profiteering.
Maybe I’m cynical but I’m thinking whatever platform the podcast is on probably has that tracking information for sale anyway if the podcast producers want it.
That is probably true for podcasts on exclusive platforms like Spotify, but those are few and far between. Even with those, I don’t think Spotify is delivering customized audio files to each user.
It’s more like with broadcast TV, where they have general demographic information that they use to attract advertisers.
The general case is a plain ol’ RSS feed accessed by any arbitrary client. There’s not much data to be tracked there. And there’s not a whole lot you can do with an IP address without introducing highly-visible problems. You can infer the general geographic location of your listeners, but that’s about it. If you try to do personal tracking via IP address, it’s going to be messy. Cell phones don’t typically have persistent unique IPs, and even most laptop users are going to be running on a shared external IP (e.g. at a college campus, business, or any ISP that does not provide users with a dedicated IP). And again, they’re not customizing audio files per user. It’s a mostly static medium.
Erm, podcasts very much get dynamically placed locally-relevant ads based on listener location (probably IP) by now. Which even makes sense, some ads are not legal to run for listeners in other countries, so as long as you conduct business there (say the BBC’s podcasts when listened to from Germany) then they got to abide by local advertising laws and hence need to partially present other ads. And would want to, as not all products of theirs are available in all countries equally (as some are local in their content) and hence they have no reason to run cross-selling ads.
You actually see (hear?) this a lot nowadays. Sure, it doesn’t work with all platforms and definitely not with all providers, but “tracking” for ad-purposes exists in podcasts. For legal reasons, if nothing else.
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
There are so many different ways they could create value.
Such as?
Selling products and services
They’ve tried, notice how many of their products and services with a cost get shut down?
Their power users are too picky for what they offer, and the normie users wouldn’t want a product the power users demand.
It sounds like a management issue. They keep frolicking around and not listening to the userbase. There is no reason other than management that Mozilla couldn’t be a profitable and sustainable company. They create some half baked thing no one asked for and then kill it off.
That’s why you make enterprise products. Companies will continue to pay for services they don’t even use for years because nobody knows what it is or what it does.
And then SimpleLogin comes, as just one example, and succeeds. Mozilla obviously messed up all their efforts, for one reason or another.
what products and services?
Theyve tried that many times already
Not really
They create 100 random things no one wanted and then offered then mostly for free. They have a massive management problem. I think the biggest issue is how risk adverse they are. They don’t want to take big risks so they instead take a bunch of small useful risks that fail. They need to start something and then commit. Also baking more things into Firefox is not the way forward. They need stuff that is separate and useful.
they tried a bucnh of paid services, like their vpn, email alias and data broker remover.
Do you think you can come up with a better idea?
Why not ask the CEO of Mozilla? They’re paid to have all the smart ideas, allegedly.
Refreshing.
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:
- Mozilla’s CEO doubles down on them being an advertising company now
- Mozilla’s Original Sin.
- Mozilla is an advertising company now.
- “Open source, at least in a spiritual sense.”
- CEO pay skyrockets, while Firefox Marketshare nosedives.
- “Today I learned about Mozilla’s new AI startup from my gas pump.”
- “The only way to get a corporation to behave ethically is to create a PR disaster for their comms team.”
- “This is where the Innovation goes in.”
For now I installed Librefox on my devices until I am familiar with the json scripts stripping Firefox from these new features.
*Librewolf
Nice choice though. I personally would recommend the resist fingerprinting toggle extension as well
Same here. I’ve tolerated enough, and now it’s enough. At the same time, I’m keeping my 👀 on Ladybird and Servo development.
I already have a pihole to cut out most of the Mozilla phone home shit, now ads injected on websites with the new update, sponsored links in my address bar and what not…wuggghh. Librewolf is not exonerated strictly but better in privacy for now.
I have been a Firefox user since two decades ago, no shit.
Yep, can’t remember exactly, but 20 something years sounds about right.
Librewolf will do for now. I’m aware that any solution for now is a temporary one. Let’s see where we end up.
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.
There’s actually a whole group called the Acceptable Ads Committee who decides on making advertisements distinct and unintrusive… But they don’t have any policies regarding privacy invasion.
They also partner with popular ad blocking software developers, such as AdBlock Plus.
They also have eight members, via their other name “eyeo”, on the W3C PATCG committee (alongside Mozilla, Facebook, Google, more ad companies).
all the groups you cited? are they just toothless and making no impact because it happened way too late? or do they just have a very trash definition of what is intrusive? The major players still intrude all they like the second adblock isn’t there.
by the time ablock plus’s author tried to meet in a middleground advertising was already so far out of control that the users said “f that, no more” and most of us moved to ublock origin. these pricks need regulated into submission but it’ll never happen.
if it became reasonable, I’d turn off my blocking. ain’t gonna happen and we all know it no use pretending these companies are going to back off thier tactics.
It’s worse: I would say every group is malicious. Ad companies try to look like they are policing themselves, in the hopes that they don’t suffer external regulation. But back when AdBlock Plus started this nonsense, people made uBlock Origin in response. People wouldn’t just take the ad industry at its word.
Now… For some reason, people have changed their minds.
“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?
Millions of creators are making a living through their content.
Spare a moment to think of the poor technofeudalist serf working hard to put food on her family.
They should create a way to pay websites and creators
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.
So what kind of ceo would they get if they paid pennies? That would be a better scenario?
Then it would be “mozilla can’t do shit with that crap ceo”.
I don’t know. I’m really thankful we still have mozilla. May not be perfect but Google is horrible, so.
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.
People are pissed that firefox depends on google’s money, and theyre also pissed when they try to make their own money.
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.
I just don’t want to lose control of my device. I could care less about how poorly run Mozilla is.
Yeah it would be best if they could just create money, like the fed. Problem solved. :p
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…
