
Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page - emptysongglass
https://www.neowin.net/news/firefox-640-is-now-showing-a-bookingcom-ad-in-the-new-tab-page/
======
coffekaesque
Honestly I don't care how harsh this sounds but they should fire their entire
marketing department. Or the people who are approving the bullshit we've been
seeing for the past what, 2~3 years?

They're either completely clueless, don't care about damaging the brand or are
just malicious. And in the process, accordingly to themselves, they aren't
even making money just partners and good feels, right?

We can't afford to lose Mozilla and Firefox.

~~~
Signez
Is Mozilla in any way a democratic organization? I understand that the Corp is
100% owned by the Foundation, but how does it work?

Can we do anything, as users, to stop these people from hurting Mozilla,
without stopping to use Firefox everyday?

Are they, in any way, accountable to their bad performance for all those
recent years?

~~~
pseudalopex
The Corporation CEO answers to the Corporation directors. The Corporation
directors answer to the Foundation. The Foundation is controlled by the
Foundation directors. The Foundation directors elect themselves.

------
taohansen
This is deeply upsetting to me because I have continually pushed Firefox to
friends and family as the only alternative to Google's strongarm dominance of
our virtual lives.

I have no other alternative to recommend my social circle and feel, daily,
increasingly helpless to do anything about a future determined to shake down
the miracle of humanity for pocket change.

Mozilla Corp--the for-profit business arm of nonprofit Mozilla Foundation--has
sold out its users before in a partnership with German ad company Cliqz and
again in a marketing blitz for Mr. Robot. No amount of outrage from its users
has changed their behavior. Perhaps because we are locked into a browser
duopoly, Mozilla Corp feels privileged to continue to abuse user trust.

How do we take back user privacy when the world's computing window becomes
poisoned by those impassioned for money? It is deplorable behavior.

~~~
kiriakasis
> It was not a paid placement or advertisement.

I would like that people were more explicit in why they despise ads. For me it
is because they are unsecure, often outside the control of the site owner and
heavily rely on tracking.

For a long time my impression of Mozilla is that they are trying to "sanitize"
ads on the web by experimenting on advertisements that are non-tracking by
design.

(this does not cover cliqz, I never found a good reason for that and honestly
think they should be more transparent about it or cancel it)

Clearly we see that Mozilla has no interest in being an holy warrior against
advertisements, but as said above ads can work while respecting privacy.

> How do we take back user privacy when the world's computing window becomes
> poisoned by those impassioned for money? It is deplorable behavior.

non-profit or for-profit every company still needs money to keep existing

~~~
gpm
Reasons to despise ads?

> they are unsecure, often outside the control of the site owner and heavily
> rely on tracking.

\- They attempt to influence me into buying things I do not want or need.

\- They take up some of my attention, a resource that I consider very
valuable.

\- They create perverse incentives to create content that advertising buyers
appreciate (particularly worrisome when we are talking about a browser, that I
have to rely on to not sell out my privacy).

\- The are often promoting things that are often objectively bad for me (e.g.
energy drinks).

\- They apply all sorts of psychological tricks, many with negative
consequences (e.g. implying that I look bad).

The fact that Mozilla wasn't paid for this means very little. This is clearly
Mozilla experimenting with a new channel of advertising that could be
monetized in the future if successful.

~~~
kiriakasis
My point is that ads are essentially the only way to gain visibility for a lot
of products.

The fact that internet ads are in such an harrowing situation is a consequence
of perverse incentives on ads delivery and reliance on clickbait titles.

wouldn't it be nice if there was a culture of treating your own site or page
as a place for "editor choices"? If there was a model of trust between page
owners (or admin on social media) to choose quality advertisements in a model
similar to television? (I do not live in the US, here television ads are
mostly reasonable)

My point is that ads are not just a way to monetize your own page, they are
also a way to allow easy product discovery. In may opinion, before you can
call them purely evil it is right to also point out the beneficial effects
they do have.

Also many of you point also apply to most modern journalism and articles
online. They are strong negative point but they do not imply that a whole
practice is irredeemably evil.

------
xg15
What I don't get is how they _keep_ doing those "it might look like an ad
except we don't even get paid" stunts. Honestly, to me this seems even worse
than actually inserting genuine ads. That would be horrible as well, but at
least I knew they are a way to support Mozilla.

Those "partnerships" on the other hand seem all about showing that Mozilla is
willing to sacrifice any kind of UI integrity or user control in order to
advertise their user base as capital - without even gaining them anything.

What is going on there?

...or are some people in charge at Mozilla _really_ delusional enough to
believe the "this is our thank you to our users" line?

~~~
pseudalopex
Mozilla representatives stressed that Mozilla didn't receive any money for
integrating Pocket. They conveniently left out that Mozilla _did_ receive
money for referrals. The statement that the Booking.com ad "was not a paid
placement" may be intentionally misleading.

------
mindcrash
Response from Mozilla:

"This snippet was an experiment to provide more value to Firefox users through
offers provided by a partner. It was not a paid placement or advertisement. We
are continually looking for more ways to say thanks for using Firefox. In a
similar vein, earlier this month we offered Firefox users a free opportunity
to enjoy a live concert from Phosphorescent."

Well, maybe it's just me but it seems every single time Mozilla fucks up they
respond with a excuse like "yeah, but it was just a experiment".

If they keep going on like this, thousands of former Firefox users will switch
to Brave - which due to its latest codebase is basically technologically
Chrome but designed from bottom to top with privacy and security in mind. And
former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, who - politics aside - seemingly DOES know
how to run a company focusing on PEOPLE using the web and building a browser
with PEOPLE using the web in mind will be there and happily welcoming them to
the Brave community.

And it's not like these idiots EVEN need the money because it is an open
secret the likes of Google are giving Mozilla $300+ million dollars on a year-
to-year basis to keep them afloat and "competing" with Chrome anyway!

~~~
wtmt
Your thoughts about Brave haven't considered its model of collecting payments
for people without their consent. See this recent discussion [1] and
contemplate whether Brave is really significantly better than Firefox for the
points you mention. I'm not condoning this experiment by Firefox, but just
stating that Brave is not run by great thinkers either.

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999)

------
amaccuish
Don't actually have a problem with this, even though I have an ad blocker
installed, since in Mozilla's statement they said they don't share any data to
display the ad, and I have far more trust in Mozilla than other organisations.
As long as there is a way to switch it off, it's all good with me.

~~~
reitanqild
Upvoted you as well as a number of the more sceptical replies.

I can understand a number of the things Mozilla does, but they have been so
clumsy lately :-/

------
plorg
I've never been a big fan of start pages, even (or especially?) those with
supposedly personalized content. Bookmarks are fine, but tiles showing most
frequently visited sites seems like a pushy way of forcing the user use
bookmarks, and I'm not really into that kind of user manipulation. Like this
case, these personalized start pages always seem like they're designed to give
the browser creator access to the user's attention (impeding the use of the
browser as the metaphorical dumb pipe). It always seemed that, as in this
case, these pages would be the first place for the browser maker to sell
access to the user's attention.

On new Firefox setups I'll specifically turn off all the splash page widgets
and/or set the homepage to about:blank. The search bar in the middle of the
front page is just a shortcut for the super bar anyways.

~~~
mnutt
I used to use Firefox’s Recommended Stories, but eventually disabled them
because they were very clickbaity, and usually when I was opening a new tab I
was working on a particular task and it would distract me from whatever that
was.

------
dawnerd
I don’t get how people can defend Mozilla over this yet blast chrome for
simply being a Google product. Yeah there’s concern over what Google tracks
but I’d be using their search and services in Firefox anyways.

~~~
propogandist
>"Simply being a google product"

which, like all Google products, are constantly phoning home and mining data
across all your web behaviors. Recent changes are hostile towards privacy.
Worse still, for mobile devices they don't allow add-ons given it will impact
mobile ad-revenue, all the while the OS itself is mining user data. Disabling
the data-mining is nearly impossible. Google makes tens of billions off this
data also.

Firefox, on the other hand, is injecting an text ad to the default tab, but
clearly it's not very targeted. It appears they're doing the equivalent of
affiliate marketing, where they'll take a commission if they drive a sale. The
lack of targeting will mean the effectiveness will be questionable.

Unlike Google, Firefox is also not in the data-hoarding business and this is a
feature that's trival to disable. They just screwed up by not disclosing this
test to their (privacy concious) users.

Firefox gets a lot of revenue by allowing Google to be the default search
engine and they will need to figure out monetization strategies to get away
from that model. Standing up their own infrastructure to monetize their users
without selling them out to a competitor is a good starting point.

~~~
dawnerd
I think you missed my point. I would be using google regardless so the data
mining in the browser is kind of a moot point. So my choice becomes a browser
with ads or a browser without.

~~~
propogandist
>my choice becomes a browser with ads or a browser without.

given Chrome is pro-ads and doesn't allow add-ons for mobile devices, your
choices are Firefox, or perhaps Brave

------
Tharkun
The more they pull stunts like these, the more i realize it's time to fork FF
and get rid of all their garbage. Make Pocket optional, remove the (paid?)
list of URLs that's apparently preloaded, remove all of the phone home shit.

~~~
yorwba
> it's time to fork FF and get rid of all their garbage.

The nice thing about Firefox is that you don't even need to fork for that.

> Make Pocket optional

Go to about:config and set extensions.pocket.enabled to false.

> remove the (paid?) list of URLs that's apparently preloaded

If you mean the stuff that's displayed on new tab pages (like the snippet in
TFA), you can get rid of it by changing "Firefox Home Content" at
about:preferences#home .

> remove all of the phone home shit

I've deliberately enabled all telemetry, because I think it's data that
Mozilla _should_ have (check about:telemetry to see what they're measuring)
but you can disable it under "Firefox Data Collection and Use" at
about:preferences#privacy .

I agree it'd be better if Firefox came with a sane configuration by default,
but the fact that you can change it at all makes Firefox a good enough browser
for me.

~~~
Tharkun
> Go to about:config and set extensions.pocket.enabled to false.

That doesn't remove Pocket, it merely disables it. It's a stupid feature and a
stupid default. It should be an extension that users can choose to install (or
not).

> remove the (paid?) list of URLs that's apparently preloaded

This might be an android thing only, but when I type, for instance "sea", the
URL bar autocomplete will suggest "sears.com", even though I have search
disabled and have never visited sears.com. There are a bunch of these which
seem to have come out of nowhere.

~~~
yorwba
> This might be an android thing only, but when I type, for instance "sea",
> the URL bar autocomplete will suggest "sears.com", even though I have search
> disabled and have never visited sears.com. There are a bunch of these which
> seem to have come out of nowhere.

I honestly never noticed this, because I look at the keyboard when I type a
URL on Android.

Doing a bit of research in Bugzilla, it appears that there are two different
systems in Firefox to "seed" the browser with autocomplete results. The first
was implemented in Fennec (Firefox Android) [1] and acts as a fallback to the
Alexa top 500 sites if no other autocomplete result was found [2]. The second
was implemented separately in all of Firefox [3]. Ironically, someone was
worried whether this might appear to users as a paid advertisement, but
proposed using engagement as a metric to measure the impact [4]. That
implementation uses _browser.urlbar.usepreloadedtopurls.enabled_ and
_.expire_days_ to stop using the preloaded list after two weeks (when the user
probably has generated enough history of their own). But the earlier Fennec
version doesn't respect those settings. Someone already complained about that
[5], but it doesn't appear like they filed the report in the right place for
someone on the Fennec team to see it.

I'm going to file a new report to hopefully get that fixed. In the meantime
you can toggle _browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled_ to completely disable
autocomplete, but I guess you might not want that if the suggestions are
otherwise useful.

[1]
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=858829](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=858829)

[2] [https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-
central/file/tip/mobile/andro...](https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-
central/file/tip/mobile/android/base/java/org/mozilla/gecko/home/BrowserSearch.java#l677)

[3]
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1211726](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1211726)

[4]
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1211726#c10](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1211726#c10)

[5]
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1211726#c70](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1211726#c70)

------
vesak
A big dilemma for them. They need money, but they cannot demand it from their
users, nor will they get enough (I guess?) by asking. Not sure what they
should do. Perhaps dismantle the corporation, stick with the non-profit. I
know I would pay them a monthly sub if it was just the non-profit.

Or perhaps just go for Apple and Safari, whose bottom line depends on
respecting privacy.

------
samfisher83
Someone has to pay their programmers. It's through ads via partnership with
Google or other ads.

~~~
anonymousab
There are ways to go about this that are much cleaner and less suspect.

By simply shoehorning this into the existing Snippets functionality and
deploying it without warning they're continuing a dark interaction pattern
with their users.

Their response to the issue - a weird way of maybe saying they weren't paid
for this and that it is purely to help users - is either a weasel words lie or
a ridiculously out of touch action that is not cognizant of how much goodwill
they've been tarnishing over the past year.

Neither bodes well for them.

~~~
chrischen
What are those ways? Develop a separate search engine product where their
primary revenue would be from ads there so they can release a web browser to
track you more to increasse the reveneu from such ads that do not appear in
your browser, but are aided by your browser?

~~~
pseudalopex
At this point just admitting the ads are ads would be a good start.

~~~
darkpuma
Marketing types lie compulsively. They can't help themselves.

------
throwaway2048
the language they used surrounding this is pretty gross:

it "was an experiment to provide more value to Firefox users through offers
provided by a partner" and "not a paid placement or advertisement".

I think its concerning that Mozilla is that deep into the marketing double-
think.

------
Escolte
Is Mozilla that lacking in money that they have to do this?

~~~
Paul-ish
Mozilla struggles with diversity of revenue sources. They make 95%+ of their
income from their search deal. That's a lot of eggs in one basket.

------
switch007
Wikipedia's campaign worked well enough that I now donate monthly. I'd rather
Mozilla bugged me in-browser about setting up a monthly donation rather than
paying marketing people to craft statements to explain these kind of bs
decisions.

~~~
orev
Ask any open source project how many donations they get and it might be just
barely enough to run the severs, if they’re lucky, and not nearly enough for
much else. The idea that large OSS projects can be supported by individual
contributor donations (or the other terrible idea: selling stickers or
t-shirts) is just not in touch with economic reality.

Mozilla’s handling of this situation is really a problem, but it’s not hard to
understand that they need to find sustainable ways to make money if they want
to continue their mission.

------
mikroskeem
C'mon Firefox... you can do better than this

------
gweinberg
An unpaid ad is still an ad.

------
rb666
I am sure all the people complaining here regularly donate to Mozilla.

------
hartator
It’s okay though because it’s Mozilla and we trust Mozilla.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Sarcasm?

Mozilla burned their trustability with me at least.

------
boramalper
I can see how upsetting this is but let’s go on a hyperbole and compare it
with Chrome. The fact that _we_ have a say about the future of Firefox is a
feature that no other (proprietary) browser has.

Beware of your negativity bias.

~~~
tapoxi
Lets compare. Chrome has never showed me ads. Most developers target Chrome
and you're less likely to experience issues. Chrome is also open-source (BSD)
as Chromium, and I can use a fork (such as Vivaldi, MS Edge, Opera, Brave, or
Ungoogled Chromium) if I have an issue with upstream.

~~~
boramalper
> Chrome has never showed me ads.

Totally fair, but this alone by no means indicate that Chrome is more privacy-
friendly than Firefox.

Firefox was the first browser to implement DNT (Do Not Track) alongside other
major browsers in early 2011, whereas Chrome/Chromium implemented it nearly
two years later at the end of 2012.[0]

> Most developers target Chrome and you're less likely to experience issues.

…and don’t you find it worrisome that interoperability might one day
completely fade away?

> Chrome is also open-source (BSD) as Chromium

Yet Google still has a _massive_ influence over the project. For example, see
what I wrote about DNT above. Chromium also syncs all your data to Google’s
servers the moment you login to any Google service.[1]

[0]:
[https://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?revision=156566&view=...](https://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?revision=156566&view=revision)

[1]: [https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/09/23/why-
im-l...](https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/09/23/why-im-leaving-
chrome/)

~~~
kodablah
> Chromium also syncs all your data to Google’s servers the moment you login
> to any Google service.

You said something about Chromium and supported it with a link to a blog about
Chrome. Though the terms can be confusing, it is very important to get them
right if you run around making charges like this. I built a Chromium-based
browser and it doesn't sync data with Google.

~~~
boramalper
> __I built __a Chromium-based browser and it doesn 't sync data with Google.

AFAIK Chromium, by default, syncs data with Google as well unless you can
disable it by some custom compile flags or something. Do we seriously expect
(the majority of) users to compile their own browser?

~~~
dependenttypes
I would expect at least the major linux distros to turn said flags by default.

~~~
boramalper
As I've just checked, Ubuntu doesn't. Don't know about other distros.

------
john_moscow
Unfortunately that's inevitable given that the public expects a browser to be
a free product. The money to pay software developers for keeping the product
up-to-date has to come from somewhere: so it's either selling the users' data,
or having a paid subscription, or something similar to what Wikipedia does.

~~~
ken
Why does it have to come from any of these?

Companies need web browsers (and their component parts), too. They're going to
pay engineers to work on them, anyway. That's how development is supported for
Linux, Git, Postgres, Ruby, etc.

If every Git command started displaying ads tomorrow, would you say that
that's "unfortunately inevitable" given that people expect version control to
be a free product, and that the Git developers need to be paid somehow, and
there's only 3 possible ways for that to happen?

("It was not a paid placement or advertisement", they say, so it's doubly
strange to try to excuse it as a necessary revenue source. There _is_ no
revenue for Mozilla here.)

