Technology

It's hard because Mozilla need money to survive, and the world needs Mozilla, but it's been hard for them to find a stable source of funding. Mozilla relying on their main competitor (Google) for most of their income is a massive risk. I can understand why they're trying approaches like this, even if the users don't like it.

Does anyone here have a suggestion as to a better way for them to increase their income?

The tech communities are trying their hardest to get people to switch to Firefox. Meanwhile Mozilla is trying its hardest to get people off Firefox with decisions like this.

This is a weird one. On the one hand, we have Mozilla, the last remaining browser company not sucking at the teat of either Google or Apple and we all expect for Mozilla to somehow generate enough money to pay enough employees to stay competitive on the other hand we have the users who expect them not to do anything to try and leverage their userbase to create financial independence.

The problem with Mozilla remains the same problem that they've had for a while. Mozilla doesn't acknowledge the symbiotic relationship it has with its community and the community always over reacts, which means there's a chasm where simple things should be easy but they're not.

Take this for example, Mozilla only had to have a public facing discussion about this and then go and do it anyway.

Sometimes paying lip service works. But since they didn't, you have people like OP who feel like something nefarious is happening and in the end Firefox users lose out as things like donations being pulled hurt.

Mozilla already shows ads, as do all the other browsers, however unlike the other browsers, you have a fully functioning uBlock that can and will remove anything that the preferences don't cover.

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.

ill be happy to be wrong, but there is no alternative. if we dont support firefox; were all fucked.

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?

This appears to be an experimental initiative within Mozilla right now. It's not available to the public and may never be if it doesn't pass muster for them.

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/share-your-thoughts-on-how-you-shop-online/td-p/43015 https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/the-future-of-shopping/

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.

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.

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.

Librewolf on PC.

Mull on Android

I can live with ads but I'd prefer to pay a few dollars a year instead. I already support Mozilla through relay.

I don't think this should surprise anyone, given the new CEO they got and the announcement that was made immediately afterwards, followed by the layoffs. Fortunately, there are Firefox forks that we can switch to as a form of protest, provided that the forks keep these changes out of their codebases.

One thing I predict happening is that this move by Mozilla could spur more activities for the Firefox Forks. It would be a good opportunity for the developers of Mull, Librewolf, and Waterfox to think of ways to make their respective browsers stand out or be unique. Maybe we can one day see an Android version of Librewolf or a new web engine get developed in response to all this mess. Just a thought, of course.

If you don't use the "review checker" feature, which I didn't know existed until now, you will be unaffected by this change.

Pale Moon is the only independent fork that I know of that doesn't depend on gecko or ff

Librewolf

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.

Waterfox is a good fork to move to

WTF?