Firefox

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

Not everyone?

Does anyone?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is just a huge fuck you to their community.

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

This breaks my heart.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The enshitification of Firefox continues 😢

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

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.

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