Ads are bad for firefox, whether they are called ads or Contextual suggestions
Categories
(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)
Tracking
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People
(Reporter: kubrick, Unassigned)
Details
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:95.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/95.0
Steps to reproduce:
I read the news [1] and was horrified to learn that Mozilla Corporation had diverted precious engineering effort to bake ads into Firefox.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/navigate-web-faster-firefox-suggest#w_contextual-suggestions
Actual results:
As a result, I will not be able to recommend Firefox any more. Even with the best guarantees of privacy, which Mozilla cannot provide, these suggestions means treating your users as "eyeballs" and you are fighting for their attention.
Also, yes, Mozilla cannot provide guarantees regarding the privacy, as once as user has clicked on a so called suggestion, it will most likely be sucked into a website with tons of trackers: as it a marketing expense for the target website, they have no choice but to track the s* out of viewers to evaluate their campaign's performance.
Expected results:
As many users are pointing out [2], many people in the community would be happy to pay for Firefox. There is growing awareness that "free" is not a sustainable business model.
Also, this engineering time should have been spent building features that are actually useful to the user, instead of working against them.
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Comment 1•4 years ago
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The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Address Bar' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.
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Reporter | |
Updated•4 years ago
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Reporter | |
Comment 2•4 years ago
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To expand a bit, I don't think that "Ads are bad", I think a lot of users are very happy to trade some privacy for free products, and for many companies, this is their entire source of income, and good for them.
But I really don't think that ads have their place in a browser, or an operating system, or any piece of software that is expected to be a safe space for the user: safe in terms of privacy (which one can argue can be mitigated) but also safe in terms of competition for attention.
Firefox is a tool I use for work and I don't want it to distract me and still my time away.
For 15+ years I've been using Firefox as my main web-browser, until now.
CEO/etc. whoever is responsible for the latest degeneration of the project/product - read the sentence above carefully.
UI - butchered and dysfunctional
Now I see why it became HUGE and dysfunctional couple of months ago - to serve ads in the future (and future is now)
10+ years of trust - wasted but still recoverable if right and bold decisions are made
Performance - not the best
Browser share - since 2016 dropped from 16% to 8%, half of users use FF now.
Ads in the search bar - good luck. If I could ask back the money I've donated, I'd do.
After that final blow, I'll even remove FF Developer Edition from my machine and you'll have really really hard time winning users back.
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Comment 4•4 years ago
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This is a bug tracker, not a discussion forum.
There are better places to have this type of conversation than Bugzilla.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/forums/
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Comment 5•4 years ago
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Agreed, and we can also write them to /dev/null
The page you liked to states clearly "Mozilla provides discussion forums to enable communication among the Mozilla community."
If I had wanted to talk to the "community" I would have used that channel, thanks.
Well, I think this is the one of the major bug Firefox has ever encountered in its lifespan.
Description
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