
New Tab Experiments - RougeFemme
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2014/05/09/new-tab-experiments/
======
Osmose
This article is an interpretation of
[https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2014/05/09/new-
tab-e...](https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2014/05/09/new-tab-
experiments/) and I'm not sure it's the correct interpretation.

My personal opinion (which might be wrong!) is that jonnath is trying to
reassure people that 'Directory Tiles' is not about slapping random ads on the
newtab page, and is not going to just ride the trains to release. They're
going to stew in the Nightly channel for a while while we iterate on them and
figure out how to make them useful to users.

What I don't see is an assertion that the final feature won't involve some
form of revenue. There's been no final declaration, but my understanding was
that the suggested system involved choosing sites that are useful to our
users, and then going to those sites and discussing payment for the placement,
rather than letting sites come and pay us to be put on the page. This is very
similar to what we do with the search box: we choose Google as the default
because we think they're the best default for the users, not because they got
to us first or paid us the most[1].

If you want more details about the implementation that's going to land on
Nightly, check out the tracker bug for the feature and the dependent bugs:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=973273](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=973273)

(And remember kids, Bugzilla is for input on the implementation, discussion
about the feature itself goes on a mailing list like firefox-dev[2]).

[1]: Granted, if we choose Google and Google said "Hah, no money for you" then
we'd probably go to another provider because we have employees to pay, but
this becomes a more important distinction if, say, Bing wanted to pay us more
than Google.

[2]: [https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/firefox-
dev](https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/firefox-dev)

Disclaimer: I'm a webdev for Mozilla, and can't speak for the people actually
working on Directory Tiles, only as someone who knows how to navigate
Mozilla's public information.

~~~
anon1385
>This is very similar to what we do with the search box: we choose Google as
the default because we think they're the best default for the users, not
because they got to us first or paid us the most

Is there a public record of this discussion? I'm kind of curious if anybody
brought up the idea that not having your searches tracked by an ad network
would be best for the users. Unfortunately that leads to the conclusion that
the default search should be DDG (or similar) and I doubt they could afford to
pay you enough to keep Mozilla running. Call me cynical but I'm not sure I
believe that anybody in the room was going to take that suggestion seriously
when it meant their paycheque was on the line.

I can accept the argument that Google is a better search engine right now so
the tracking is 'worth it' for most users (although that does seem to conflict
heavily with Principle 4 of the Mozilla Manifesto: Individuals’ security and
_privacy_ on the Internet are fundamental and _must not be treated as
optional_ ). What happens if DGG catches up enough to be functionally
equivalent for most people? Do Mozilla engineers collectively fall on their
swords and lose their jobs to improve the privacy of the internet for most
users? Or do we have to engage in 'lesser of two evils' style mental
gymnastics about the world being better if Firefox is well funded?

~~~
Osmose
So my statement was a bit too short and not quite accurate. For a reference,
the closest thing I could find within 10 minutes was this mailing list thread:
[https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.governance/flhYG39Oc...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.governance/flhYG39Ocwc/DaiuyqA0Y48J)

It starts off specifically about the removal of Yandex as the default for the
Russian localization of Firefox, but touches on the greater question of why
Google vs anyone else given our differences on tracking users and such. For
context, the Harvey mentioned is Harvey Anderson, who was Senior VP of
Business and Legal Affairs at the time.

My personal summary would be something like this: Mozilla has a mission
defined in the manifesto. We have a ton of projects that are supported by the
funding provided by Google and other search engines. There are several factors
being balanced in the choice of search engine: usefulness to users,
respectfulness of user privacy, and sustainability of the project, to name a
few.

JohnTHaller's got it right: Sure, we could switch to DDG and max out the
respectfulness of user privacy aspect. In return, the usefulness to users goes
down[1], and the sustainability plummets. We'd be sticking perfectly to our
ideals, but shooting ourselves in the foot (assuming we want to continue doing
all the different projects we do).

In choosing Google, the leadership of the project decided that Google as
search provided offered the best balance of usefulness, respectfulness, and
sustainability. You can argue that they're really bad at respecting user
privacy[2], but they'd argue all the alternatives offer an even worse balance.
They think that we can provide a greater net good to the world by going with
Google than we can by going with DDG or someone else.

Mozilla tends to favor pragmatism, IMO, and sometimes that means focusing on
sustainability (a nice word for making money to pay for our other activities).
Hence why we considered directory tiles, among other ideas, so that we can pay
the bills and keep making the web better.

(I'm intentionally ignoring side-arguments like "Why does Mozilla need so
_much_ money?" or "Why do VPs get to make decisions without consulting the
community" because one comment isn't enough to address a complex topic like
this :D)

[1] IMO, I find DDG's results to be worse than Google's, and although I'm fine
with that in return for their other great features, not all users are.

[2] And I'd mildly agree, not being super-knowledgeable about the specifics
personally.

------
huhtenberg
> _A lot of our community found the language hard to decipher_

There is something rotten in the Mozilla stewardship.

First they come with an idea that clearly goes against their users best
interests. Then they actively try to disguise it and sell it as something that
people really truly want, but are just dumb enough not to realize and
appreciate. They still get an earful. And now they don't have chops to simply
say that the idea was bad and it was written off. Instead there's this
masterpiece of weasel wording that effectively puts blame on the users for
killing a perfectly good idea. What the f#ck.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Their plan seemed fine to me. In fact, it was for the benefit of their users -
everyone wins if Mozilla is funded and decoupled from Google.

The ads were unintrusive, and made sense in context. It was just populating
something that was replaced over time with info from your own browsing habits.

~~~
huhtenberg
It's not the idea to put the ads in. It's the fake pretense of doing that for
the sake of users. Just re-read the original announcement [0]. It is _so_
disingenuous, it hurts. Then see the line I quoted above. It got the exact
same problem - it's disingenuous. The issues with the announcement were not
with the language.

[0]
[https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publish...](https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publisher-
transformation-with-users-at-the-center/)

~~~
zanny
It _is_ for the sake of users, like the parent said. We _want_ Mozilla to make
money. As it is right now, they produce all this free software and don't make
a cent from any of it. That can only continue as long as they stay in Google's
good graces to fund them, and as anyone with a popular youtube channel or
dependence on adsense or as a user of any of the dozens of products they have
shut down (like Google Voice third party apps in the next _week_ ) they are a
_fickle_ company to work with.

~~~
magicalist
To be accurate though, Mozilla has a _lot_ more leverage there any of the
analogs you mention.

Mozilla isn't getting handouts from Google. They probably deliver more revenue
to Google by setting it as the default search than any other partner Google
has. iOS/mobile Safari is probably the only other contender.

Finding ways to diversify is good, though.

------
daleharvey
I think this is both good and bad

I love the fact that at Mozilla we listen to community input and make
decisions that we feel are in the best interests of the user, I dont feel like
I work at a company at Mozilla, I feel like I work with a community.

But at the same time, a lot of the broader community are (rightly) cynical and
when something like this is proposed it causes a minor uproar, Its also hard
to filter out what is the vocal minority between a genuine concern, I have no
doubt that it would have been implemented in a responsible way that benefited
everyone involved, so I think this may be a bit of a missed opportunity, but
onwards and upwards.

------
doe88
That obtuse language still scares me, I think it says a lot that the word
_ads_ is not written a single time in this blog post and he seems to use the
word _logos_ instead.

------
olegp
Since we are on the topic of experimenting with the FF new tab page, it would
be great to get the feedback of the HN community on this add-on that we've
been working on: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/starthq/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/starthq/)

StartHQ replaces the new tab page with one that you can fully customize,
giving you quick access to commonly used functionality using "deep links", as
well as the ability to search inside your cloud services, like Greplin did
back in the day.

We also have an API so you can add search support to the services we don't
support or internal apps used within your organization.

More info here: [https://starthq.com/features](https://starthq.com/features)

~~~
chmod775
I think you guys sent me some mail when you added Volafile. It seemed very
impersonal and automated to me, which is likely what you're doing. The other
reason I pretty much ignored it was that the site didn't really appear
'curated' to me, just filled with stuff a crawler would've found out about me.

Off the top of the head I have three ideas that might help:

\- Maybe make it possible for users (not webmasters) to edit information about
pages or at least let them leave some feedback.

\- Send personalized mails to webmasters, to give them some incentive to
actually help you pad the little information you have about their sites. Or
even better let me just reply to your mail with a short description of my site
and directly put that on Volafile's/Whatever's profile. That would basically
take away all of the friction I'd have to endure while 'claiming' my profile.
Replying to a mail isn't hard and you could be pretty sure it belongs to the
rightful owner.

\- Just pull some reviews off other sites, like Google does with reviews for
restaurants (only the first few lines with a link to full review)

Use these suggestions however you like, they're just my few cents but they
might help to pad the little content you have on each page with something more
useful to the user. Currently stuff like this:
[https://starthq.com/apps/volafile-io](https://starthq.com/apps/volafile-io)
looks empty and cheap to me, like something created by a machine. Not many
people will be intent to discover more stuff on your page if the information
they'll get is so little with each click.

Even I, who wanted to discover 'alternatives' to my own service got bored
after a few clicks. I didn't feel like I was finding out anything useful about
the suggested alternatives and related services.

Plus you don't seem to refresh the 'stars' very often. Volafile doesn't have a
lot WoT ratings, but they don't seem to warrant 1 star. Why don't you let your
users rate service by clicking on the stars? It works well for most other
online 'market places'. I actually thought the stars would be clickable at
first. Looking at some other services I don't think the 'stars' they have make
sense at all. Most have 1 star throughout the bank and others have 4 times 1
star and one 5 star 'gauge'. They look pretty random and only confuse. Maybe
you should try to work out better conditions on when to display them. Services
with not enough data points available seem to get 1 star by default, maybe
just gray them all out?

Okay that's all I noticed. Maybe you should take my opinions with a grain of
salt as I'm not really your average user, but I know how valuable feedback can
be to small websites (running one myself, unsurprisingly)

Edit: I can't seem to claim Volafile's profile. Just takes me to some
launcher.

~~~
olegp
Thanks, really appreciate the detailed feedback.

There's an automated tweet sent out when an app is added to the directory. I
presume you got notified of that via email. I've intentionally not emailed app
owners directly as I thought that would be pretty spammy. Perhaps it may be
worth doing, especially if the benefits of having a full listing would be
explained in more detail.

I like the idea about letting users update info on webapps, much like what
Lanyrd is doing for events. Not entirely sure how to go about implementing it
though, but will probably start by letting users review apps and go from
there.

The stars are refreshed once a day, but the rating you see on StartHQ is
relative to other apps in the directory, not all the sites on WoT.

I've sent an email about claiming your profile. You've actually claimed it by
signing up, however updating the profile is still a manual process.

Did you try out the launcher and search? Would be great to get your input on
that.

------
ambrop7
Why not spend all that time that goes into making changes to the UI on actual
functionality, like multi-process, sandbox, faster WebGL?

~~~
vfclists
Doesn't that work need to be funded somehow?

------
tom_jones
I thought this would be about the new mobile version, which unlike the prior
"upgrade" is actually an upgrade. The prior mobile version ruined what was a
great program. Hopefully that they're moving in the right direction with
mobile will mean the desktop version will improve too.

------
blueskin_
What I find bad is this:

"particularly for fresh installs of Firefox, where we don’t yet have any
recommendations to make from your history"

Does this mean they are going to be scraping people's history to find
'suggestions'? If so, time for me to move to pale moon.

------
melloclello
I like my new tab to be empty. Because it's a new tab.

------
lucb1e
> New Tab Experiments

Hey, that's not the title I upvoted

------
mantrax5
"That's not who we are at Mozilla". That's Mozilla talking about a Mozilla
decision.

Do you people suffer split personality or something?

When a company changes its mind about such things it's the worst of both
worlds: you get all the negative PR, none of the benefits, and on top of that
it makes Mozilla management look like a bunch of indecisive amateurs who have
no strategy, rhyme or reasons behind their actions.

A company that decides to have sponsored new tab links and then decides it's
not "who we are" might decide something completely random tomorrow. You can't
rely on there being consistency, because apparently they're not sure who they
are.

Mozilla fears their users now. They fear them. That's not a good thing,
because it means Mozilla doesn't have the credibility to do what's good for
their users and for Mozilla if users might _perceive_ their actions as bad.

But popular actions and good actions don't always overlap. I wish it was that
easy. The word "populism" wouldn't be a bad thing.

~~~
chimeracoder
> Do you people suffer split personality or something?

I think it was Marissa Meyer who said, "Companies don't do things. People do
things."

Companies are just collections of people grouped together under some sort of
legal structure. It doesn't mean that they actually all act as if they were
one monolithic entity. Even at relatively small companies, it's not unusual
for one team to have the authority to make a decision that later gets
contradicted or reversed either higher up the chain, or in a different part of
the organization.

I don't know if this is better or worse than average at Mozilla, but it's
certainly present to at least some extent in any company of (almost) any size.

~~~
Osmose
> I don't know if this is better or worse than average at Mozilla,

It's less about contradiction (which implies a final decision was made and
then reversed) and more about being painfully open. Other companies may also
have lots of instances where there's internal disagreement on things, but when
your standard form of communication is mailing lists, IRC, and blog posts,
it's a lot harder to maintain the façade of a unified mind.

~~~
mantrax5
You're exactly right.

This would be like a person who is unable to lead internal dialog, and
everything they think, they say out loud.

