from Hacker News

Mozilla becoming active in online advertising

by brentjanderson on 10/4/24, 4:46 PM with 55 comments

• by goplayoutside on 10/4/24, 5:00 PM

  Ladybird can't happen soon enough. I've been a ff advocate for many, many years and it pains me to say this, but I've had enough now. I don't want my browser to be made by an advertising company.

  I wish Mozilla the best. It would be great if they could be successful in advocating for web ads that consist of, say, a jpeg and an href, but I don't think that's ever going to happen.

• by lovethevoid on 10/4/24, 5:16 PM

  Interesting the Mozilla board interpreted "ease off the Google reliance money" to mean "become Google"

  The core of the problem is really in this very paragraph:

  > Right now, the tradeoffs people are asked to make online are too significant. Yes, advertising enables free access to most of what the internet provides, but the lack of practical control we all have over how our data is collected and shared is unacceptable. And solutions to this problem that simply rely on handing more of our data to a few gigantic private companies are not really solutions that help the people who use the internet, at all.

  There is no solution to this. You can't advertise effectively and profitably without personal information. No matter how much you try to chop up and anonymize data, it's still personal and even in the absence of information you can wind up collecting a lot of data about someone (as browser fingerprinting does often times). The more information you have, the more is paid. Not even Apple avoids this, despite their privacy claims, and they too see there's far more money to be made as an ad network than letting Google gobble up the space.

  But as much as I personally dislike this, my guess will be that this is the most successful (financially) change Mozilla enacts.

• by JohnFen on 10/4/24, 5:09 PM

  That's all flowery happy-talk, but lurking in the background is the reality that Firefox's main revenue source (Google) is clearly going away and they need to replace it. It seems they've decided to replace it with advertising and everything else is them trying to justify that decision in noble terms.

  > we do this fully acknowledging our expanded focus on online advertising won’t be embraced by everyone in our community

  I'm glad that they acknowledge this! And deciding to to something that is unpopular isn't a sin or anything. They can do whatever they like. I'm just a bit saddened that this direction means that my trust level with Mozilla and Firefox has to be greatly reduced.

  But times change, and often for the worse. Such is life.

• by EA-3167 on 10/4/24, 4:58 PM

  It's hard to look at this as something other than a trigger for inevitable conflicts of interest, and the same enshittification spiral Google experienced.

• by alexey-salmin on 10/4/24, 5:51 PM

  I wonder which of the existing nonprofits can have enough weight and trust to pull off a Firefox fork, would be happy to fund it. I donated to Mozilla Foundation for many years but no more.

• by WCSTombs on 10/4/24, 7:00 PM

  Who is Firefox's target user, anyway? Because it seems a lot of what they've been doing mainly drives people away.

  > We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market.

  Oh, really? Come on. Nobody is applauding this.

  I get it, Firefox users aren't customers, so they are the product. But repeatedly sabotaging their product with these constant blunders doesn't seem like a good strategy.

• by deafpolygon on 10/4/24, 9:01 PM

  The milk has run dry at the Mozilla teat, so now they need to wring blood from stone.

• by cebert on 10/4/24, 4:51 PM

  It’s too bad they can’t raise enough from donations to avoid this downward spiral.

• by kstenerud on 10/4/24, 6:05 PM

  Great... So build an incompatible advertising technology solution on a minority platform (Firefox) that's inferior for advertisers (less juicy data) and not in-line with Google's strategy, and then for some bizarre reason the advertisers will come flocking to it and help the magical fairies at Mozilla "build a better internet"?

  Just how stupid do they think we are?