"No shady privacy policies or back doors for advertisers" proclaims the Firefox homepage, but that's no longer true in Firefox 128.
Less than a month after acquiring the AdTech company Anonym, Mozilla has added special software co-authored by Meta and built for the advertising industry directly to the latest release
I mean people freaking out about this don’t actually understand what’s happening and why Mozilla is doing it. Mozilla is trying to build a new privacy-based advertising. The feature needs to be opt-in by default in order to have a chance to become mainstream. Forget about the technical details and whether the user understands what it is. Most people don’t change default settings. So they can never get websites to try this better technology if their own users aren’t adopting it.
I also hate the attitude of this community they think Firefox is built for them(ultra tech savy, extremely privacy concious) when 99% of their users are not these things. If you want ultra privacy, go use Libreawolf or whatever. Those solutions are for that type of person. Firefox and Mozilla builds for the average person, which is why they correctly say that the user won’t understand the feature. (Anyone says otherwise is in a tech bubble and haven’t seen normal people interacting with their computers).
I don’t think so. People using Firefox are freaking evangelists trying to spread privacy. And if Firefox should lose those people, it will truly be the end
99% was referring to them not being both tech savy and extremely privacy conscious. I don’t disagree that the appeal of Firefox is better privacy. I just don’t think the average user is looking to absolutely remove every drop of data collected. I mean just look at the default Firefox homepage it comes with. It has sponsored shortcuts and sponsored stories. They put them there because the average user actually clicks on them. If everyone was privacy conscious like you say, they would turn off the feature and Firefox wouldn’t keep it because they don’t make money from it. But that’s obviously not the case.
And these days, privacy is basically the only appeal of Firefox. It’s slower than chrome or webkit based browsers, hangs out with Safari in terms of standards support, and can’t hold a candle to either other browser when it comes to battery life. Why mozilla seems determined to throw that all away is beyond me
The last time I looked at performance and energy benchmarks Firefox was winning.
Sources?
FF users include both normal people and freaking evangelists trying to spread privacy.
Privacy based advertizing:
Develop ad
Think about what websites your target demographic will probably frequent. (Be creative, dear marketing person! You can do it! This is the essence of what you’re getting paid for!)
Pay those sites to display your ad
Done.
No. Why? It’s simple. They are collecting data I don’t want the ad networks to have instead of the ad networks and give it to the ad networks. That’s only more private than the status quo if I’m okay with them to have this data and trust them to handle it responsibly. Which I have no reason to.
See explanation above. That’s not too complicated to explain to a person that managed to turn on the computer. It only gets complicated when you try to follow the mental gymnastics you need to think this feature adds privacy for anybody.
This exactly. We don’t need some in-between “compromise”.