our expanded focus on online advertising won’t be embraced by everyone in our community
you don’t say
Targeted ads should be illegal.
Contextual ads are a compromise I would accept. That is, you can buy ads based on the page content, but not the viewer details. So if I’m looking at a website about bikes, you can have bike ads on there. You don’t need to know I’m a xx year old living in zip code 10001. That’s how ads worked for like decades (centuries?). It’s fine.
They get (got?) millions in donations, maybe instead of giving it to their CEO and political activists they put it into the browser they could run their browser without ads. But instead they became the infinite growth (at least attempted anyway, not doing well in the growth department) funded by ads silicon valley company in a nonprofit’s disguise.
Those millions will drain in a few months and at the end of the day they are a company and need to make money. Its not a fairy tale where Mozilla fight against the big tech and ends up winning because of their good will , be realistic we live on a capitalist society , companies need to make money. I prefer to still have them around rather than letting Google being another monopoly on the internet.
While realistic - if nobody tries differently without getting just the massive bag of ceo tax money, it’ll never ever change.
Google actually regularly donates to Mozilla so expect enshitification to continue.
Get was correct. For a long time the vast majority of Mozilla funding is provided by Google,and that will continue.
I’m honestly not against this. I know a lot of people will be furious with Mozilla about doing anything related to advertising, but as the article says:
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.
We may dislike ads, but the vast majority of internet users are not going to engage with content that requires you to pay up front. Creators and journalists need money to survive, and currently, ad-supported viewing is necessary for that to happen.
Instead of just hoping that advertising somehow goes away, I’m glad that Mozilla is working on ways for ads to exist without mass individual user tracking. I wish it wasn’t necessary, but wishing won’t change the world.
With all due respect, Mozilla is now (and, for a while, has been) an ad company. When an ad company tells you ads are necessary, you should not trust them. Plenty of lousy things have been entrenched as social norms, but it is the job of the entrenchers to justify their existence… Which Mozilla is definitely not doing here.
Creators and journalists need money to survive, and currently, ad-supported viewing is necessary for that to happen.
The only way out of this is to block advertising. I, personally, think that you should not have a website if you can’t pay for it yourself, but the only acceptable kind of website income is a paywall. If you just have “better advertising”, advertising will never go away. And I hate ads.
I don’t mind simple static ads on websites as a way to keep them free to use. The reason I use an ad blocker is because websites use ads that flash, play video/audio, and dynamically resize causing the text you are trying to read to jump around and change, making the site unusable. Even with an adblocker, sometimes the only way to use those sites is with reader mode. I disable the adblocker on sites that display reasonable, mostly static advertising. People putting in the work to make the content deserve to eat.
Fuck you, Mozilla. I’ll turn off any option you expose and run away to Librewolf or Fennec as soon as you cross the line. And the line is ublock origin, make no mistake about that. Here’s a tip: Raymond Hill is the most valuable asset Mozilla has and, here’s the kicker – YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE HIM.
Yup people saying run to Firefox yet they walk in line with Google every time as an illusion of choice.
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