Improving online advertising through product and infrastructure | The Mozilla Blog
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LAURA CHAMBERS, CEO, MOZILLA CORPORATION As Mark shared in his blog, Mozilla is going to be more active in digital advertising. Our hypothesis is that we n

Despite its emphasis on protecting privacy, Mozilla is moving towards integrating ads, backed by new infrastructure from their acquisition of Anonym. They claim this will maintain a balance between user control and online ad economics, using privacy-preserving tech. However, this shift appears to contradict Mozilla’s earlier stance of protecting users from invasive advertising practices, and it signals a change in their priorities.

  • Beej Jorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org
    1·
    1 month ago

    I’ve been sticking with FF proper since it has the sync stuff that’s easily used. But it sounds like it’s about time to set up a sync server and run a FF fork.

  • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 month ago

    Mozilla sold out a long time ago, they are nothing like they used to be. Everyone should be ditching Firefox for forks if possible. Yes, Firefox is still miles ahead of anything Chromium-based but we can’t trust Mozilla to not screw over their users anymore (and it’s been apparent for YEARS…Pocket, “Sponsored” shortcuts and links, Mozilla VPN popup ads, this behavior is hardly new). What can we trust? Firefox forks with the bullshit stripped out, mostly. I’ve been using LibreWolf for several years on my Linux, Windows, and MacOS systems now. I originally switched because of the Mozilla VPN popups but at the time, complaining about those popups was met with a bunch of Mozilla apologists going “it’s not that bad” “they’re a big company and they need their precious monies”…no. That was ADVERTISING front and center, and it was in Firefox years ago. So was Pocket. So was having Amazon links auto-filled on the new tab shortcuts. Go to something that isn’t run by money. Go to a community-maintained and sanitized fork.

    • pipe01@programming.dev
      1·
      1 month ago

      It’s crazy how for me the worst thing about Firefox is how much people complain about it online, never had a single issue with it

  • utopiah@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 month ago

    I hope everybody criticizing the move either do not use products from Mozilla or, if they do, contribute however they can up to their own capabilities. If you don’t, if you ONLY criticize, yet use Firefox (or a derivative, e.g. LibreWolf) or arguably worst use something fueled by ads (e.g. Chromium based browsers) then you are unfortunately contributing precisely to the model you are rejecting.

    • anachronist@midwest.socialEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Mozilla could have focused on being user-supported through fundraising like Wikipedia. Instead they chose the comfortable path of being funded by their biggest competitor, who is an evil monopoly spyware ad business, which has been compelling Mozilla to kill Firefox and become the badies on the way down.

      • tb_@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 month ago

        You can donate to Mozilla.

        Perhaps they should’ve put that more front and center. But if they add a prominent donate button the people on here would probably lose their shit too.