First focusing on AI and now this, already cancelled my donations, do we have a good fork to move to?
deleted by creator
It says “opt-out” in the title.
deleted by creator
ill be happy to be wrong, but there is no alternative. if we dont support firefox; were all fucked.
Pale Moon is the only alternative I can think of, it’s independent of Gecko and FF
Last I heard, which was admittedly a long time ago, Pale Moon was dangerously out of date with respect to security and web standards and not much more than a meme. I feel like I remember a significant change in leadership relatively recently, but has Pale Moon actually become a viable alternative?
Beyond that, WebKit is still a thing. Ladybird is too though it’s still quite a ways from primetime.
Hence why we need a public option.
Maybe I’m too much of a goof but I haven’t noticed any ads and I haven’t found any way to turn them off either. Is this only in the desktop version or is it also in the mobile version? Normally I just use the mobile version.
I’m not planning to move anywhere tbh.
Mozilla is almost 100% financially dependent on Google right now, if that funding goes away then so will Firefox, the Gecko engine, and likely all the forks. With all the layoffs happening in the industry, we can’t rule out Google shareholders looking elsewhere to cut costs too, such as the massive subsidization of Mozilla. The little we can do is allow Mozilla to find other sources of funding that are optional for users IMO
Yes, stuff like pocket is garbage. But at least Mozilla allow you to turn it off, which is more than can be said for Google: on Android devices manufacturers have to pay a hefty “fee” just to allow users to remove the Google search bar from the launcher. As a user you can get around this by installing a custom launcher, but as a manufacturer, you will not get Google certification: no SafetyNet (Play Integrity DRM, required by Banking apps), no Widevine, and Google will block GMS & their other apps on your product.
Regarding AI, mozilla’s memorycache is completely local (runs on the user’s machine) and does not call out to any servers. The new translation feature is the same. The only exception to this that I’m aware of is the AI helper on MDN, but the target audience of that site is already in a position to determine whether that is a useful feature or not.
I’m not planning to move anywhere tbh.
I do. If they go through with it than they’re not much better than Google.
If they don’t have enough money maybe they could start with cutting the CEO’s pay.
this need to start from inside the company, lile the employers timing a walkout of something, other than that everything gonna stay the same
I haven’t read through the issue, but so far all of Mozilla’s endeavours into ads have been stellar privacy-wise.
And their CEO stepped back a few weeks ago. It’s well possible that the intermediary/new CEO won’t get as much payment, because losing them to a competitor will not hurt as badly.
already
How considering to show ads and allow to opt out is worse that google? Have you watch Youtube?
Likening this to the evils of google is such a wildly dishonest take lmao
On the contrary, it’s the only comparison you can make, since they are literally the only options.
Why? Do you really think Google started out evil, and not step by step by implementing “improvements” similar to this one?
That bugzilla page says they targeted version 122 for this change. I have Firefox 122 on my PC and when I look at the about:config page, that setting is still set to False. I think y’all are freaking out about a very small thing.
If you use Firefox, and you check your about:config page and you see true for that setting, then just change it to false and go about your day.
Or are we all just talking philosophically about this?
Sure, you can change literally everything about Firefox if you pay a time cost. The defaults do matter because that’s one more thing to fix when installing it. We could say this about any negative feature.
With Firefox sync you only ever have to do it once.
Firefox is a super easy install for me. Install login and all of my settings auto apply.
I agree with all of that. 👍
I just didn’t see anyone else addressing where the change lives in the browser and how to un-do it if you want to opt out.
I really don’t understand where they are going with Mozilla’s new leadership.
Don’t they already show ads in pinned sites area. Since I am not a regular donor I click on the affiliate amazon link if I am purchasing something to support them. Now I feel like they are taking wrong signal due to this. More advertising enabled by default will make even harder to recommend firefox to new users.
If you don’t use the “review checker” feature, which I didn’t know existed until now, you will be unaffected by this change.
Don’t they already do this with Firefox Suggest?
WTF?
It seems highly likely that you have mischaracterized the meaning of browser.shopping.experience2023.ads.userEnabled but it doesn’t matter. The mere existence of browser.shopping.experience2023.ads.userEnabled is damning enough on its own.
I remember the last few versions of Netscape Communicator had a “Shop” button.
This was the sign that Netscape had lost the browser war and was giving up.
I remember the Amazon icon on Ubuntu. It is why I initially gave up on Linux after the first install…like WTF I don’t want Amazon in this new to me OS.
Librewolf
I found its privacy settings too restrictive. I ended up moving to Floorp which is much closer to the Vanilla FF
Waterfox is a good fork to move to
If Firefox goes down because of lack of funding, so will waterfox. You will be forced to move to Chromium for security and basic web features.
Is there a picture of what this actually looks / would look like? Honestly, although it is going down a bad path, it isn’t actually all that surprising. Firefox already has sponsored address bar suggestions by default.
I mean good, as long as they don’t build in shitty tracking and stuff.
It makes them less dependent on Google money.
Indeed. Firefox already has “sponsored links” and such in the built-in homepage, I simply disable those when I first install it and get on with life.
Big projects like Firefox need big money to support it. If you don’t want it to be beholden to Google it needs to find ways to earn some on its own.
