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It's kinda frustrating that Mozilla's CEO thinks that axing ad-blockers would be financially beneficial for them. Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a
by herobird 10mo ago
It's kinda frustrating that Mozilla's CEO thinks that axing ad-blockers would be financially beneficial for them. Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a ton of users would leave Firefox for alternatives.
- hu3 10mo agoMozilla has pressure from their sugar daddy, Google, to weaken ad-blockers.
- buran77 10mo agoThe only reason Mozilla matters in the eyes of Google is because it gives the impression there's competition in the browser market. But Firefox's users are the kind who choose the browser, not use whatever is there. And that choice is driven in part by having solid ad-blockers. People stick with Firefox despite the issues for the ad-blocker. Take that away and Firefox's userbase dwindles to even lower numbers to the point where nobody can pretend they are "competition". That's when they lose any value for Google. Without the best-of-the-best ad-blocking I will drop Firefox like a rock and move to the next best thing, which will have to be a Chromium based browser. I'll even have a better overall experience on the web when it comes to the engine itself, to give me consolation for not having the best ad-blocker.
- agumonkey 10mo agoi left chrome to avoid ads.. i'd rather use dillo than ads infested firefox
- mrtksn 10mo agoThe whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money and everything was great until every corner was taken, the land grab was complete and the time to recoup the investment has come. Once the users were trapped for exploitation, it doesn’t make sense to have a browser that blocks ads. How are they supposed to pay software salaries and keep the lights on? People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions. They all end up doing one of those since the incentives are perverse, that’s why Google didn’t just ride the Firefox till the end and instead created the Chrome. It doesn’t make sense to have trillion dollars companies and everything to be free. The free part is until monopolies are created and walled gardens are full with people. Then comes the monetization and those companies don’t have some moral compass etc, they have KPI stock values and analytics and it’s very obvious that blocking ads isn’t good financially.
- shakna 10mo ago> The whole web ecosystem was first run by VC money Huh? Nexus was funded by CERN. Newsgrounds was never investor funded. Yahoo! Directory was just two guys, and you paid to be listed. There were no investors involved. WebCrawler was a university project. Altavista was a research project.
- gr4vityWall 10mo agoPeople seem to forget the non-commercial web ever existed.
- mycall 10mo agoThe long tail of the web, likely consisting of mostly small or noncommercial sites, are currently numerically huge but individually low traffic. Meanwhile, user attention is dominated by a relatively small set of commercial and platform sites.
- mrtksn 10mo agoThat was ine inception age when very few people were online, its not the stage of mass adoption. The mass adoption starts with the dot.com era with mass infrastructure build up. But sure, if you think that we should start counting from these years you can do that and add a "public funded" era at the beginning.
- skydhash 10mo agoI came to the web after dotcom and most of the content (accessibke trough search) was blogs and forums. It wasn’t until SEO that fake content started to grow like weeds.
- mrtksn 10mo agoThat's the time when VC's were making huge investments into the web tech, most companies were losing crazy money. The mentality of the age was portrayed like this in SV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo There were companies that were making some money but those were killed or acquired by companies that give their services for free. Google killed the blogs by killing their RSS reader since they were long into making money stage and their analytics probably demonstrated that it is better people search stuff than directly going to the latest blog posts. It's the same thing everywhere, the whole industry is like that. Uber loses money until there's no longer viable competition then lose less money by jacking up the prices. The tech is very monopolistic, Peter Thiel is right about the tech business.
- shantara 10mo agoDitto. A fully functional uBlock Origin is the only remaining reason why I'm still sticking with Firefox despite everything
- gvurrdon 10mo agoContainers are also very useful indeed; I have to log into various different Google and Github accounts and can do this in a single browser window.
- ghusto 10mo agoWhich alternatives though? On Mac at least, I'm not aware of any viable non-Chromium alternatives.
- braebo 10mo agoUse Brave the privacy is better than Firefox already.
- timeon 10mo agoQuestion was about non-Chromium browsers. Although Brave's custom ad-blocker is not bad.
- swiftcoder 10mo ago> On Mac at least, I'm not aware of any viable non-Chromium alternatives Surely Mac is the only place there is a viable non-Chromium alternative (Safari)?
- deanc 10mo agoThere is Orion which is built on top of WebKit so you get a lot of the battery life optimisations built into Safari
- saithir 10mo agoI think people like to imagine it's not viable because the most commonly known adblocker refuses to release the version for it. Negative news somehow stick better. Fortunately it's not the only one and for example Adguard works perfectly fine.
- array_key_first 10mo agoSafari is even further behind chrome in feature set than Firefox.
- rsync 10mo ago
- iso1631 10mo agoThere's only two alternatives, safari and chrome-based browsers. Safari isn't cross platform either
- nephihaha 10mo agoWhat is your opinion on Brave?
- KAMSPioneer 10mo agoThey already said "Chromium-based browsers."
- DonHopkins 10mo ago[flagged]
- handedness 10mo agoWhat an incredibly unfair and even fanatical take on what happened.
- tune-nova 10mo agoYou can't even imagine how little the rest of the world cares about this. Do people in California care that slightly under 50% of my state's population are at or below poverty level? Do they care that most of the rest spend 55-60% of our income on food? Do they care that our life expectancy is 15 years lower than that in California, mostly because of terrible pollution caused by extraction and processing of minerals which our beloved government then sells to the US and several European countries, and pockets the money? Do they care about conflict minerals in general, used to build electronics for their enjoyment? Have they done anything about this? This American political bickering does not even register on our radars when choosing a web browser. "Europe's problems are the world's problems but the world's problems are not Europe's problems.", as India's Mr. Jaishankar is fond of saying. The same can be said about the US.
- vanschelven 10mo agoIt's financially beneficial for them in exactly the same way as setting yourself on fire makes you warmer
- PurpleRamen 10mo agoKnowing an option, doesn't mean it's his goal. It's probably just a regular offer from Google, they always decline.
- ErroneousBosh 10mo ago> Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a ton of users would leave Firefox for alternatives. Alternatives like maybe a fork of Firefox with the adblocker-blocker removed?
- mattbee 10mo agoAnd users would flee not just because they're seeing the ads but because Firefox is obviously the slowest browser again. Stripping the ads is a big performance boost, so right now Firefox feels snappier than Chrome on ad-laden pages.
- klabb3 10mo ago> Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a ton of users would leave Firefox for alternatives. Yes but keep in mind that’s not an individual problem that is solved by switching browsers. If a browser engine dies, the walls get closer and the room smaller. With only Chromium and WebKit left, we may soon have a corporate owned browsers pulling in whatever direction Google and Apple wants. I can think of many things that are good for them but bad for us. For instance, ”Web Integrity” and other DRM.
- freddref 10mo agoIt might be financial beneficial once as an up-front payment, but long term, as others have mentioned, really not good for the project to remove the only feature that gives firefox a defensible way to fill it's niche in the market.
- ntoskrnl_exe 10mo agoThat wouldn’t seem so much out of the ordinary, long-term thinking CEO is an oxymoron these days.
- KurSix 10mo agoThe users most likely to leave are the ones who actively recommend Firefox to others and keep it installed on friends' and family's machines...