Firefox will show ads on the new tab page based on browsing history
geeksnack.comMaybe the more relevant page is Mozilla's own announcement, instead of some random site. See https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/05/21/help-test...
I think Mozilla needs to do a better job explaining why there is "no tracking involved in delivering Tiles". They now just state that, with no information on how it's implemented, and people will get scared if they don't hear specifics. I can imagine this being implemented without tracking, by simply downloading all advertisements and doing the ad selection on the client. The ad may then of course not 'phone home'.
They also state that if you have Do Not Track enabled, these new tiles will be disabled "as we believe that most DNT early adopters are seeking to opt out of all advertising experiences". You can also opt out of them by using the cog at the new tab screen.
Still, I don't really like this development.
A better blog-post to link to would be https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2015/05/21/providi... which links to an infographic describing how user privacy is protected:
https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/files/2015/05/How-...
For people who don't like infographics, there's also a textual description: https://blog.mozilla.org/privacy/2015/05/21/putting-our-data...
From your first link:
> This is still one of our early steps towards our goal of improving the state of digital advertising for the Web – delivering greater transparency for advertisers, better, more relevant content experiences and, above all, greater control for Firefox users.
At least one would hope they could be honest in their goal, I don't think anybody care about the state of digital advertising except marketers.
Hi, I'm an engineer on the team working on Tiles at Mozilla.
It may sounds strange, but this is really our honest goal. We want to change the ad industry.
The ad industry in its current state is built on foundations we think don't make sense. For instance, the whole idea of abusing cookies, a useful technology, to track where users go around the internet so that the data can be traded, so that others can make guesses about what ads to show... sounds a bit in need of a change.
We know for a fact that many of the players in the business, the ones that matter, don't really care about intruding on people's privacy. For them, it is what they need to do to achieve their goals.
We have to face it, the internet wouldn't thrive without ad-tech. Not many people are willing or able to pay for content. The digital ad industry is important and is here to stay.
That said, we think we can make a change... for the better. We can think about how to do this from first principles, to be the first customer of our tech.
Frankly, no one will be willing to play the new game with us if we can't prove that it works at least as good as the current way they are doing things: the old tech may be clunky, not that effective and there may be a lot of middlemen, but there are 2 decades of investment in the way its built.
Users are affected. Users care. We know we can make for a web with less annoying ads. They don't need to be nagging, vying for your attention the same way they are now. They don't need to be creepy. And you know what? They may not even be ads as you know them today.
We thought about this a lot, and it's a very touchy topic, one which would cause controversy any way we'd broach it . Why do you think we're not being honest?
How about bringing back Power user features instead of bloating the browser with ads, chat and social networking features?
How about delivering again something for power users which does NOT require add-on installs aka toolbar customization or moving buttons where i want to have them? Or.. how about offering features for both user target groups like it was able until Firefox 22 before you started to remove features because of simple users? How about that?
But you do not care and you are not interested in this! Here is my answer.. Moving to Seamonkey as main browser and to Vivaldi. The later one may be closed source but that developers have at least a brain and know how to handle power users!
And i also quit donating for you month after month and make sure everyone i know is uninstalling your browser.
Btw. the big computer trader of my town is also not supporting Firefox because of your treatment of advanced users! He now only installs Firefox if there is some extra payment!
Congratulations, you anger both loyal users and technology advocates!
>The ad industry in its current state is built on foundations we think don't make sense. For instance, the whole idea of abusing cookies, a useful technology, to track where users go around the internet so that the data can be traded, so that others can make guesses about what ads to show... sounds a bit in need of a change.
And how do you propose this would stop that?
> We have to face it, the internet wouldn't thrive without ad-tech. Not many people are willing or able to pay for content. The digital ad industry is important and is here to stay.
How are ads in the browser relevant to websites that depend on ads for their revenue?
It's not hard to imagine how this concept could expand to the web at large. Rather than deciding what ad to display by consulting a user profile built on cross-site history tracking, a site could simply ask the browser for advice on what to show, without the site having to learn anything in particular about the user.
Good for the site because they get better advice; good for the user because they get more privacy and control.
(I've nothing to do with the team behind this at Mozilla, and have no idea what their roadmap actually is. But it's pretty clear that this is just a first step in a broader version of re-inventing advertising on the web, not a stand-alone attempt to generate a bit more revenue).
Back in 2013, Mozilla Labs had been experimenting with a similar idea, a feature called "User Personalization" (UP). It was an API that get web content access to (user-controlled) user interest keywords, but AFAIK nothing came of the project.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/07/25/up-with-people/
EDIT: Looks like the "Firefox Interest Dashboard" add-on is a more recent exploration of this idea, letting you explore the categorization of your own local browsing history:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-inter...
Unless you personally are paying for everything you're using on the web, you should care about the state of digital advertising.
>At least one would hope they could be honest in their goal, I don't think anybody care about the state of digital advertising except marketers.
So users wouldn't care if most ads would be popups and autoplay sound, right? Oh, they would? Who is being dishonest then?
Most users would prefer if there would be no ads at all. I don't think putting ads in Firefox will reduce ads on websites.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. The way to reduce ads on websites is to pay for websites. But, so far, that's proven less practical and acceptable to users than just putting up with the ads. But, ads are getting annoying and intrusive. So, if we're stuck with ads because folks won't pay, maybe it makes sense to try to make that situation better?
>I don't think anybody care about the state of digital advertising except marketers.
As I have demonstrated with a simple example, this statement is false.
>Most users would prefer if there would be no ads at all.
Your attempt at moving the goalposts is irrelevant.
Therefore, your accusation of Mozilla being dishonest with their goals is not supported by your arguments.
You are interpreting him too literally. What he meant was simply that it is obvious that Mozilla cares about income from their ads, not about the state of digital advertising.
Mozilla cares about funding itself, yes. But digital advertising is also how most of the web is funded - and Mozilla cares about that, too, because it directly impacts everything else under the Mozilla mission.
As a user, you might prefer no ads when asked - but an enormous majority of people have endorsed the ad-supported free-of-charge model on the web through their daily actions. So, practically speaking, we have to find a way to deal with it and make it better.
>What he meant was simply that it is obvious that Mozilla cares about income from their ads, not about the state of digital advertising
Yes. I do not agree with this statement. Mozilla as an organization, as a collective of individuals and as a steward of interests of hundreds of millions of Mozilla products users has diverse and complex interests in the direction of evolution of digital advertising. These interests are not limited to the immediate profits.
They have information in the Bug Tracker, though it's in a more technical language. A plain version is definitively important.
I had nothing against the sponsoring in the new tab screen but this is a bit different. There is so much potential for backfire if they don't do it properly. But at the end, how is that different from Google who is also putting ads by analyzing your entire web history. The main problem is that it's quite hard to finance their business, they are trying to do new stuff in every direction to depend less on Google (new search partners, Read-it-later, Firefox OS...) but it's not an easy task.
Engineer on the Tiles team at Mozilla here.
We're trying to create a new way for ads to be targeted. In the classical model, the server tracks wherever you've been on the internet.
Basically, to show you relevant ads, at least one entity needs to know where you've been.
What we're trying to achieve is similar, except there is no tracking. Most of the decisioning (e.g. which sites similar to the target group have you been on before?) is made in Firefox.
The ad server will send many ads based on a user's geo (as determined by IP address) and locale (browser language, e.g. en-US). This package will include more Tiles (some are sponsored, some are not) than Firefox will decide to show.
While we do get data based on the impressions and other interactions with the Tile, we only get the strict minimum needed to compute our counts.
And on the topic of IP addresses, we consider that sensitive information. We only keep the raw data for a very short while (7 days).
The only thing that is kept for longer is the aggregate data, e.g. how many impressions tile X did on day Y.
Can I simply ask 'why'? It seems like if Firefox has no method of guaranteeing that an add will be placed, there is no financial gain for the mozilla foundation.
Why would you even perceptually compromise user privacy. You have to realize there are many using your browser with expectations of privacy. If you perceptually damage this notion, you're going to loose mind share.
If this goes into firefox, I'll be looking for an alternative.
Apparently, it's different from Google by showing ads without selling your personal information. Firefox fetches ads without sharing your history. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1120311
Google doesn't sell your personal information, it provides access to your eyeballs.
Yeah, I hear this a lot but I've never seen anything that suggests they sell info to any third party. If I'm wrong about this I'm definitely interested in reading about it so I can adjust my stance on it.
As far as I can tell, the idea has always been the same: more relevant ads means less ads needed to make the same revenue and cost businesses less in wasted ad budget.
The "old method" was to just make your ads more obnoxious and abundant since you could only compete through volume (both in the sense of "loudness" and "quantity"). Now if I open a shop in my city, I can advertise on Google. I tell Google that I want to pay for X ads and to show them to people in my city (potential customers) who have searched for similar items (more likely customers). This way I can minimize the amount of money I spend showing ads to people in other cities/countries or who aren't likely to be interested. Google can charge more for that space because it's more likely to result in a customer. Google makes more money from fewer/less obnoxious ads (no popups, flashy shit, etc). And as a web user, I don't see ads for diapers or restaurants in Wyoming because Google's algorithms have determined that I live in an east coast US city and have never searched for baby stuff.
Honestly the only real issue I have with their "big data" is that it might be captured by another organization (business, "hacker", or government) and used in less benign ways than tweaking the ads in my sidebar.
Do you really think that if google gets the chance to earn a lot more money, if they refer only healthy people to insurance A and the rest to insurance B. That there is no chance they woudn't do it? Google could probably destroy other insurances this way.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/nsa-prism-costs...
They most certainly do when there are national security letters involved.
You may argue that this was not Google's fault - it is uncertain how much choice they had with regards to providing access for PRISM, and they're welcome to the tiny compensation they received. The point is that they had the data at all, thus allowing it to be copied y others, regardless of google's intentions
I agree that it is a valid concern but it doesn't support the "Google sells user data" premise without reductio ad absurdum.
Good. Non-profits with proven track records such as Mozilla are the only entities I trust to run an ethical ad network. While I care about privacy and have ghostery, ublock and eff privacy badger installed, I'll be making an exception for Mozilla.
As usual, I am disappointed with the HN hive-mind myopia regarding web ads, privacy and non-profits efforts to compete.
Also, Mozilla is respecting Do Not Track setting of Firefox users:
"* Note: if you set DNT=1, it is possible that you may not be receiving Suggested Tiles. You can very simply enable them on the new tab page with the cogwheel. We made the decision to opt users out of all sponsored Tiles experiences if they have DNT=1 quite early on, as we believe that most DNT early adopters are seeking to opt out of all advertising experiences. However, it’s important to understand that no tracking is involved in delivering Tiles."
You can look at it thisway -- Firefox was funding it's own development by off-shoring it's ads to Google/Bing in exchange for funds. Maybe the world becomes better with Mozilla directly serving ads than it's partners.
Of course, I'll be going with the adblocked community version which will be released, with or without Mozilla's backing.
Relevant: http://ed.agadak.net/2015/04/whys-and-hows-of-suggested-tile...
Key quote: "to summarize, Firefox makes generic encrypted cookieless requests to get enough data to decide locally in Firefox whether content should be added to the new tab page."
The problem is that nobody is funding Firefox and they need money to continue development.
If any of you "goodbye firefox" have a better idea feel free to speak up. Also, you can leave firefox for google, but it collects way more data anyway.
Maybe Microsoft Edge will be good so Windows users can just use default browser.
You're joking, right? Windows now phones home even with your "encryption" keys, Bing search is integrated into the start panel and you're somehow hoping that a still closed source IExplorer will better respect your privacy. My sarcasm detector must be malfunctioning.
Isn't that integrated with MSN.com?
FWIW, I work at Mozilla, but I don't work on this particular project. But, I care because I <3 the web.
What I think a lot of folks are missing here is that this is an attempt to change how ads are done. Whether you like it or not, ads are how most of the web gets funded right now.
Yes, funding Mozilla would be nice. Even better would be if ads on the web in general were less intrusive and better respected privacy.
One of the things this does not do is send your browsing history to remote servers. Instead, the remote server sends you a pile of ads roughly based on your location & language. The browser decides locally what to show. That's a big change, shifting the bulk of the sensitive stuff to your own computer instead of black boxes in the cloud.
This isn't just your usual "slap a banner on it" ad network used in all the free mobile apps. And, if the model works in the browser, it might work on the web too.
Why not go further and give the money earned with ads in firefox to the user. Who can then use this to directly buy webservices. This could also automaticly be brokered by the browser. This could make webservices a comodity and give back power to the user.
Are we sure they will be collecting data?
You could get personalize advertisements without collecting the data: the browser has your history, it made some kind of profiling (categorize you), and then it request advertisement for your profile.
Indeed, the whole point of this (and all the verbiage about "respecting user privacy") is that the browser will do the analysis locally without sending history data back to Mozilla.
For once, it appears Microsoft are the only browser vendor moving in the right direction and that is scary.
They can afford it because they have lots of cash from Windows and Office sales.
It's happened in the past. I still have positive memories of IE4 - at least compared to the horror of Netscape 4
Fair point! I'd forgotten about Netscape 4 and eternal Bus Errors on the SPARCstation 20 I had back then :(
You mean the guys that torpedoed DNT and are sabotaging WebRTC standardization?
It's not about where the processing happens or what data is actually transmitted, it's about them pulling this type of shit without clearly asking my permission. And it's not an excuse that Google and others are doing similar things. If you try to win users by publicly saying you're "fighting for privacy", you will be held against higher standards.
Mozilla failed really badly here and honestly I'm not sure if they can ever win back my trust after this. Even though I've read through the tech docs released and I know it's not like they are sending your history all over, it's the way they decided to do this that undermined all their efforts so far.
Could you be more specific about the particular aspects of the "way they decided to do this" that you are objecting to? As a privacy advocate, I can't see anything particuarly objectionable in their methodology.
Sigh. I was worried this would happen. I know Mozilla need to make money and with their market share shrinking that is getting harder but these kind of "features" put me off wanting to use Firefox all together. I would rather use Chromium over a version of Firefox with targeted advertising built in.
For now at least it looks like being able to disable it is still possible but I cannot find any mention if disabling this also disables the whole analysing my history bit?
There's no real analysis of your history, it's just selecting the top visited links (using existing code, which is used to show you the current tiles of visited sites).
The article says Mozilla are "doing a Google" with this, but I can't remember ever seeing this sort of thing in Chrome or Chromium.
I hate ads. I love Mozilla. I understand Mozilla needs the money. I don't mind supporting them with cash. Why not have a freemium option for folks to subscribe to Firefox and hide the ads?
Freemium wouldn't work. There will be unofficial builds available with this kind of stuff removed available for free within hours of the official release.
They could charge for services such as sync but again that is going to be difficult Chrome does it for free.
I think Mozilla need to seriously look at how they are spending their money as it seems to be pretty insane some of their outgoings.
I know they are trying to diverge from just being a browser with things like Firefox OS but we all know that isn't going to ever be a real competitor to iOS and Android. Even in developing nations I think people are more likely to go with a dirt cheap Windows Phone when Windows 10 is out over a Firefox phone. One thing Windows Phone does really well is run great on very low powered devices. I can't ever see Firefox OS getting above 0.x market share.
Perhaps Mozilla is just too big now? Do they need to scale back to save money? Can they survive on a donations alone?
> Freemium wouldn't work. There will be unofficial builds available with this kind of stuff removed available for free within hours of the official release.
Why? Anyone who would go to the bother of downloading a separate build (and worrying about whether it'll update itself properly) can surely click on the gear in the top right corner of the new tab page and uncheck a checkbox? (Or be like me and keep the new tab page blissfully blank. Far less distracting.)
I highly doubt the revenue from the ads will be significant compared to what Mozilla gets from Yahoo, at least not for a long time. This isn't about revenue; it's more like the old Firefox sync thing where it avoided sending unencrypted data anywhere. You could only decrypt client-side. Similarly, this is about trying out an ad model where the privacy-sensitive data stays client-side.
Perhaps it'll do better than old Sync did?
(full disclosure: I work for Mozilla on the JS engine. Sadly, though, I'm not one of those world-class JIT geniuses mentioned elsewhere in this thread. In fact, I'm a complete idiot. Please don't tell them.)
(And no, we can't survive on donations alone.)
> Freemium wouldn't work. There will be unofficial builds available with this kind of stuff removed available for free within hours of the official release.
But how is "Firefox with ads" going to work then? Firefox is still open source after all. Someone will remove the bit of code enabling ads, gives it a fancy new name and eventually a critical mass will switch to this browser.
Firefox already has market share and momentum; a fork won't hurt it that much unless it gives a lot of improvements.
"Firefox with ads" lets one turn off the ads. The control offered is the same when you're allowed to download a fork. I don't see why a fork would hurt Fx so much if it just turns a feature off by default -- a feature that Firefox lets you turn off anyway.
You have. Disable the feature (yes, it's easy to disable) and donate.
I do donate :) My point is show a message that says 'Subscribe to hide these ads' or something similar. The process you describe is not ideal for most uses who might not even know they can donate. Remove the friction.
A more trustworth statement would be "Click here to turn these ads off. These ads help support Firefox development, if you would like to support development by donating click here".
I'd like to see a "Firefox subscription", a monthly automatic donation model like NPR and PBS use. Give people who "subscribe" a custom Firefox theme to show off that they're supporters (like KQED bumper stickers on Volvos ;).
Bad idea. I hate even the website icons from the new tab page. They sometimes show sites I don't want to advertise (xxx). They make "new tab" work slower and I never feel inclined to click on them.
Now they are trying to stuff even more slowness inducing ads in the new tab - that means - exactly the moment you wan to to something ELSE.
That's the problem - when you open a tab, you don't really want to see the ads. When you search on Google, you might want to see the ads.
I'm okay with this.
I love firefox and was the first few when netscape open Mozilla and I jumped on board and ditch IE5.
So far I trust Mozilla more so than Google or Microsoft on browser software.
Is there a project to make a decent browser that doesn't have any intention of making a profit or selling out its users, and has governance appropriate to make that a reality?
It seems like this is necessary. If I can contribute to that, pre-existing or not, I will start today.
There are 3 billion web users: between us we must have enough altruism and skill to compete with this.
I'm pretty sure the browsers by suckless won't ever show ads; not sure if you consider them decent, though.
Bye Firefox.
Edit: "We promise to put you first and never sell your personal data. What else do you want for the Web?" -- https://twitter.com/firefox/status/461550580729536512
Don't collect my personal data.
Yeah, time to switch to Google Chrome. It's made by a party that will never collect personal data, certainly not make it their entire core business.
Oh wait...
Ok, serious mode. For years people have been complaining that Mozilla is too dependent on funding from Google. This is a way for Mozilla to fund itself without depending on Google. But that's not good either?
Maybe Mozilla should start nagging people for donations, Wikipedia-style? But that's not good either: lots of people complain about Wikipedia's yearly "begging" and say they would prefer to see ads instead.
What would you have them do?
> But that's not good either?
Indeed, it's not a binary decision, there are other ways than just sell you user's data.
For starter, Google (and now Yahoo) were giving hundreds of millions every year. What did Mozilla do with that?
What did they do with it? Have you looked at the insane amount of engineering they have done in the past 8 years? Their Javascript engine is among the fastest in the world. An insane amount of money has been pumped into hiring world-class experts to develop it. Not to mention the continuous improvements to their rendering engine, marketing and awareness projects, charity projects to get minorities like kids and women into web development, fighting legal battles against patent encumbered technologies like H264, etc. You are seriously underestimating the amount of money they need.
> Their Javascript engine is among the fastest in the world.
And still easily the slowest.
Oh really?
Yes, really. Benchmarks are fabricated and hardly represent real use cases, such as modifying the DOM.
DOM modification performance has next to nothing to do with the performance of the JS engine.
Mostly, it funded development: http://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/mozilla_re...
In 2012 they had a surplus of more than $100,000,000 though...
And still, $30,000,000 for administrative cost? $45,000,000 for marketing? (never saw any ads for firefox, did you? I have no idea what they spent so much money on)
The discussion of those numbers is here:
https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi...
It isn't hugely informative, but I would guess that the $9 million in office leases mentioned towards the end is categorized as an administrative cost.
Marketing is not just ads. They support a lot of projects like the Stupid Shit No One Needs & Terrible Ideas Hackathon[1], the Gigabit Community Fund[2], the Hive NYC Learning Network[3], and many more, which probably are itemized as marketing.
[1] http://stupidhackathon.github.io/
Maybe you can email them and ask?
The data is collected in the browser, same as it ever was. The history is not sent to Mozilla's servers - it's the browser that locally chooses and fetches the tiles.
The tiles are grouped based on multiple servers, so the fact that your browser requested a specific tile doesn't directly tell them which site you actually visited.
Mozilla has done a disastrous job of communicating this, I hope they post something soon.
Their last blog entry is from 18 May: https://blog.mozilla.org/
Edit: they have a different blog here that mentions it: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/
Agreed. It’s posted on a /privacy/ section of the blog https://blog.mozilla.org/privacy/
It just leaks which category of sites I've been visits.
Why is it so hard to understand that leaking any bits not necessary for the retrieval and presentation of the link I clicked on is absolutely unacceptable? Anything that sends data that could not be learned form the server logs is spyware and will be treated as such.
Some companies like to claim that this spying is necessary because the data is useful. I'm sure it is, just like I'm sure a thief find the goods they stole to be useful. For similar reasons claims - like your explanation of this firefox misfeature - relating to the amount of bits leaked are not actualy a defense.
Well you know the saying. When something is free, you're the product.
Personally I don't mind. I love Firefox and the work they've done all these years and if that's the only way to keep them afloat then so be it. I just hope the implementation won't be too intrusive.
Not always. If something is free, and it is a commercial company offering it, then you are probably the product.
But if the offering is from a not for profit company, a charity, or volunteers building something open source for their enjoyment and to contribute to the community, then you are not the product.
As for Mozilla, I'll leave you to make up your mind. I tend to agree with you and I love Mozilla too (but hope that Iceweasel doesn't have this :)
There is a whole cosmos of FLOSS software that utterly destroys that argument.
As an open source developer myself, I say that you are way too optimistic about it. With a few exceptions, open source projects tend to be consistently underfunded. I get the feeling the HN crowd doesn't realize/appreciate/care about this fact.
Let's take a look at two contrasting open source projects: Ruby and the V8 Javascript interpreter. Ruby is dog slow in comparison to V8. They both languages are extremely dynamic and present similar optimization challenges. Why? Because Google has enough cash to hire world-class experts to make V8 fing fast. One of the guys behind V8 has 20 years of experience with writing JITs for dynamic languages. The guy practically invited JITs for dynamic languages, and was also one of the main contributors of the Hotspot JVM JIT.
In contrast, Ruby does not. I met up with a panel of Ruby core developers a couple of months ago. It became extremely clear that Ruby is underfunded. Ruby has maybe 2 full time paid developers. They are skilled, but are nowhere near as skilled as the V8 guy when it comes to optimizing dynamic languages. They also lack funding for infrastructure projects.
Web browsers are one of the most complex pieces of software in human history. Mozilla literally spends millions per year on developing Firefox. Sure, a browser might exist in a completely free, lowly-funded FOSS form. But at what expense? Just look at Ruby vs V8. You can't just hand-wave away the importance of money.
Do you have ideas on how else to continue development process ?
And FF forks will gain traction, and so the cycle continues.
I personally switched over to Pale Moon when the whole UI "update" happened, and it's looking more and more as though I made the right choice.
Couldn't iceweasel just change the default so the ads are not shown? It is free software and they already got experience to do changes to the code in order to change the name and icon.
Who in their right mind would push such a thing? How can they think it'll will win them any user? I have no words.
This isn't about winning users. It's about not dying. Web browsers are one of the most complicated pieces of software in human history. Skilled developers cost money, lots of money.
I doubt it. I'm guessing this won't bring in significant money for a while at least, and it'll lose users in the short term. Monetizing search, as with the Google now Yahoo deal, is where the money for developers comes from. This only makes sense if the goal is to shake things up. What its chances of success there are, and how positive that outcome would be, is still an unknown in my head. But Mozilla only exists to have an impact on the Web, so it kind of makes sense.
(I work for Mozilla, but have no special insight into this initiative.)
I think we need a Firefox Edge similar to what happened with ABP.
Finally, I got someone who is respecting privacy instead of moneybag.
...and I'm done with Firefox.
Bye FF
what a terrible change. i've spent the last week developing two firefox addons; now i regret that, because i'll never use a browser with embedded advertising.
Ok, then turn off the embedded advertising. Your users are going to continue seeing ads all over the web no matter what browser they use, and in fact will be tracked by advertisers (less so if they take steps to avoid it, but that's up to them.)
They're a business, just like anyone else. Unless we all start throwing thousands of donations at them, they have to find ways to monetise to keep up the awesome work they do. If it's both relevant and intuitive, then no harm done. Remember, your browsing history isn't exactly a big secret. That's why incognito modes exist in most browsers.
Firefox isn't a business, it's an open source/free software project. Mozilla is a nonprofit entity which pays some people to work on it. This is an important distinction, no?
>Mozilla is a nonprofit entity which pays some people to work on it.
Mozilla now consists of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation and the for-profit Mozilla corporation subsidiary.
The Corporation isn't really for-profit, either, as it dumps any money it makes back into the Foundation.
Not particularly, they still have to gain some form of revenue to keep their core ventures. Their revenue in 2012 for example was $311 million.
Firefox is not a "they" it is an "it." As a computer program, it has no obligation to Mozilla to make them money.
An organization being for-profit or non-profit is not particularly important distinction? Elaborate please.
It's literally just a tax status.
Part of that is that no one owns the Mozilla Foundation, but, for example, the people controlling it can still extract money by paying themselves salary. This is how family foundations can be a tax dodge, the huge legacy is dumped into a non profit and grows without incurring much taxes, meanwhile the family has some meetings and draws comfortable salaries for it.
I understand nothing is free and my privacy matters. For that reason, I'm willing to make donations, even on a regular basis, instead of having ads.
Great, here you go! https://sendto.mozilla.org
I stopped using firefox about 5 years ago. Adblock + Chrome is the best browser I've ever used.
That doesn't stop Google from reading your URL history.
I don't particularly care, If I need anonymity i use tor. P.S. Are you so sure Firefox won't be doing any tracking for 'advertising purposes'?