
Mozilla Is Moving Ahead With Sponsored Tiles On Firefox’s New-Tab Page - pachek1
http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/11/mozilla-is-moving-ahead-with-sponsored-tiles-on-firefoxs-new-tab-page/
======
plorkyeran
Good. Mozilla needs more revenue sources, and the new tab page is one of the
least obtrusive places to put ads I can think of.

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Numberwang
I'd love for the possibility to start paying for stuff again. Adds bore me. I
wonder how much one would reasonably have to pay to make adds go away
completely from Google and friends.

It would also be in their interest to have customers pay a base fee as then It
would be much easier for them to sell extended services like music, movies and
privacy.

~~~
jiggy2011
If you released a pay-for firefox then everyone would just start using
iceweasel which could still happen if the ads get too annoying.

~~~
TheZenPsycho
Just as people could install ubuntu and "just use wine" if they want to run
windows programs without paying for windows.

~~~
jiggy2011
I think iceweasel is much closer to firefox than wine is to windows!

~~~
TheZenPsycho
that was not my point.

~~~
coldtea
Yes, but the analogy you tried to make does not justify any other.

~~~
TheZenPsycho
The analogy was about ease of use and well known-ness. To suggest casually
that people would _en masse_ switch to ice weasel points to a kind of tone
deafness.

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chimeracoder
> The problem, however, is that this doesn’t really fit into Mozilla’s brand
> image. It’s supposed to be an independent, mission-driven organization. Once
> it starts taking money from big brands, it will be harder to maintain this
> image.

This is a rather silly statement - most of Mozilla's funding already comes
from Google, and has for a while.

If you want to make Mozilla less reliant on "big brands", it's very easy -
just donate[0]. Every dollar from its users makes Mozilla slightly less
dependent on advertising money.

[0] [https://mozilla.com/donate](https://mozilla.com/donate)

~~~
Pacabel
I occasionally use Firefox and other offerings from Mozilla. And so I'd be
very willing to directly donate money to them, as well.

However, a lot of their recent actions have seriously dissuaded me from doing
so.

Desktop Firefox, for example, has gotten progressively worse over time. A lot
of useful functionality has been stripped out, and the Chrome-like UI these
days is much less efficient and effective than the Firefox 3.5.x UI was.

Mobile Firefox on Android doesn't exactly offer a very pleasant experience.

They basically gave up on Thunderbird.

They've wasted resources on unnecessary and unwanted efforts like Persona and
Firefox OS.

Asm.js is not a very sound approach, especially compared to technology like
Native Client.

Rust seems promising, but won't be seriously usable until at least Rust 1.0,
which still seems a long way off. As the year progresses, I get more and more
doubtful that it'll be out during 2014, like was claimed earlier this year.

As it stands now, Mozilla is now offering me far less useful products than
they once were. I've also seen them squander a lot of the resources they
already had on unnecessary products. And their future offerings aren't very
inspiring, either. I just can't convince myself that any donation I do make
would be used in a productive manner, I'm sad to say.

~~~
21echoes
> Desktop Firefox, for example, has gotten progressively worse over time.

by what metrics? it uses less RAM, runs faster JS, renders faster, is easier
to write add-ons for, is more in line with the HTML5 feature-set...

> Mobile Firefox on Android doesn't exactly offer a very pleasant experience.

compared to what? the stock browser? mobile chrome? in my experience it blows
both of those out of the water.

> They've wasted resources on unnecessary and unwanted efforts like Persona
> and Firefox OS.

Persona was a three person, part-time team for under a year. It is used pretty
widely, and has sufficient community support to continue past Mozilla's devs
moving off of it. It and Firefox OS, imo, are the two most promising things
that Mozilla is doing right now. Mozilla's mission is to stave off a walled-
garden web wherever it rears its ugly head. I can think of no areas where this
is in a worse state than mobile OS's and "login with X".

> They basically gave up on Thunderbird.

True. Probably their biggest mistake of the last three years, imo

> Asm.js is not a very sound approach, especially compared to technology like
> Native Client.

a very hotly debated topic by most of the leading voices in the field; far
from a settled issue.

> Rust seems promising, but won't be seriously usable until at least Rust 1.0,
> which still seems a long way off. As the year progresses, I get more and
> more doubtful that it'll be out during 2014, like was claimed earlier this
> year.

fair enough. i don't currently doubt they'll just make it in 2014 tho

~~~
Pacabel
Well, after each desktop Firefox update I ask myself, "Am I better off now
than I was with the last version?"

In the Phoenix, Firebird and Firefox pre-4 days, I'd quite often find myself
answering with "Yes". Since Firefox 4, though, I'm not sure if I've answered
with "Yes" even once. Sometimes I'm not any better or worse off, but most
times I'm worse off.

For example, extensions would break very frequently for a long time after
Firefox 4 was released, although they eventually managed to get that
straightened out. Then there's been the progressive dumbing-down of the UI, to
the sorry state of affairs after the recent Firefox 29 release containing the
Australis disaster. Useful functionality has also been removed, such as the
status bar and the ability to disable JavaScript through the preferences
dialog. With each update, a lot of us users now have to install more and more
extensions just to restore useful functionality that has been removed.

Worst of all, I don't think there's been any significant improvement in its
RAM usage, its speed, and other factors like those. Yeah, I know about the
are-we-fast-yet style benchmarks, but those don't translate well to the actual
experience when using Firefox. Chrome, as much as I dislike its UI, still
feels far more responsive and efficient than Firefox.

As for Mobile Firefox, yeah, I'm comparing it to other mobile browsers from
Google and Opera, for instance. I find it slower, I've had it crash more, and
I don't think it really offers any significant benefits. If it's no better
than its competitors, and worse in some ways, it inherently can't offer a good
experience.

And it's nonsense to suggest that Persona was "widely used". It saw basically
no adoption, compared to its competitors. The same seems to be happening with
Firefox OS. Some people try it out, and there is some hype, but it's still a
very, very marginal player in the big picture. It won't have any impact on
"walled gardens" when almost nobody actually uses it. And in many ways it
forces developers into a "walled garden" worse than that of its competitors,
with JavaScript/HTML5/CSS basically being the only option for developing
applications.

From a technical standpoint, the Asm.js versus Native Client debate is over.
Native Client is a much more general, technologically-superior approach.
Asm.js is basically just a human-unfriendly subset of JavaScript, without the
benefits that a more general approach offers.

I think the Rust crew could have pulled off Rust 1.0 by the end of the year
had they stabilized the language and standard library a few months back. But
that didn't happen, and we're still seeing relatively significant breaking
changes happening to this day. It just doesn't leave them much time all to
freeze the language and libraries, and to then give it the significant amount
of testing and bug fixing required of a respectable 1.0 release, before the
end of 2014.

~~~
pcwalton
> I think the Rust crew could have pulled off Rust 1.0 by the end of the year
> had they stabilized the language and standard library a few months back. But
> that didn't happen, and we're still seeing relatively significant breaking
> changes happening to this day. It just doesn't leave them much time all to
> freeze the language and libraries, and to then give it the significant
> amount of testing and bug fixing required of a respectable 1.0 release,
> before the end of 2014.

Yes, according to you, we should have frozen the memory-unsafe design
decisions in a language _whose entire selling point is memory safety_ ,
defeating the entire point of the language in an effort to reach 1.0.

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ladzoppelin
Mozilla is amazing. Just please be really transparent about these new changes
and I do not think people will care. I definitely support any changes that can
bring in more revenue for the company.

~~~
Spittie
They are, most of what they do is open in the wild. See
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=directo...](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=directory+tiles)

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erichurkman
Cool. I'm curious how they'll play out with non-power users. Suggested sites
are not always a bad thing. I've discovered some cool sites & services through
advertising.

Hopefully they hold the ads to a very high bar, akin to what Reddit does (with
manual review of every ad), instead of self-service ad networks that are of
dubious quality.

Granted, one of the first things I do with a fresh Firefox install is get rid
of the new tab page. Opening a new tab, typing the first two letters of the
site I want, and hitting enter is faster than the new tab page, waiting for
the tiles/images to load, and using a mouse to click on a top site.

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rjzzleep
i have a lot of little beefs with new firefox versions for example not knowing
that firefox leaks dns when you hover a link with no easy way to disable it.

but sponsored tiles is not one of them. out of all the browsers out there with
silly home screen tiles firefox's are the easiest to disable or never actually
hit in practice depending on your browser habits. it's not even really ads
just someones homepage similar to the google sponsored home.

i feel this is not a functionality issue at all. it's a complete failure in
the marketing and pr department. when people heard ad their alarm bells
starting ringing(mine did too).

~~~
sheetjs
I don't think the ads were the problem. The language that bothered me was the
phrase "user-enhancing" when describing ads. Call a spade a spade

~~~
kijin
I agree. I don't have a problem with unobtrusive ads, but people are seriously
deluding themselves when they think ads enhance the browsing experience.

It almost feels like a case of Stockholm syndrome. We're stuck with ads
anyway, so why don't we come up with silly reasons to like them . . .

~~~
Spittie
I'll quote a guy from a different site:

    
    
        I installed Nightly on Friend's computer yesterday, and
        there were "suggested sites" on the new tab page. And you 
        know what? I was grateful. A few of them were frequently 
        visited by him, so I was able to simply pin the items 
        already there (which had recognizable icons instead of 
        thumbnails) instead of having to browse around and 
        manually click and drag. 
    

[http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?100100-Mozilla...](http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?100100-Mozilla-
Decides-Against-Ads-In-The-New-Tab-Page&p=416438#post416438)

I do think that ads can be useful when done right. For example, ads about
tickets/cd of a band when I'm browsing Last.fm. Or ads about the stream/box of
TV Series/movies when I'm browsing IMDB.

~~~
kijin
According to the article, the ads in the New Tab page will be selected before
Firefox knows anything about the user's browsing habits. So there's no
guarantee that they will actually be useful to him/her. If they do turn out to
be useful, that's merely by chance.

Mozilla could try to ramp up the usefulness of the ads by selecting a bunch of
popular sites like Facebook, Twitter and IMDb. But since those sites are
already so well known, they won't have much incentive to pay for the privilege
of being on the New Tab page. Many of them can already be selected in the
Search bar.

Useful ads need to be contextual, but contextual ads require tracking the
user's browsing habits. As a result, it is very difficult to display useful
ads while respecting the user's privacy as Mozilla wants to do.

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vvpan
Until recently I felt that all the free services I am getting from different
website are a blessing. I am starting to feel otherwise. Somewhat unfair,
because I have the money to spend, but still. When the service is paid for, I
as a customer have some voice over things like ads, or abrupt changes in
product direction. For now I'll donate some money to Mozilla I guess.

~~~
Retric
It's a basic problem, advertisers most want people who can afford to not see
Adds.

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simondedalus
as long as the ads don't run code, i don't mind at all.

~~~
dec0dedab0de
I think this is the crux of the matter. Who cares about simply seeing ads? Its
the tracking that goes along with them that is worrying.

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higherpurpose
If that helps them be less reliant on Google, I'm not too upset about it, as
long as they leave the option for not being tracked by those ads, and they
aren't too annoying. Also, we've learned NSA takes advantage of ad networks to
inject malicious code into people's PCs, so I hope they would try to make them
as safe as possible against that (only encrypted ad networks?)

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ewinters123
Why not? I see the same stuff every day, could do with some interesting
content

~~~
mburns
These ad tiles only fill space before your browsing habits emerge. They won't
override your existing options, so you aren't likely to see them until you
reset your profile.

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mantrax5
I don't mind the feature itself, but gotta love the confusing info coming from
Mozilla's people over this, over the course of the last few days.

Open isn't always good when it comes to your PR.

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Pacabel
If this functionality really must be supported, then why isn't it just offered
via an extension? Those Firefox users who want this functionality have the
option of installing that extension. Otherwise, it doesn't interfere with
other users who do not desire its presence.

~~~
ForHackernews
Firefox needs to make money. An optional extension that hardly anyone will
install won't help with that.

~~~
Pacabel
Yes, that's obvious.

What you've missed is the overarching issue here, though.

Mozilla will strip out useful functionality from Firefox (like the status bar,
for example), and anyone desiring such functionality is told to install some
extension to restore the now-missing functionality.

If such an attitude is acceptable when it comes to functionality that Firefox
users find useful, then it is just as acceptable when it comes to
functionality that Mozilla may find useful.

Mozilla should offer this as an optional extension. If users wish to
financially support Mozilla in this way, then they are free to install it and
provide such financial support. Otherwise, Firefox users aren't subjected to
financing Mozilla in a way that may not be considered acceptable.

~~~
zobzu
i would actually like if firefox just came out of the box with a set of
extensions enabled that mozilla chooses.

ie everything would be an extension (or in their words, addon).

That would ensure everything stays compatible and that you can make your
browser look exactly the way you want (it would also shut you up! :p)

That being said having looked and sometimes contributed to the gecko source
code this is not something that is easily doable.

Til then im actually quite happy with their choices. i uninstalled my status
bar addon eventually. Its better without it. I even like the new FF UI. Sure
theres a few things that could be better, but overral i find most of the
complains to be because of the "i dont want any change, better or not"
attitude (even i have a little bit of that attitude).

