Mozilla doubling down on ads in Firefox

blog.mozilla.org Improving online advertising through product and infrastructure | The Mozilla Blog

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.

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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.
- You do understand those forks do 1% of the work required to keep the Firefox codebase performant, standards compliant and technically sound?
  If Mozilla disappears those forks will too.
  
  Hopefully Mozilla employees will kick out their money sink CEO with double legs before the browser disappears for good.
  
  I don’t know if it’s the CEO, the board or the wider leadership team but I agree they haven’t been laser focused on building a better browser and that isn’t good enough.
  
  It's the board and the wider leadership who are controlled by Google and intent on destroying Firefox. The current CEO is pretty new, and replaced a heavily criticized CEO that spent years overseeing the decline of Firefox. The new CEO is a former McKinsey consultant.
- Been called an idiot for saying that I wouldn't trust Firefox as far as I can throw it like 2 months ago after they made telemetry opt out.
  I can't believe that someone who is privacy conscientious would just stick to their guns rather than watching out for their privacy.
  I just hope someone else picks up the shards and runs with it and then we can all just focus on making them better instead of getting riled up over a god damn browser lol.
  
  This is such an ignorant take, this preserves privacy, did you even read the fucking article??? Like seriously this comment is purely false assumptions
  
  I did, and I disagree with their decisions.
  I can condense their article down to "we need money, and we can get it through ads, so we built our own ad network to preserve privacy".
  But I don't like that. This decision does not exist in a vacuum. This comes after a number of other decisions leading me to believe they are shifting priority to making a profit. Telemetry being opt-out, pocket, selling ads on home screen, ...
  This is the icing on a shit cake and I'm sorry, Mozilla destroyed their value proposition about half way into their chain of bad decisions.
  If you still wanna use Firefox, fine. I don't care about that. I don't understand why, but that's ok, it's your god damn decision. But I wanna alert everyone else that Mozilla is not who they used to be and it's time to reevaluate why you use the browser you do.
  Saying this is an ignorant take is invalidating all the experiences I've had configuring Firefox back to being privacy friendly, and I don't appreciate you calling me ignorant for that. If you disagree, that's fair, but you can do it without attacking my credibility. And doing so by giving actual reasons would definitely help your case.
- 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
  
  Firefox hate has become more and more rampant as Google tries to tighten their fist around chromium challengers

53 comments