13 ms·

Is it worth supporting Firefox?

195 points by Matt3o12_ 8y ago

Matt3o12_ 8y ago
The discussion on r/firefox is also quite interesting: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/8hhss1/is_it_worth_supporting_firefox/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/8hhss1/is_it_worth...
giancarlostoro 8y ago
The biggest irony for me is the fact the new Reddit doesn't fully work for me in Firefox (all plugins / extensions disabled) there seems to be completely missing the ability to toggle / collapse comments from Firefox. Works on Chrome. Not sure who QAd those new changes but they missed one of the features I use most on HN and Reddit...
- Matt3o12_ 8y ago
  You can use old.reddit.com to load the old design or can also change it in your settings (if you are logged in). I have found their new design quite confusing so I reverted back to the old one for now. Tbh I sometimes wish there was a website which uses reddit’s API to display all articles/images using HN design. No clutter, minimal JS and no random scrolling when going back/reloading.
  - jacobparker 8y ago
    Some friends and I have http://f6oclock.com http://f6oclock.com (open-office mode: http://www.f6oclock.com/#ninja http://www.f6oclock.com/#ninja) for reading r/politics (a guilty pleasure). I like minimal UIs. Showing Reddit in an HN skin is a pretty funny idea so I might give it a shot tonight. (It's named f6oclock because there was f5oclock but they made it suck...)
    - Matt3o12_ 8y ago
      Sounds pretty cool! Please feel free to also post it in this thread so I can check it out!
- sirn 8y ago
  Comment collapsing works fine for me on Firefox 59[1] [1]: https://i.imgur.com/rCB8npT.png https://i.imgur.com/rCB8npT.png
  - giancarlostoro 8y ago
    You're missing the [+] next to the up down arrows, try opening it in Chrome to see..
    - icebraining 8y ago
      They show up and work for me on FF59: http://sufi.andreparames.com/Screenshot2018-05-07.png http://sufi.andreparames.com/Screenshot2018-05-07.png
    - sirn 8y ago
      I don't have Chrome installed but I tried in Vivaldi (based on Chromium) and couldn't see the [+] either. Maybe they were A/B testing the collapse UI?
      - giancarlostoro 8y ago
        If that's what that is, I'm not a huge fan of that change. But it's hard to tell, I tried it from Firefox under Linux from different machines and get the same result.
    - floatboth 8y ago
      No, in the new design, collapsing works by clicking the vertical line.
    - kirb 8y ago
      The new design removed them. You click the line below the vote arrows to collapse. Not exactly the most intuitive, but it’s working as intended.
- seanalltogether 8y ago
  Reddit broke for me on Firefox whenever they moved to ssl permanently, hitting the back button always reloads the page rather then going back to the cached state it was in so comments show uncollapsed. HN doesn't seem to have this problem.
  - 3131s 8y ago
    I've noticed that too, is it only a Firefox thing? It's very annoying.
    - Matt3o12_ 8y ago
      I think it is a reddit thing. I’m pretty sure I observed the same behavior when I used chrome (thought this was almost a year ago) and this still happens on my iPad using safari.
- erichdongubler 8y ago
  Have you tried clicking the vertical bar that spans the comment and its children right underneath the voting buttons?
- nxc18 8y ago
  I had the same issue. It was a result of the privacy settings being turned up (I think there's a built-in block list). Edit: dug a little more, it's probably unrelated to your issue, but worth a check.
JepZ 8y ago
Sounds like a major publisher is in big trouble when the management tells the webdevs which browsers they should support.
- Steltek 8y ago
  It's worse than that, if you read more comments, they're actively breaking Firefox (reader mode, etc). It's not the IE era of benign neglect. Some of the comments are helpful in building in a better business case, such as this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/8hha0r/is_it_worth_supporting_firefox/dykdd4j/ https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/8hha0r/is_it_worth_... . In summary /u/wedragon says that users have multiple environments and even multiple browsers. Damaging or disabling Firefox on the desktop may lose the profitable mobile side where the user may have Safari or Chrome.
ppeetteerr 8y ago
Display ads are dead. They have been dying for over a decade. Video ads have picked up some slack but they too are being commoditized. These days, publishers are turning to the paygate model and commerce. Anyone who thinks that ads can pay for publishing are fooling themselves into believing they are part of the top percentile of publishers for whom this works due to sheer impression volume.
- scarface74 8y ago
  There is also the opposite end of the spectrum where advertising works - niche publications by small teams. In the Apple ecosystem there is Daring Fireball. John Gruber charges $6500 a week for one ad that appears on Monday on both the website and RSS Feed and a thank you post at the end of the week. He also charges $5500 for three ads in each podcast.
  - drb91 8y ago
    Yes, and the recommendations are semi meaningful, even. Google and Facebook have no incentive to actually show you ads for good products, just ads you are likely to click.
  - ppeetteerr 8y ago
    It works for some, there is no doubt. I would believe that industry publications (transportation, forestry, etc.), and popular blogs, still make decent coin on selling print ads or sponsorships on the web. It's different to the original post's comments. They are looking at a public audience with ad blockers. Podcasts are a different affair altogether. I would love to see the numbers for those as I'm never in front of my computer when I listen to a podcast and I don't remember the ads long enough to followup even when I'm interested in the product. Also, thanks for sharing that Gruber has a podcast!
    - scarface74 8y ago
      I would love to see the numbers for those as I'm never in front of my computer when I listen to a podcast and I don't remember the ads long enough to followup even when I'm interested in the product. It's not always about direct action, it's often about brand awareness. If you listen to a lot of podcasts, you'll know the first company you think about when you are in the market for: - Mattresses - Eyeglasses - Creating a website quickly - online backup - shaving products. - Mesh networking devices It's an old joke that the definition of a podcast is "two or more white guys talking about tech sponsored by Squarespace". Whether you act right then, when someone asks you to build them a website, your first thought is going to be to point them at SquareSpace. Since the same sponsors keep buying ads on podcast and most of them have coupon codes to tell them where their customers came from, they have metrics that tell them the return on investment.
johnchristopher 8y ago
> I work for a major publisher. Ad-blockers are starting to hurt our revenue big time. No. What's hurting your edit:employer's revenue is years of blinking GIFs, auto-play videos and misleading links thrown between paragraphs. That's the first reason why I started using ad-blockers 15 years ago. The privacy issue is a recent thing. > We're doing a redesign now. Manager says that we should just discourage the users of Firefox (not optimizing for Firefox, and poor UI) from visiting our website as they bring a loss. But that'd just bring chrome users who use ad-block. > Edit: They are even going to approach google and ask them to introduce new API's that allow us to determine if browser really chrome or just chromium, so that we block chromium. And a DRM for website instead of only video DRM that exists, so that user cannot view source code, and no extension can block the ads. Other publishers are doing the same thing. Expect new DRM for HTML5 too. Going to be fun :/.
- Steltek 8y ago
  But what if this publisher never did that? Ad blockers are taking off because of Internet-wide abuses (malware, privacy, gross obnoxiousness). It's a tragedy of the commons. Publishers never got together to regulate themselves so users are now doing it for them.
  - Qwertie 8y ago
    Chrome is now starting to block the worst ad offenders but googles own ads (While not very obnoxious) are still out of line in terms of privacy abuse.
  - lakechfoma 8y ago
    Why can't we have content based ads that are non-intrusive like television and old print media? Yeah they still interject in the middle of content, but not with the same level of deceit as what some ads and sponsored links do on web media. I would disable my adblocker for sites that have ad campaigns not based on "gross obnoxiousness", privacy intrusions, and disregard for if an advertising party is serving up malware. I even miss advertising because I'm not exposed to things I might otherwise be interested in, but I won't accept it in the current form.
sevensor 8y ago
Firefox is a standards-conforming web browser. If some nincompoop puts a web page out there and my browser can't render it, I'm not going back. I make an exception for restaurant websites, because I want to see the menu and they all seem to have been defrauded by the same bad designer.
- twostoned 8y ago
  It was me. I made a fortune.
- Qwertie 8y ago
  The comments said that the reason the page doesn't work on firefox is they detect the user agent for firefox and don't load the css if its found.
  - taneq 8y ago
    Could this finally be the end of every user-agent string starting with Mozilla/?
    - foobarchu 8y ago
      No, because the parent comment here is incorrect. They stated that they are using feature detection, and specifically mention user-agent as something they don't use.
      - computerfriend 8y ago
        The above comment was a joke about user agent strings.
- DanWaterworth 8y ago
  The rule of thumb for restaurants is the poorer the website, the better the food. Restaurants with Flash-only pages that haven't been updated for 15 years are the best. Also, the cleaner the bathrooms, the cleaner the kitchen.
ttctciyf 8y ago
> Also we and some other publishers are even approaching google for full page html drm standard. This means adblock will have a hard time, as they cant modify the requests. Full page drm means that extensions cannot interfere with the page. Esccalation has reached the nuclear phase.
wheaties 8y ago
Yes, it's worth "supporting" Firefox. Just like it's worth it to "support" a standards compatible web browser. I swear we're going backwards in time to IE6 days when everyone built for just one browser and forgot that others existed. Do you really want Google to dictate how the web works? I don't. When Microsoft did this we lost _years_ of meaningful improvements and just recently got the ability to vertically center in CSS.
- Jach 8y ago
  As long as Google keeps pushing forward new useful features with Chrome, people won't care. Even more so if those new features get standardized within a few years. MS dropped the ball by resting on their laurels with IE6+ActiveX (plus the antitrust stuff scared them quite a bit) while the rest of the browser ecosystem innovated and standardized. If MS had instead kept leading the way, things could have played out differently. Instead I feel like we've gone back to IE6 days where there's one browser holding everyone else back, in this case mobile safari (and sometimes desktop safari) causes the most problems in things I work on. IE11 is more tolerable to support for me. I still fight the good fight every now and again on respecting standards, though I get sad when it seems even the standards compliant browsers implement 99.99% of various standards but then each differ on the leftover .01%, leading to shims or workarounds for everyone. It's definitely better than it once was though -- http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ is one of my favorite sites.
- squarefoot 8y ago
  "I swear we're going backwards in time to IE6 days when everyone built for just one browser and forgot that others existed." It's even worse than that. The Internet grew in the hands of engineers who cared about functionality and compatibility first, then about profitability. About two decades ago the industry started turning tables (and later the smartphone boom helped to achieve that goal even more). Now every big player is looking to build its own proprietary environment to get the most users on so that they're forced to use that player resources; this is precisely the mindset the world wide web openness fought against. Sadly they're now fighting back: if yesterday a browser could help to surf 10 sites, today you need 10 apps, each one closed source and doing who knows what under the hood. And this monstrosity is slowly sneaking into the non mobile world hidden behind catchy buzzwords and fancy graphics. Using "the cloud" to store documents and important data seems so cool, but is not that different from going back to the 60s world of dumb terminals and big mainframes where the mainframe owner decided if, how and when the user could access to his/her own data. Both engineers and users are losing control and quite frankly I have no idea of what to do.
kevincennis 8y ago
I honestly wonder if this is real, or the whole story. How many websites are actually doing things that require a meaningful amount of extra effort to support Firefox if it already works in Chrome/Safari? For most websites, cross-browser testing is almost an afterthought these days.
- realusername 8y ago
  > For most websites, cross-browser testing is almost an afterthought these days. Most of my time involves fixing things for IE11 or mobile Safari, Firefox-only or Chrome-only issues are extremely rare.
  - kevincennis 8y ago
    Yeah, agreed. I think I run into more issues in Safari than anywhere else these days. It's always some weird rendering bug that mysteriously vanishes with the old null transform trick.
    - realusername 8y ago
      Yes exactly, it's either that, or some random JS feature which is unsupported or does not work as expected.
rsoto 8y ago
> Extension cannot mimic everything. There are far too many features. NaCl, other css values. Also we use obfuscated js to resist reverse engineering. There are like 100 features, and more in future that'll be chrome specific. Average time to reverse engineer a 10mb obfuscated js file is like a 1 month. We're safe for 10 years. I'm against this shit tho. Not to be dismissive, but this sounds like he's trolling. One thing is not actively supporting one browser because «it's at the bottom of the list» and another thing is actively trying to detect it. Also I don't think he understands what obfuscated JS means, and is he seriously talking about having a 10MB JS file? Just for a major publisher? For comparison: NYT's home page is 1.6MB, the whole document. The thing that totally gives it's trolling away is the 10 years «safe thing».
- FRex 8y ago
  I agree. One time he (or she) is against that, another time he acts cocky like saying they'll now sabotage opera too (after being told it has a built in ad blocker) or bringing up existing DRM in a tone that is less like being sad those ideas are getting into web and more like he wants the same in html. It also starts reasonably with just focusing on chrome and then goes to asking google for a html drm, asking google to help sabotage chromium users, blocking firefox using obfuscated 10 mb js even though the site works well on ie8, vague threats of html drm coming soon to end ad blocking in an accusatory tone, saying they do all this to cut costs because each page they send is 3 megs and ff users are freeloaders, etc. Plus the weird title ('should we support' vs. 'we sabotage'), going with this to reddit instead of anonymously tipping fsf, eff or mozilla off (if he's already willing to leak that info and the fact he works there, the latter could remain hidden if he tipped these orgs off), etc. Edit: oh, and since css and images are loaded via js (on which he also comments by saying that people using no script 'ironically make their job easier') wouldn't that 10 mb one cause a flicker (fast internet) or a broken website for several seconds (slow internet) during at least the first load uncached load? And 2-3 megs of content for the few freeloading ff users is too much or can't be cdn'd but pushing that 10 meg js to everyone and taking up time of web devs and business-y people (for lobbying for drm at google or wherever) is fine and cheaper?
  - rsoto 8y ago
mathieubordere 8y ago
So, why would your manager want to optimize for the browser with the highest average revenue per user? e.g. a browser with 1 user that generates $100 vs a browser with 1K users that generate $1 on average. Your manager would optimize for the former?
teamhappy 8y ago
This is obviously pretty weird and stupid on many levels, but there is one interesting fact hidden in one of the authors responses. They ended up in this (really just incredibly stupid) situation because they use feature detection and non-standard features only available in Chrome (or WebKit maybe).
jasonkostempski 8y ago
Firefox isn't to blame. Users that are proactive about their web browsing (hopefully a rapidly growing number) often choose Firefox because it offers the most control. These aren't the types of users that are going to switch to a different browser to render a random site, they'll just ignore the site. If that's what the manager wants, I think they're on the right path. Seems shortsighted to me, but they're still in the online publishing business, playing the same old cat-and-mouse game, trying to live off antiquated ad-tech, so I'm guessing they're not very forward-thinking.
ryandrake 8y ago
This isn't 2002. If you're writing a standards-compliant web page, you're already supporting Firefox (and all other browsers). Why go out of your way, investing the extra effort needed into not supporting a browser?
solarkraft 8y ago
Chrome user: "Let's check out website X" Firefox user: "It's hopelessly broken"
stuaxo 8y ago
If it's a small fix, just drop it into some other change and don't mention it. Sometimes it's the only way to do the right thing is in spite of management.
- Stephen304 8y ago
  I get the feeling that this user is either trolling or not being honest about their position on this. Or both. https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/8hhss1/is_it_worth_supporting_firefox/dykmd45/?context=10000 https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/8hhss1/is_it_worth...
627467 8y ago
How hard is it to sell a fixed <img /> tag or any block of text within an article? Sell it as "this content will stay there for as long as the page is published". The problem is that every major publisher has bought into centralized ad brokers. Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content business online. Publishers should know their audience better than ad servers. This is what is killing the business: content creators stopped caring about their audience.
- rodorgas 8y ago
  Companies simply get better leads with tracking. You don’t really know about your audience when you are online, because there are so much traffic and so many users.
  - 627467 8y ago
    I heard and even understand the truth in that argument, it even worked well in the past 10 years. But I think the content business has reached a point where it needs a new solutions. Paywalling is only one of them.
- juliangoldsmith 8y ago
  >Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content business online. Publishers should know their audience better than ad servers. Part of the problem is that Google and Facebook actually can know the audience better than the content creator. A content creator only knows that the reader is interested in, say, cooking. Facebook and Google know most everything the reader is interested in, and what sort of ads the reader actually interacts with. They can use all of that information to maximize the chance the reader will click on an ad. The problem now is that because of how effective Google' and Facebook's ads are, a single click on an ad is basically worthless. Someone who's trying to sell a product isn't going to pay 100 times as much per click to use a smaller ad network, they're going to go with whoever can give them the most impact.
DanBC 8y ago
There's a bunch fo websites (Atlantic being notable) that tell me I'm using an ad-blocker and ask me to turn it off. I'm not. I'm using stock Firefox. So, I guess their conversation goes: > We block Firefox (but don't know that we do so) > We don't see many Firefox users > Why do we optimise for Firefox? It's mildly frustrating that they block users for dumb reasons. (Again, I'm not blocking ads). But it's only a mild frustration - there are a gajillion places to get news that are better than Atlantic.
- adrian1973 8y ago
  They are probably detecting that some ad/tracking cookies are not being set... because by default in FF tracking protection is enabled.
  - Sylos 8y ago
    It's only enabled by default in Private Browsing. And it doesn't actively block cookies (they obviously do get cleared at the end of your Private Browsing session, though).
phyzome 8y ago
> Ad reinsertion solutions exist for Chrome, but they also dont support Firefox. "Ad reinsertion". You're trying to bypass the user's self-determination on the web. Good luck, bozo. > They are even going to approach google and ask them to introduce new API's that allow us to determine if browser really chrome or just chromium, so that we block chromium. And now we see the real question: "Is there some way to lock our users into browsers that give more control to us than the users?"
- pritambaral 8y ago
  By "Ad reinsertion", they mean the paid advertisement inclusion programmes of Adblock and Adblock Plus, which is opt-out and pretty shady in the first place. They think that Adblock and Adblock Plus don't exist on Firefox, and that people who use uBlock Origin on Firefox will not use uBlock Origin on Chrome too if they were somehow forced to use Chrome.
  - Washuu 8y ago
    No, they are talking about services such as Instart. Javascript that runs on the page, detects the advertisements are being blocked, does a redirect through Instart's proxy to insert hard coded advertisements, and redirects back. Instart only works on Chrome.
    - pritambaral 8y ago
      I don't know where you're getting that — and I couldn't find any mention of Instart with a Ctrl-F on that page — but my source is this comment by the OP: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/8hha0r/is_it_worth_supporting_firefox/dykjb5o/ https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/8hha0r/is_it_worth_... Besides, wouldn't something like that itself get blocked?
some_account 8y ago
Computer savvy users are never going to accept the web flashing, blinking, popping, interrupting, lagging.... And there will only be more of us in the future when the new generation grows up. Your revenue model is dying and you are trying to save it by making the web even worse. Its a race to the bottom.
- OtterCoder 8y ago
  > There will be more of us That doesn't look to be the case. While the "net native" generation is more likely to turn to digital content than other media, studies show that computer literacy, in the sense of understanding the basic workings of a computer, is on the decline.
devit 8y ago
This is one of the problems with making decisions based on "data". Obviously, the benefit of having users is not only in the profit from ads, but rather from having your site be popular, recommended to friends, posted in links in discussions, training Google's algorithms by people clicking on their search results, having people willing to subscribe to future paid services or buy future products, etc. But since those things aren't measurable in the short term, they get completely discounted by naive businesspeople, with bad results like this.
yakcyll 8y ago
It strikes me in a weird way that power users are brought up in one of the comments as the main users of Firefox. It's obviously a major stretch to argue the counter-argument, that Chrome and others must be mostly used by casual users, but the idea that those people are somehow more accepting of bullshit UX is, well, just wrong. They are either even more frustrated, not knowing how to deal with it, or have already developed habits to sieve the noise out, definitely not bringing any additional advertisement revenue.
nukeop 8y ago
This is a totalitarian publisher's wet dream, to strongarm users to pay them or look at they ads whether they like it or not. If somebody's using adblockers, they're not going to be converted by your ads either way. If you introduce bothersome mechanisms preventing me from interacting with your website on my terms, I'm just going to leave and never come back. This is exactly why we need Firefox and other browsers, so that Google can't dictate what the web has to look like. They'd like to ideally introduce a tracking id in everything you ever do everywhere, it's up to us to stop them. Anyway, no matter what kind of mechanism is introduced, there will be an equal and proportionate response to mitigate it within a week. You can't force people to watch ads they don't care about, and that's it. The sooner you accept it, the smaller losses you'll incur.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
yosito 8y ago
This discussion makes me wonder why I haven't seen more server side ad solutions that render ads into a page in a way that's harder to detect or block. Of course, advertisers could find ways to abuse that too and then adblockers would have to up their game. I think the best strategy is to render a fallback into your page that looks like an image related to your content and then replace that image on they fly with unobtrusive ads that respect the user experience. If people block the adds they'll see the fallback which is an opportunity to plead your case to users and ask for donations, subscriptions or permission to show respectful ads.
- pritambaral 8y ago
  There have been attempts to render ads with the page. For example, Facebook and some news sites do it. It's just that it is bad UX to not clearly mark ads as ads. When Facebook launched sponsored ads and posts embedded in its feed, it was only a short while before DOM-manipulating ad blockers could block it because Facebook had to mark those "posts" as "sponsored".
  - yosito 8y ago
    That's a good point. But I think there are some ways around that which aren't too intrusive. If you just render a fallback on the server side with a message asking users to support you in some way, and then replace that fallback with your ads, you can mark the ads as sponsored without having to mark the fallback. And if you have image based ads, you could mark the image itself using server-side processing to add some sort of watermark rather than a DOM-based marker.
- phicoh 8y ago
  A problem I can see with that approach is that code that is served from the content server would have to do browser fingerprinting before ads can be auctioned by the ad network. In the current setup with third part tracking cookies, the ad network sees individual users. If you route everything through the content providers servers, then the ad network may have to work a lot harder to figure out who is who. And the ad networks have no incentive to do so (at the moment)
- 8y ago
_bxg1 8y ago
When ads stop tracking me, serving malware, and showing fake download buttons, I'll turn off my ad-blocker. Usually if there's a site I visit frequently, I try turning it off to support them. But if the ads are abrasive or misleading, I turn it right back on. Here's an example of a non-skeezy ad provider which would not cause me to turn my ad-blocker back on. https://www.buysellads.com https://www.buysellads.com
- stordoff 8y ago
  It can also push _paying_ customers away. There was a site I paid to use for a few years until one of their sister sites (which I only used infrequently so didn't have a paid membership for) started showing large auto-playing video ads in a way that was deliberately hard to block (div ids were 30-odd random characters). I ended up canceling my subscription soon after.
callahad 8y ago
The Web works because no single vendor has absolute control over the platform, and the competing browsers can keep each other in check. Hell of a thing to watch people in such a hurry to throw that all away. No one would ever abuse a platform monopoly, would they? (For disclosure, I work for Mozilla. But I wouldn't want us to control the Web, either: competition and open standards are key.)
floatboth 8y ago
> And a DRM for website instead of only video DRM that exists, so that user cannot view source code, and no extension can block the ads Good luck with that. You could render an article into a DRM'd video, and utterly destroy SEO, accessibility, readability, and the website's whole reputation. "DRM for news articles" makes zero sense. Movie DRM works because HDCP decrypts the video on the display. ("works" - pirates got the private keys anyway :D) You can't DRM software on a general purpose computer. You can try, and it would be cracked soon. Even the best attempts (Denuvo) get cracked.
- cesarb 8y ago
  > Movie DRM works because HDCP decrypts the video on the display. No, it doesn't. The movie is decrypted on the player, uncompressed, and encrypted again with HDCP for the display.
  - amdavidson 8y ago
    > ...encrypted again with HDCP for the display And after it is encrypted again "for" the display, the display decrypts it, closing the loop, and allowing the DRM to be at least more than trivially functional.
- gruez 8y ago
  >You can't DRM software on a general purpose computer. You can with SGX
  - floatboth 8y ago
    Well, that's not exactly a general purpose computer anymore :)
gwbas1c 8y ago
The bigger problem is that publishers are loosing control over their advertisers. The reason why I block ads is that they turn great websites into horrible experiences. Remember, the way ads work today is that the web site is delivered to your browser, and then ad networks' Javscript comes in and mangles the page to insert ads wherever the ad network pleases. In the days of paper, editors laid out where the ads went in newspapers and magazines. There weren't obnoxious blinking ads that would move the text around while you were reading it. Now, publishers hand control over where ads go to the advertisers themselves. The publishers are in denial about the problem they created.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  > There weren't obnoxious blinking ads that would move the text around while you were reading it. No, instead newspapers went for screaming headlines (big text, celebrities in bikinis) and ads went for whatever caught the attention most. Don't idealize newspapers or newspaper ads, they're in the exact same market and were trying to optimize for maximum exposure and revenue just as much as websites are.
- criddell 8y ago
  > The bigger problem is that publishers are loosing control over their advertisers. I've never understood this. There are a lot of magazines that clearly spend considerable resources making their printed page look exactly how they want. Then when they publish that same content online, they apparently don't care at all about the presentation. Matthew Butterick's great article Bomb in the Garden makes this point very well. It's from 5 years ago but I think it is more relevant today than ever.
kibwen 8y ago
Note that this is exactly why Firefox has resisted shipping with adblock on by default for years now. It's not just about websites deciding not to support Firefox, it's about websites like this one deciding to go out of their way to break on Firefox.
adamc 8y ago
Here's the reality: Most people won't pay for most sites. I get that. I'm the same. I have subscriptions to a handful of high value sites (e.g., NYT), but most sites just don't deliver enough value to make that viable. I could live with advertising if it were unobtrusive, useful, and didn't try to track me. Very little advertising is like that, so I block it. Yep, that means marginal sites will die. I can live with that. It is still possible to sell magazines and other media. No one was promised that the web would be a perfect was to sell media. If it's only a good way to exchange information (for free), that is not a bad thing. I don't think it is a tragedy if sites collapse that cannot find a viable way to serve me. I don't give a rat's ass about serving advertisers.
Arr0wH34D 8y ago
They also opened an interesting issue on Brave browser: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/14041 https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/14041 Looks like their feature detection is based on user agent, and they are angry at Brave for using an user agent that resemble the one Chrome is using.
- thebouv 8y ago
  Oh, the issue has devolved into threats against Brave now by FineHub. https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/14041 https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/14041
leephillips 8y ago
I recently switched from uBlock origin to using a hosts file (there are several going around; I got mine from http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/). This seems to work better, overall, although uBlock origin was quite good. Less fuss, smaller resource usage. I'm happy to view self-hosted ads, but don't feel bad about blocking connections to a list of sites that track, invade privacy, or worse.
daemin 8y ago
A lot of the comments on the article remind me of the time people put those little gifs on their homepage to note that "optimised for Netscape Navigator" or "optimised for IE". Nice to see that Chrome is today's IE.
wybiral 8y ago
I block content [1] on Chrome but maybe I'm in a smaller group. [1] Not ads. Just scripts and other potentially dangerous stuff but since most ads use scripts I generally block ads.
mcintyre1994 8y ago
Whatever these ad reinsertion methods that work for Chrome but not Firefox are, they're encouraging me to keep using Firefox :)
potench 8y ago
The real question for media publishers (one I've already experienced at a large sports agency): "is it worth supporting the web". It is worth it, there's still a lot of traffic, but it's a different model and elegant, interactive browser experiences aren't the target. Minutes spent, repeat, and quality traffic continues to move toward native apps. GDPR and ad-blocking represent increasing risk + decreasing revenue with the status-quo media web experience. So the status-quo is becoming prioritizing search engines, social scrapers, and a well-designed URL funnel that pushes traffic toward your native app where you can still monetize with display ads, reliably autoplay video with client-side video ads, and push notifications that result in actual traffic. There are strategies for monetizing on the web (server-side ad stitching, integrated marketing, pay-gates, hell - just buy traffic to your site that you know doesn't have ad-blockers) but sometimes it's counterintuitive to funneling traffic to native. Ultimately it requires investment in Product/Creative/UX/Dev to define and sell-through a vision/strategy for web to decision-makers when those decision-makers are seeing numbers that suggest even the investment to define the web strategy is a poor investment - let alone investment in developing and maintaining it.
gkya 8y ago
I don't use an ad blocker. I have JS turned off, thus don't see ads. When I encounter a website that's interesting enough to browse even though it does not work w/o JS (rare), I open it up in Chromium (which I actually keep around to use a couple web apps that I have to use). And every time I do that I realise what a huge piece of shit online publishing has become. Almost all websites that publish professionally are just overengineered crapware, viable only because the bubble that's the ads business. Luckily there's a sane subset of the internet that I can use without thouching all this crap most of the time. If their business model is failing due to us not turning around and bending over, let it be so. Who cares, apart from them?
Net-effects 8y ago
Like in a Comic, 'seeking minimising differences'-user: But buying/downloading runs in browsers - so the browser is like a shopping mall and the net-effect (of internet shopping) is: 'dying inner city shops, franchise shops, empty shopping malls...-but wait it happens in your community, hey! - abstract yourself (-;
onyva 8y ago
I agree with the comment above. Most of the sites that exist to drive revenue from traffic (content farms and such) are essentially dispensable. If they don’t work I won’t be back. If it’s a service, there will always be a competitor. The only one getting screwed here is the business not taking care to support all would be customers.

195 points by Matt3o12_ 8y ago

The discussion on r/firefox is also quite interesting: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/8hhss1/is_it_worth_supporting_firefox/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/8hhss1/is_it_worth...

giancarlostoro 8y ago

The biggest irony for me is the fact the new Reddit doesn't fully work for me in Firefox (all plugins / extensions disabled) there seems to be completely missing the ability to toggle / collapse comments from Firefox. Works on Chrome. Not sure who QAd those new changes but they missed one of the features I use most on HN and Reddit...

Matt3o12_ 8y ago
You can use old.reddit.com to load the old design or can also change it in your settings (if you are logged in). I have found their new design quite confusing so I reverted back to the old one for now. Tbh I sometimes wish there was a website which uses reddit’s API to display all articles/images using HN design. No clutter, minimal JS and no random scrolling when going back/reloading.
- jacobparker 8y ago
  Some friends and I have http://f6oclock.com http://f6oclock.com (open-office mode: http://www.f6oclock.com/#ninja http://www.f6oclock.com/#ninja) for reading r/politics (a guilty pleasure). I like minimal UIs. Showing Reddit in an HN skin is a pretty funny idea so I might give it a shot tonight. (It's named f6oclock because there was f5oclock but they made it suck...)
  - Matt3o12_ 8y ago
    Sounds pretty cool! Please feel free to also post it in this thread so I can check it out!
sirn 8y ago
Comment collapsing works fine for me on Firefox 59[1] [1]: https://i.imgur.com/rCB8npT.png https://i.imgur.com/rCB8npT.png
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  You're missing the [+] next to the up down arrows, try opening it in Chrome to see..
  - icebraining 8y ago
    They show up and work for me on FF59: http://sufi.andreparames.com/Screenshot2018-05-07.png http://sufi.andreparames.com/Screenshot2018-05-07.png
  - sirn 8y ago
    I don't have Chrome installed but I tried in Vivaldi (based on Chromium) and couldn't see the [+] either. Maybe they were A/B testing the collapse UI?
    - giancarlostoro 8y ago
      If that's what that is, I'm not a huge fan of that change. But it's hard to tell, I tried it from Firefox under Linux from different machines and get the same result.
  - floatboth 8y ago
    No, in the new design, collapsing works by clicking the vertical line.
  - kirb 8y ago
    The new design removed them. You click the line below the vote arrows to collapse. Not exactly the most intuitive, but it’s working as intended.
seanalltogether 8y ago
Reddit broke for me on Firefox whenever they moved to ssl permanently, hitting the back button always reloads the page rather then going back to the cached state it was in so comments show uncollapsed. HN doesn't seem to have this problem.
- 3131s 8y ago
  I've noticed that too, is it only a Firefox thing? It's very annoying.
  - Matt3o12_ 8y ago
    I think it is a reddit thing. I’m pretty sure I observed the same behavior when I used chrome (thought this was almost a year ago) and this still happens on my iPad using safari.
erichdongubler 8y ago
Have you tried clicking the vertical bar that spans the comment and its children right underneath the voting buttons?
nxc18 8y ago
I had the same issue. It was a result of the privacy settings being turned up (I think there's a built-in block list). Edit: dug a little more, it's probably unrelated to your issue, but worth a check.

JepZ 8y ago

Sounds like a major publisher is in big trouble when the management tells the webdevs which browsers they should support.

Steltek 8y ago
It's worse than that, if you read more comments, they're actively breaking Firefox (reader mode, etc). It's not the IE era of benign neglect. Some of the comments are helpful in building in a better business case, such as this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/8hha0r/is_it_worth_supporting_firefox/dykdd4j/ https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/8hha0r/is_it_worth_... . In summary /u/wedragon says that users have multiple environments and even multiple browsers. Damaging or disabling Firefox on the desktop may lose the profitable mobile side where the user may have Safari or Chrome.

ppeetteerr 8y ago

Display ads are dead. They have been dying for over a decade. Video ads have picked up some slack but they too are being commoditized. These days, publishers are turning to the paygate model and commerce. Anyone who thinks that ads can pay for publishing are fooling themselves into believing they are part of the top percentile of publishers for whom this works due to sheer impression volume.

scarface74 8y ago
There is also the opposite end of the spectrum where advertising works - niche publications by small teams. In the Apple ecosystem there is Daring Fireball. John Gruber charges $6500 a week for one ad that appears on Monday on both the website and RSS Feed and a thank you post at the end of the week. He also charges $5500 for three ads in each podcast.
- drb91 8y ago
  Yes, and the recommendations are semi meaningful, even. Google and Facebook have no incentive to actually show you ads for good products, just ads you are likely to click.
- ppeetteerr 8y ago
  It works for some, there is no doubt. I would believe that industry publications (transportation, forestry, etc.), and popular blogs, still make decent coin on selling print ads or sponsorships on the web. It's different to the original post's comments. They are looking at a public audience with ad blockers. Podcasts are a different affair altogether. I would love to see the numbers for those as I'm never in front of my computer when I listen to a podcast and I don't remember the ads long enough to followup even when I'm interested in the product. Also, thanks for sharing that Gruber has a podcast!
  - scarface74 8y ago
    I would love to see the numbers for those as I'm never in front of my computer when I listen to a podcast and I don't remember the ads long enough to followup even when I'm interested in the product. It's not always about direct action, it's often about brand awareness. If you listen to a lot of podcasts, you'll know the first company you think about when you are in the market for: - Mattresses - Eyeglasses - Creating a website quickly - online backup - shaving products. - Mesh networking devices It's an old joke that the definition of a podcast is "two or more white guys talking about tech sponsored by Squarespace". Whether you act right then, when someone asks you to build them a website, your first thought is going to be to point them at SquareSpace. Since the same sponsors keep buying ads on podcast and most of them have coupon codes to tell them where their customers came from, they have metrics that tell them the return on investment.

johnchristopher 8y ago

> I work for a major publisher. Ad-blockers are starting to hurt our revenue big time. No. What's hurting your edit:employer's revenue is years of blinking GIFs, auto-play videos and misleading links thrown between paragraphs. That's the first reason why I started using ad-blockers 15 years ago. The privacy issue is a recent thing. > We're doing a redesign now. Manager says that we should just discourage the users of Firefox (not optimizing for Firefox, and poor UI) from visiting our website as they bring a loss. But that'd just bring chrome users who use ad-block. > Edit: They are even going to approach google and ask them to introduce new API's that allow us to determine if browser really chrome or just chromium, so that we block chromium. And a DRM for website instead of only video DRM that exists, so that user cannot view source code, and no extension can block the ads. Other publishers are doing the same thing. Expect new DRM for HTML5 too. Going to be fun :/.

Steltek 8y ago
But what if this publisher never did that? Ad blockers are taking off because of Internet-wide abuses (malware, privacy, gross obnoxiousness). It's a tragedy of the commons. Publishers never got together to regulate themselves so users are now doing it for them.
- Qwertie 8y ago
  Chrome is now starting to block the worst ad offenders but googles own ads (While not very obnoxious) are still out of line in terms of privacy abuse.
- lakechfoma 8y ago
  Why can't we have content based ads that are non-intrusive like television and old print media? Yeah they still interject in the middle of content, but not with the same level of deceit as what some ads and sponsored links do on web media. I would disable my adblocker for sites that have ad campaigns not based on "gross obnoxiousness", privacy intrusions, and disregard for if an advertising party is serving up malware. I even miss advertising because I'm not exposed to things I might otherwise be interested in, but I won't accept it in the current form.

sevensor 8y ago

Firefox is a standards-conforming web browser. If some nincompoop puts a web page out there and my browser can't render it, I'm not going back. I make an exception for restaurant websites, because I want to see the menu and they all seem to have been defrauded by the same bad designer.

twostoned 8y ago
It was me. I made a fortune.
Qwertie 8y ago
The comments said that the reason the page doesn't work on firefox is they detect the user agent for firefox and don't load the css if its found.
- taneq 8y ago
  Could this finally be the end of every user-agent string starting with Mozilla/?
  - foobarchu 8y ago
    No, because the parent comment here is incorrect. They stated that they are using feature detection, and specifically mention user-agent as something they don't use.
    - computerfriend 8y ago
      The above comment was a joke about user agent strings.
DanWaterworth 8y ago
The rule of thumb for restaurants is the poorer the website, the better the food. Restaurants with Flash-only pages that haven't been updated for 15 years are the best. Also, the cleaner the bathrooms, the cleaner the kitchen.

ttctciyf 8y ago

> Also we and some other publishers are even approaching google for full page html drm standard. This means adblock will have a hard time, as they cant modify the requests. Full page drm means that extensions cannot interfere with the page. Esccalation has reached the nuclear phase.

wheaties 8y ago

Yes, it's worth "supporting" Firefox. Just like it's worth it to "support" a standards compatible web browser. I swear we're going backwards in time to IE6 days when everyone built for just one browser and forgot that others existed. Do you really want Google to dictate how the web works? I don't. When Microsoft did this we lost _years_ of meaningful improvements and just recently got the ability to vertically center in CSS.

Jach 8y ago
As long as Google keeps pushing forward new useful features with Chrome, people won't care. Even more so if those new features get standardized within a few years. MS dropped the ball by resting on their laurels with IE6+ActiveX (plus the antitrust stuff scared them quite a bit) while the rest of the browser ecosystem innovated and standardized. If MS had instead kept leading the way, things could have played out differently. Instead I feel like we've gone back to IE6 days where there's one browser holding everyone else back, in this case mobile safari (and sometimes desktop safari) causes the most problems in things I work on. IE11 is more tolerable to support for me. I still fight the good fight every now and again on respecting standards, though I get sad when it seems even the standards compliant browsers implement 99.99% of various standards but then each differ on the leftover .01%, leading to shims or workarounds for everyone. It's definitely better than it once was though -- http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ is one of my favorite sites.
squarefoot 8y ago
"I swear we're going backwards in time to IE6 days when everyone built for just one browser and forgot that others existed." It's even worse than that. The Internet grew in the hands of engineers who cared about functionality and compatibility first, then about profitability. About two decades ago the industry started turning tables (and later the smartphone boom helped to achieve that goal even more). Now every big player is looking to build its own proprietary environment to get the most users on so that they're forced to use that player resources; this is precisely the mindset the world wide web openness fought against. Sadly they're now fighting back: if yesterday a browser could help to surf 10 sites, today you need 10 apps, each one closed source and doing who knows what under the hood. And this monstrosity is slowly sneaking into the non mobile world hidden behind catchy buzzwords and fancy graphics. Using "the cloud" to store documents and important data seems so cool, but is not that different from going back to the 60s world of dumb terminals and big mainframes where the mainframe owner decided if, how and when the user could access to his/her own data. Both engineers and users are losing control and quite frankly I have no idea of what to do.

kevincennis 8y ago

I honestly wonder if this is real, or the whole story. How many websites are actually doing things that require a meaningful amount of extra effort to support Firefox if it already works in Chrome/Safari? For most websites, cross-browser testing is almost an afterthought these days.

realusername 8y ago
> For most websites, cross-browser testing is almost an afterthought these days. Most of my time involves fixing things for IE11 or mobile Safari, Firefox-only or Chrome-only issues are extremely rare.
- kevincennis 8y ago
  Yeah, agreed. I think I run into more issues in Safari than anywhere else these days. It's always some weird rendering bug that mysteriously vanishes with the old null transform trick.
  - realusername 8y ago
    Yes exactly, it's either that, or some random JS feature which is unsupported or does not work as expected.

rsoto 8y ago

> Extension cannot mimic everything. There are far too many features. NaCl, other css values. Also we use obfuscated js to resist reverse engineering. There are like 100 features, and more in future that'll be chrome specific. Average time to reverse engineer a 10mb obfuscated js file is like a 1 month. We're safe for 10 years. I'm against this shit tho. Not to be dismissive, but this sounds like he's trolling. One thing is not actively supporting one browser because «it's at the bottom of the list» and another thing is actively trying to detect it. Also I don't think he understands what obfuscated JS means, and is he seriously talking about having a 10MB JS file? Just for a major publisher? For comparison: NYT's home page is 1.6MB, the whole document. The thing that totally gives it's trolling away is the 10 years «safe thing».

FRex 8y ago
I agree. One time he (or she) is against that, another time he acts cocky like saying they'll now sabotage opera too (after being told it has a built in ad blocker) or bringing up existing DRM in a tone that is less like being sad those ideas are getting into web and more like he wants the same in html. It also starts reasonably with just focusing on chrome and then goes to asking google for a html drm, asking google to help sabotage chromium users, blocking firefox using obfuscated 10 mb js even though the site works well on ie8, vague threats of html drm coming soon to end ad blocking in an accusatory tone, saying they do all this to cut costs because each page they send is 3 megs and ff users are freeloaders, etc. Plus the weird title ('should we support' vs. 'we sabotage'), going with this to reddit instead of anonymously tipping fsf, eff or mozilla off (if he's already willing to leak that info and the fact he works there, the latter could remain hidden if he tipped these orgs off), etc. Edit: oh, and since css and images are loaded via js (on which he also comments by saying that people using no script 'ironically make their job easier') wouldn't that 10 mb one cause a flicker (fast internet) or a broken website for several seconds (slow internet) during at least the first load uncached load? And 2-3 megs of content for the few freeloading ff users is too much or can't be cdn'd but pushing that 10 meg js to everyone and taking up time of web devs and business-y people (for lobbying for drm at google or wherever) is fine and cheaper?
- rsoto 8y ago

mathieubordere 8y ago

So, why would your manager want to optimize for the browser with the highest average revenue per user? e.g. a browser with 1 user that generates $100 vs a browser with 1K users that generate $1 on average. Your manager would optimize for the former?

teamhappy 8y ago

This is obviously pretty weird and stupid on many levels, but there is one interesting fact hidden in one of the authors responses. They ended up in this (really just incredibly stupid) situation because they use feature detection and non-standard features only available in Chrome (or WebKit maybe).

jasonkostempski 8y ago

Firefox isn't to blame. Users that are proactive about their web browsing (hopefully a rapidly growing number) often choose Firefox because it offers the most control. These aren't the types of users that are going to switch to a different browser to render a random site, they'll just ignore the site. If that's what the manager wants, I think they're on the right path. Seems shortsighted to me, but they're still in the online publishing business, playing the same old cat-and-mouse game, trying to live off antiquated ad-tech, so I'm guessing they're not very forward-thinking.

ryandrake 8y ago

This isn't 2002. If you're writing a standards-compliant web page, you're already supporting Firefox (and all other browsers). Why go out of your way, investing the extra effort needed into not supporting a browser?

solarkraft 8y ago

Chrome user: "Let's check out website X" Firefox user: "It's hopelessly broken"

stuaxo 8y ago

If it's a small fix, just drop it into some other change and don't mention it. Sometimes it's the only way to do the right thing is in spite of management.

Stephen304 8y ago
I get the feeling that this user is either trolling or not being honest about their position on this. Or both. https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/8hhss1/is_it_worth_supporting_firefox/dykmd45/?context=10000 https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/8hhss1/is_it_worth...

627467 8y ago

How hard is it to sell a fixed <img /> tag or any block of text within an article? Sell it as "this content will stay there for as long as the page is published". The problem is that every major publisher has bought into centralized ad brokers. Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content business online. Publishers should know their audience better than ad servers. This is what is killing the business: content creators stopped caring about their audience.

rodorgas 8y ago
Companies simply get better leads with tracking. You don’t really know about your audience when you are online, because there are so much traffic and so many users.
- 627467 8y ago
  I heard and even understand the truth in that argument, it even worked well in the past 10 years. But I think the content business has reached a point where it needs a new solutions. Paywalling is only one of them.
juliangoldsmith 8y ago
>Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content business online. Publishers should know their audience better than ad servers. Part of the problem is that Google and Facebook actually can know the audience better than the content creator. A content creator only knows that the reader is interested in, say, cooking. Facebook and Google know most everything the reader is interested in, and what sort of ads the reader actually interacts with. They can use all of that information to maximize the chance the reader will click on an ad. The problem now is that because of how effective Google' and Facebook's ads are, a single click on an ad is basically worthless. Someone who's trying to sell a product isn't going to pay 100 times as much per click to use a smaller ad network, they're going to go with whoever can give them the most impact.

DanBC 8y ago

There's a bunch fo websites (Atlantic being notable) that tell me I'm using an ad-blocker and ask me to turn it off. I'm not. I'm using stock Firefox. So, I guess their conversation goes: > We block Firefox (but don't know that we do so) > We don't see many Firefox users > Why do we optimise for Firefox? It's mildly frustrating that they block users for dumb reasons. (Again, I'm not blocking ads). But it's only a mild frustration - there are a gajillion places to get news that are better than Atlantic.

adrian1973 8y ago
They are probably detecting that some ad/tracking cookies are not being set... because by default in FF tracking protection is enabled.
- Sylos 8y ago
  It's only enabled by default in Private Browsing. And it doesn't actively block cookies (they obviously do get cleared at the end of your Private Browsing session, though).

phyzome 8y ago

> Ad reinsertion solutions exist for Chrome, but they also dont support Firefox. "Ad reinsertion". You're trying to bypass the user's self-determination on the web. Good luck, bozo. > They are even going to approach google and ask them to introduce new API's that allow us to determine if browser really chrome or just chromium, so that we block chromium. And now we see the real question: "Is there some way to lock our users into browsers that give more control to us than the users?"

pritambaral 8y ago
By "Ad reinsertion", they mean the paid advertisement inclusion programmes of Adblock and Adblock Plus, which is opt-out and pretty shady in the first place. They think that Adblock and Adblock Plus don't exist on Firefox, and that people who use uBlock Origin on Firefox will not use uBlock Origin on Chrome too if they were somehow forced to use Chrome.
- Washuu 8y ago
  No, they are talking about services such as Instart. Javascript that runs on the page, detects the advertisements are being blocked, does a redirect through Instart's proxy to insert hard coded advertisements, and redirects back. Instart only works on Chrome.
  - pritambaral 8y ago
    I don't know where you're getting that — and I couldn't find any mention of Instart with a Ctrl-F on that page — but my source is this comment by the OP: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/8hha0r/is_it_worth_supporting_firefox/dykjb5o/ https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/8hha0r/is_it_worth_... Besides, wouldn't something like that itself get blocked?

some_account 8y ago

Computer savvy users are never going to accept the web flashing, blinking, popping, interrupting, lagging.... And there will only be more of us in the future when the new generation grows up. Your revenue model is dying and you are trying to save it by making the web even worse. Its a race to the bottom.

OtterCoder 8y ago
> There will be more of us That doesn't look to be the case. While the "net native" generation is more likely to turn to digital content than other media, studies show that computer literacy, in the sense of understanding the basic workings of a computer, is on the decline.

devit 8y ago

This is one of the problems with making decisions based on "data". Obviously, the benefit of having users is not only in the profit from ads, but rather from having your site be popular, recommended to friends, posted in links in discussions, training Google's algorithms by people clicking on their search results, having people willing to subscribe to future paid services or buy future products, etc. But since those things aren't measurable in the short term, they get completely discounted by naive businesspeople, with bad results like this.

yakcyll 8y ago

It strikes me in a weird way that power users are brought up in one of the comments as the main users of Firefox. It's obviously a major stretch to argue the counter-argument, that Chrome and others must be mostly used by casual users, but the idea that those people are somehow more accepting of bullshit UX is, well, just wrong. They are either even more frustrated, not knowing how to deal with it, or have already developed habits to sieve the noise out, definitely not bringing any additional advertisement revenue.

nukeop 8y ago

This is a totalitarian publisher's wet dream, to strongarm users to pay them or look at they ads whether they like it or not. If somebody's using adblockers, they're not going to be converted by your ads either way. If you introduce bothersome mechanisms preventing me from interacting with your website on my terms, I'm just going to leave and never come back. This is exactly why we need Firefox and other browsers, so that Google can't dictate what the web has to look like. They'd like to ideally introduce a tracking id in everything you ever do everywhere, it's up to us to stop them. Anyway, no matter what kind of mechanism is introduced, there will be an equal and proportionate response to mitigate it within a week. You can't force people to watch ads they don't care about, and that's it. The sooner you accept it, the smaller losses you'll incur.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

yosito 8y ago

This discussion makes me wonder why I haven't seen more server side ad solutions that render ads into a page in a way that's harder to detect or block. Of course, advertisers could find ways to abuse that too and then adblockers would have to up their game. I think the best strategy is to render a fallback into your page that looks like an image related to your content and then replace that image on they fly with unobtrusive ads that respect the user experience. If people block the adds they'll see the fallback which is an opportunity to plead your case to users and ask for donations, subscriptions or permission to show respectful ads.

pritambaral 8y ago
There have been attempts to render ads with the page. For example, Facebook and some news sites do it. It's just that it is bad UX to not clearly mark ads as ads. When Facebook launched sponsored ads and posts embedded in its feed, it was only a short while before DOM-manipulating ad blockers could block it because Facebook had to mark those "posts" as "sponsored".
- yosito 8y ago
  That's a good point. But I think there are some ways around that which aren't too intrusive. If you just render a fallback on the server side with a message asking users to support you in some way, and then replace that fallback with your ads, you can mark the ads as sponsored without having to mark the fallback. And if you have image based ads, you could mark the image itself using server-side processing to add some sort of watermark rather than a DOM-based marker.
phicoh 8y ago
A problem I can see with that approach is that code that is served from the content server would have to do browser fingerprinting before ads can be auctioned by the ad network. In the current setup with third part tracking cookies, the ad network sees individual users. If you route everything through the content providers servers, then the ad network may have to work a lot harder to figure out who is who. And the ad networks have no incentive to do so (at the moment)
8y ago

_bxg1 8y ago

When ads stop tracking me, serving malware, and showing fake download buttons, I'll turn off my ad-blocker. Usually if there's a site I visit frequently, I try turning it off to support them. But if the ads are abrasive or misleading, I turn it right back on. Here's an example of a non-skeezy ad provider which would not cause me to turn my ad-blocker back on. https://www.buysellads.com https://www.buysellads.com

stordoff 8y ago
It can also push _paying_ customers away. There was a site I paid to use for a few years until one of their sister sites (which I only used infrequently so didn't have a paid membership for) started showing large auto-playing video ads in a way that was deliberately hard to block (div ids were 30-odd random characters). I ended up canceling my subscription soon after.

callahad 8y ago

The Web works because no single vendor has absolute control over the platform, and the competing browsers can keep each other in check. Hell of a thing to watch people in such a hurry to throw that all away. No one would ever abuse a platform monopoly, would they? (For disclosure, I work for Mozilla. But I wouldn't want us to control the Web, either: competition and open standards are key.)

floatboth 8y ago

> And a DRM for website instead of only video DRM that exists, so that user cannot view source code, and no extension can block the ads Good luck with that. You could render an article into a DRM'd video, and utterly destroy SEO, accessibility, readability, and the website's whole reputation. "DRM for news articles" makes zero sense. Movie DRM works because HDCP decrypts the video on the display. ("works" - pirates got the private keys anyway :D) You can't DRM software on a general purpose computer. You can try, and it would be cracked soon. Even the best attempts (Denuvo) get cracked.

cesarb 8y ago
> Movie DRM works because HDCP decrypts the video on the display. No, it doesn't. The movie is decrypted on the player, uncompressed, and encrypted again with HDCP for the display.
- amdavidson 8y ago
  > ...encrypted again with HDCP for the display And after it is encrypted again "for" the display, the display decrypts it, closing the loop, and allowing the DRM to be at least more than trivially functional.
gruez 8y ago
>You can't DRM software on a general purpose computer. You can with SGX
- floatboth 8y ago
  Well, that's not exactly a general purpose computer anymore :)

gwbas1c 8y ago

The bigger problem is that publishers are loosing control over their advertisers. The reason why I block ads is that they turn great websites into horrible experiences. Remember, the way ads work today is that the web site is delivered to your browser, and then ad networks' Javscript comes in and mangles the page to insert ads wherever the ad network pleases. In the days of paper, editors laid out where the ads went in newspapers and magazines. There weren't obnoxious blinking ads that would move the text around while you were reading it. Now, publishers hand control over where ads go to the advertisers themselves. The publishers are in denial about the problem they created.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago
> There weren't obnoxious blinking ads that would move the text around while you were reading it. No, instead newspapers went for screaming headlines (big text, celebrities in bikinis) and ads went for whatever caught the attention most. Don't idealize newspapers or newspaper ads, they're in the exact same market and were trying to optimize for maximum exposure and revenue just as much as websites are.
criddell 8y ago
> The bigger problem is that publishers are loosing control over their advertisers. I've never understood this. There are a lot of magazines that clearly spend considerable resources making their printed page look exactly how they want. Then when they publish that same content online, they apparently don't care at all about the presentation. Matthew Butterick's great article Bomb in the Garden makes this point very well. It's from 5 years ago but I think it is more relevant today than ever.

kibwen 8y ago

Note that this is exactly why Firefox has resisted shipping with adblock on by default for years now. It's not just about websites deciding not to support Firefox, it's about websites like this one deciding to go out of their way to break on Firefox.

adamc 8y ago

Here's the reality: Most people won't pay for most sites. I get that. I'm the same. I have subscriptions to a handful of high value sites (e.g., NYT), but most sites just don't deliver enough value to make that viable. I could live with advertising if it were unobtrusive, useful, and didn't try to track me. Very little advertising is like that, so I block it. Yep, that means marginal sites will die. I can live with that. It is still possible to sell magazines and other media. No one was promised that the web would be a perfect was to sell media. If it's only a good way to exchange information (for free), that is not a bad thing. I don't think it is a tragedy if sites collapse that cannot find a viable way to serve me. I don't give a rat's ass about serving advertisers.

Arr0wH34D 8y ago

They also opened an interesting issue on Brave browser: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/14041 https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/14041 Looks like their feature detection is based on user agent, and they are angry at Brave for using an user agent that resemble the one Chrome is using.

thebouv 8y ago
Oh, the issue has devolved into threats against Brave now by FineHub. https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/14041 https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/14041

leephillips 8y ago

I recently switched from uBlock origin to using a hosts file (there are several going around; I got mine from http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/). This seems to work better, overall, although uBlock origin was quite good. Less fuss, smaller resource usage. I'm happy to view self-hosted ads, but don't feel bad about blocking connections to a list of sites that track, invade privacy, or worse.

daemin 8y ago

A lot of the comments on the article remind me of the time people put those little gifs on their homepage to note that "optimised for Netscape Navigator" or "optimised for IE". Nice to see that Chrome is today's IE.

wybiral 8y ago

I block content [1] on Chrome but maybe I'm in a smaller group. [1] Not ads. Just scripts and other potentially dangerous stuff but since most ads use scripts I generally block ads.

mcintyre1994 8y ago

Whatever these ad reinsertion methods that work for Chrome but not Firefox are, they're encouraging me to keep using Firefox :)

potench 8y ago

The real question for media publishers (one I've already experienced at a large sports agency): "is it worth supporting the web". It is worth it, there's still a lot of traffic, but it's a different model and elegant, interactive browser experiences aren't the target. Minutes spent, repeat, and quality traffic continues to move toward native apps. GDPR and ad-blocking represent increasing risk + decreasing revenue with the status-quo media web experience. So the status-quo is becoming prioritizing search engines, social scrapers, and a well-designed URL funnel that pushes traffic toward your native app where you can still monetize with display ads, reliably autoplay video with client-side video ads, and push notifications that result in actual traffic. There are strategies for monetizing on the web (server-side ad stitching, integrated marketing, pay-gates, hell - just buy traffic to your site that you know doesn't have ad-blockers) but sometimes it's counterintuitive to funneling traffic to native. Ultimately it requires investment in Product/Creative/UX/Dev to define and sell-through a vision/strategy for web to decision-makers when those decision-makers are seeing numbers that suggest even the investment to define the web strategy is a poor investment - let alone investment in developing and maintaining it.

gkya 8y ago

I don't use an ad blocker. I have JS turned off, thus don't see ads. When I encounter a website that's interesting enough to browse even though it does not work w/o JS (rare), I open it up in Chromium (which I actually keep around to use a couple web apps that I have to use). And every time I do that I realise what a huge piece of shit online publishing has become. Almost all websites that publish professionally are just overengineered crapware, viable only because the bubble that's the ads business. Luckily there's a sane subset of the internet that I can use without thouching all this crap most of the time. If their business model is failing due to us not turning around and bending over, let it be so. Who cares, apart from them?

Net-effects 8y ago

Like in a Comic, 'seeking minimising differences'-user: But buying/downloading runs in browsers - so the browser is like a shopping mall and the net-effect (of internet shopping) is: 'dying inner city shops, franchise shops, empty shopping malls...-but wait it happens in your community, hey! - abstract yourself (-;

onyva 8y ago

I agree with the comment above. Most of the sites that exist to drive revenue from traffic (content farms and such) are essentially dispensable. If they don’t work I won’t be back. If it’s a service, there will always be a competitor. The only one getting screwed here is the business not taking care to support all would be customers.