Mozilla axes HATED Firefox-ad-tab plan ... but will try again Mozilla has scrapped its plan to show in-browser adverts to new users of Firefox. Back in February, Moz talked up “Directory Tiles” that “suggest pre-packaged content for first-time users” of the open-source web browser. Some of the suggestions would be paid-for – ads in other words. The organisation now says the idea “didn’t …
They could even stick an ad or two on that Firefox Start Page (which respect the user's DNT setting, of course). I think few people could get their pants in a twist over that.
Mozilla lately seem to want to find new beautiful web-standard ways to shoot themselves in the foot though.
This actually CAN be done right, look at the default start screen for Palemoon for instance...its got such a good selection that frankly I have kept it as a home screen.
Here is what you get on its start screen...palemoon home page, gmail,twitter,G+,Linkedin,BBCNews,Wikipedia, second row..FF addons, Outlook livemail,FB,yahoo,deviantart,imdb,download crew, final row.lifehacker,newgrounds,youtube,microsoft,stumbleupon,wordpress,livejournal.
With that selection there is more than enough places that I use a lot to make it worth keeping...is Palemoon getting paid for having some of those there? Maybe,probably,but I really don't care since I use those sites anyway and if it keeps palemoon cranking while making my browsing a little faster win/win.
So I think it all comes down to selection and usefulness. If they make sure you have a wide selection of popular websites that are heavily used? I could see folks keeping it and even finding it useful, if they just let anybody with cash buy the slots? Then it'll bomb.
> As soon as you pay for the content you currently get for free.
Quite. Ads are not a technical problem but a commercial one. Only way to deal with them effectively, and the you-are-the-product approach of social networking (and most other) sites is to have a payment for contents system.
We could pretend that ads are not self-inflicted from our expectation of stuff for free, or maybe we could have a discussion about micropayments, like I've asked before. Shall we?
...
(Harken to that ringing silence)
Ah, the old "adverts are mandatory or you are a thief" argument.
The Internet does NOT revolve around the advert model. I know, heresy, right?
But it doesn't. Read on before you downvote...
You want to pay for your website, then sell something. A service or a product. Adverts are gravy.
There are literally MILLIONS of websites that do not rely on the advert model. If this would put Yahoo and the like out of business, I won't miss them for a second. Just like no one really misses AOL's business model, do they? There are plenty of people willing to step up and take their place and even do a better job.
I personally don't mind adverts as long as they aren't the annoying far-too-loud-pop-up-video and I do not begrudge websites making money from them. But NOBODY is obliged to look at them. That's how it works.
If Mozilla wants a way to make (more) money, they should go to the apps store model for their plug ins, but only for the high quality ones.
> Ah, the old "adverts are mandatory or you are a thief" argument.
No one said that - stop building straw men.
> You want to pay for your website, then sell something. A service or a product.
Content is the product, but no one wants to pay. Where does the money come from them? Your newspapers, TV and magazines are subsidised by adverts, it's the same on the Internet just with a different balance.
> There are plenty of people willing to step up and take their place and even do a better job.
Yeah, I can see the droves of people willing to blow a few million a month running (say) a news site in order to give you content for free.
> I do not begrudge websites making money from them.
Nor me, but people should not demand advertisers pay for bandwidth when the advertiser has already paid for the content the user is getting for free.
> If Mozilla wants a way to make (more) money, they should go to the apps store
Or people could simply pay them for their browser. Y'know, that product thing you bang on about!
"Your newspapers, TV and magazines are subsidized by adverts, it's the same on the Internet just with a different balance."
Yes, but you have already paid all you are going to pay for Newspaper, TV and Mazagines (SP - intentional).
As with the internet service, most of us have a data cap, albeit some of them are very large (mine is 300GB/month).
BUT, those adverts eat into that allotment of data. How much? I don't rightly know as I haven't had time or the inclination to measure it.
It is the principal of the thing.
What if you mobile rang you up on occasion, or during a call to play a little jingle for you? And it used up some of your minutes?
I keep letting my Screen Reader Environment (SRE) read the latest versions of FF, and the only thing I can conclude is that your design team is smoking something that even Microsoft's Win8 UI team refused to tamp into their pipe.
There's a phrase I like to use for such things: Situation Normal All F@#ed Up Beyond Recognition, or SNAFUBAR.
Your UI is SNAFUBAR and until you can navigate it with the monitor turned off, you've failed at design.
No seriously, install Jaws from Freedom Scientific, load up the browser, & turn off the monitor.
If you can navigate the Fuster Cluck that is FF entirely by SRE alone, then the design is Logical, Well Thought Out, and Useable.
Until then, I'm stuck using IE while you morons take SNAFUBAR to new & ever depressing lows.
I used to like FF, but haven't in a very long time, because every time I turn around, the UI has changed, the buttons different &/or moved, the options changed &/or moved, and nothing feels the same.
Then there's the hideous roadkill mess you make of the plug in's, with compatibility breaking with every new release, and whom has the time to bother?
It ends up being a infinite game of "Install latest version, determine which plug in's work, determine which ones are broken, set notifications to favorite plug in's so I know when they work, and wait..." Only to do it all over again a few days later because you've released a new version that breaks all the plug in's *AGAIN*...
Don't waste time slapping advertisements into the mix, pull your heads out, take off the blinders, and fix the damned UI.
Once you get THAT done & the browser stable, THEN you can think about ways to make money from the thing.
Until then, your ads will themselves be broken by the very update path you foist upon the very people you want to advertise to.
Brilliant.
Morons.
Try Firefox ESR which should still have the previous interface and should do for several more months. It only gets security fixes, no UI changes.
A Firefox update has never broken a plugin, that interface was set back in the early Netscape Navigator days and has barely changed since. They used to break extensions on a regular basis but I can't remember the last time one of my dozen or so extensions didn't already work with the latest version.
I can't comment on screen reader issues and agree they should leave the UI alone but with the theme I use I haven't seen any of the UI changes in recent versions. I don't like the Chrome UI so my Firefox still looks like Firefox, main menu and everything.
To just cut a snipet...
I used to like FF, but haven't in a very long time, because every time I turn around, the UI has changed, the buttons different &/or moved, the options changed &/or moved, and nothing feels the same.
I know how you feel! That's why I can only recommend that everyone should uninstall their current Firefox installation, and install Firefox 24ESR instead. Yes you'll need to do some judicious work in about:config to bring it back in to line.
I used this Video as a guide. It should be required viewing for EVERYONE at Mozilla!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C51X1DCMtwI
"I'm getting pressure from my bosses to think of ways to make money from Firefox, and I'm pretty much stumped."
I've used other browsers that do this (e.g. some versions of Opera, UCBrowser, Safari), and honestly I have no objection, so long as I have the option to customise it for myself.
That is the whole point. Firefox would display a few (maximum of 9?) sponsored links, until you have visited your first 9 web sites after a CLEAN installation.
The Mozilla Foundation needs money to keep on developing Firefox. Firefox is a free browser. That means that they have to find a few cents here and there to keep the whole operation afloat.
Existing users would never see these links, unless they install it on a new PC, where they will see it until they have set up synchronisation of their settings.
New users will see a list of sponsored sites until they start using the browser to visit sites of their own choosing.
People are happy to use free products, yet they complain when the makers of said products try and find a way to keep the product going and feed themselves... Maybe Firefox users should donate money to Mozilla if they don't want to see 9 sponsored tiles on a clean installation of Firefox.
Ironically of course, Mozilla is funded in no small part from the many millions Google pay them to be the default engine in the search bar (which incidentally is why a search engine is no longer my home page, because why default to search when I have a search bar permanently available?).
I'm not sure why people should be so conflicted with a few ads or sponsored add-ons here and there - provided they are not overly intrusive, and respectful of DNT settings, etc.
Firefox is already funded from sponsorship, ironically from their biggest competitor, which is why I'm sure they're keen to diversify their income stream.
Not conflicted so much as short-sighted. As digital consumers we've embraced free content like it's our right, and spew indignation over the forums whenever someone who has put their heart and soul into a web project has the temerity to ask us to consider turning AdBlock off. It pisses me off.
There used to be absolutely loads of great stuff with no adverts whatsoever when I first started using the internet. Just people posting about stuff that they were passionate about.
That was the stuff worth having and it is almost impossible to find any more. Everything is just made to show advertising content. (Or copy pasting from other similar sites).
The old systems were good.
Usenet (Still miles better than web forums both in terms of the idea and the implimentation).
Web (Displaying Content nothing else).
Email (Plain Text only).
IRC (Chat - Seperate terminal window so not distracting to anywhere near the same extent as instant messages).
There was a pretty good solution for every problem. Now everything is forced to be done via the web for which it is badly suited.
If Google (Or anybody else) had a way to search for advertising free content I would certainly use it.
I've used the mozilla/google homepage for a decade, Mozilla get a cut from that. I certainly don't begrudge it.
Just bored of change for changes sake. Seeing the last 10 pages I visited when opening a new tab is not at all useful, i have to squint to even make out what most of them are.
To this day i still type in well used url's, letting autocomplete or history take care of typos. No doubt Google or some other bunch (of c**ts) will find a reason to remove ALL unseemly text from the browsers.
The new tab page doesn't show the last 10 pages you visited. It shows 9 pages for a start. These are made up of the pages you visit most frequently, pages you've pinned to the new tab page and doesn't include any you have told it to remove from the page. And if you have to squint to see what they are you need to see an optician, one who specialises in coke bottle lenses, coz you have serious sight problems.
The new tab page doesn't show the last 10 pages you visited. It shows 9 pages for a start. These are made up of the pages you visit most frequently, pages you've pinned to the new tab page and doesn't include any you have told it to remove from the page. And if you have to squint to see what they are you need to see an optician, one who specialises in coke bottle lenses, coz you have serious sight problems.
And I'd say that in 9 outta 10 instances. When I do decide to open a "New Tab", its so I can quickly get back to Google w/o having to close the other Tab I was on. Makes ya wonder how we got on w/o 'em!? I do not need a fecking "Awesome Screen" for my PC. I seen how awesome the "Awesome Screen" was already on Android. Which is why I just stick with the more awesome AOSP Browser. That takes me directly to my Homepage quickly, simply with out having to forking shout at it. Or wanting to pitch the fecking thing at the ground!
And, now they want to bring this sh-- to my PC! OH HELL NO!!
... to change the browser I use.
I know right? Problem is, (And I'll send it back to you!), what would you replace it with? Nothing currently does, what Firefox did. Before it went all derp on us! Infection Exploiter? Ughh NOPE I only fire that fail up Once a Month (i.e. Every second Tuesday of the Month). Safari? I'm no fan of the Fruits. I guess that might leave Opera. But, that sucks too!
Pale Moon www.palemoon.org
Just want to throw it out there that Pale Moon is just another Word for Firefox 24ESR.
Why use that crap when you can just use the same environment as always. (Icons, and such).
Its also worth noting that since Pale Moon IS FIREFOX 24ESR w/another name. It will also suffer the same fate once Mozilla get 'round to killing 24ESR off. Make no mistake it might be a short while before that actually happens. But make NO MISTAKE IT WILL HAPPEN!
And, then what?! If Pale Moon were able to do more then a cosmetic brush-up on 24ESR I'd use it. As it is I fell better off just sticking to Firefox24ESR, for now.
You realize that's not how business works right? To move away from Google they've got to have a replacement revenue source or they die. Not soldier on with a limp or the occasional voilent flashback, just die. You can't lop that kind of revenue off most regular companies, much less an extra lean organization like Mozilla.
The Google revenue has always been Mozilla's biggest liability. They're fairly boxed in.
>I really need to go check the themes to find me a 2.x/3.x theme..
Pfft, good luck with that. Last I looked, the Themes directory is a wasteland; you're lucky if you get one per page that's "supported by your version".
I imagine that this is because only those with serious devotion and time on their hands can keep up with the moving target that is the base UI spec. All the good themes I used to use eventually fell by the wayside, leaving little but sports- or cutesy-animal-themed monstrosities or 1337 eye-bleeders.
I actually don't mind Australis, and used it for a while before it was default, but the forced tabs-on-top and removal of the addon bar really pissed me off. Thank heavens for Classic Theme Restorer.
Slower? Perhaps.... Uglier? Well its getting their with each new update. Thankfully I'm still able to use the 24ESR version which still retains traces of common sense.
Makes ya wonder what those Clowns over at Mozilla are currently using. I'd bet my Left Maplenut, its also 24ESR. Perhaps they should be made to suffer their sh-- first before throwing it at the walls?
This is as far as it gets from the original days of "let's keep the Internet free from proprietary stuff". In the last few years, everything emanating from Mozilla has been more and more emulation of their "commercial" competitors - and that is, mainly Google. More and more muddling of why Mozilla exists in the first place. After receiving 300 millions a year from Google, they still nag everybody that they need more money. What for? To plaster more billboards throughout California promoting, err, themselves? Does it really take that much money to release one zillion releases per month which show no discernible or useful progress? Or maybe creating rounded tabs to match the ones from Chrome has been a massively costly exercise? I bet leaving Thunderbird, Lightning and some of their other projects aside, while singing "la-la-la" to the users who need them has really costed them a lot of money. And then there is all the muddling of lines between Mozilla Foundation the charity, and Mozilla Corporation the for-profit enterprise. Where exactly does the money, influence and branding rights go to nowadays - to which one of them? Here is an idea Mozilla - if you want to make some money, maybe it is time to get rid of some of that fat at the top - which is dreaming of more and more ways of being evil while telling everybody not to be evil. Oh, well, another idea you've borrowed, we all know from where.
...who would be willing to pay for software?
Seriously, if it's good, I'm happy to buy it. Free as in Speech, not Free as in Beer. Yes, someone can take the source and make their own version and distribute for free, or just compile it for their own use. But the latter are no threat to the wider market and the former would then have to come up with a long-term business model to support the free distribution. Which would probably mean going back to ads to them so it still wouldn't be quite a competitor to the ad-free Firefox. And indeed, Mozilla could pull the rug out from under any would-be competitor who tried that by simply doing an ad-supported version in parallel with their paid one.
Like YouTube - if I could pay a pittance (e.g. a fiver for a year subscription) to not have all those ads, that would be worth it to me.
Do we really have to have everything for free?
*YES*. Very much in agreement, not just about a Browser, but about a Imap mail client also. I use Thunderbird and find it jolly useful, however, there are some aspects that I despair over, not in the least the amount of memory it consumes when linked to a Gmail account.
I would pay to help support and keep independent. I truly would. I bought Eudora back in 1999 and would certainly pay fees for well developed and supported software.
I suspect, though I have no basis for it, that the majority of people who only use FF and TB feel the same way*.
*So what? MARKETING DROiDS and politicians get away with it so why can't I?
There isn't much money to be made out of a web browser. Ask Opera. If there was a premium version of FF available, what features would it include ? Since it is already ad-free (so far), the Mozilla foundation can only rely on donations and revenue from ads via searches to keep itself going.
It's the perennial question: how to make enough money from Free Software to sustain the organisation without losing its ethos ? How can the Mozilla foundation stay independent from monetary influence by bigger players while still staying solvent ?
" Am I the last person on Earth......who would be willing to pay for software?"
No. There's three other commentards who've claimed they would pay as well. Will all four of you be able to support the development and maintenance of a new paid for browser, even forked from existing versions?
Well, I pay for good apps on my phone, and I doubt I'm the only one, so there is a market. I don't like being force-fed ads, and so one value-added way for FF to go would be to introduce a "sorry folks, we need money, so it's ads or a small fee". By small, I mean small - about the same as a decent app on a phone. I wouldn't pay the same as CoPilot premium (£36 at the moment) for a browser, but I'd pay £3-4 a year for, say, four machines - I want the option to clearly vote with my wallet if Mozilla continue making such a pig's ear of the browser as they seem committed to doing at the moment.
Really, though, we need someone to produce a light, effective browser like Firefox used to be.
@MJI how do I get back and forwards back to the left?
The Restore Classic Shell add-on has an option to make the back button moveable, which actually converts it to left and right buttons, which you can then move to the far left.
The options in RCS aren't very intuitive. I found the best way was to check each box in turn and see what changed.
Pale Moon is worth a shout. Basically a heavily tweaked Firefox. It's compatible with FF extensions and removes some of Mozilla's annoyances (Australis theme being one of them).
To be fair isn't Pale Moon not, based on Firefox 24ESR? I don't leave the default appearance alone long enough to tell if its the new-ish 4.x style or the newer Australis sh--. Before giving it the v3.0 makeover. Basically this is all what Pale Moon has already done for you. I'm not gonna knock it for that. But, lets not try, and sell this as a replacement for Firefox 24ESR proper. 'Cause its not, and once support for 24ESR ends. So to does Pale Moons.
And, that's when the Splunkie's gonna hit the Fan. The writing is on the Wall for Mozilla Firefox. But, yet there just isn't any real alternative coming outta the Free Open Source Software Community on this.
Sure things are mostly ok now... What about say a year from now? Is the World gonna do a 180° on Windows (H)8, and Australis, and suddenly "see the light, and wisdom" of it? Yeahhh... I kinda doubt that....
>>This is what happens when you do the holier than thou thing over and over. First it was the homophobic/loser CEO who had to go, and now its Mozilla thinking it can force MORE ads on us through the very browser we use to see less of them.
I'm not quite clear on how inserting ads is an escalation of ousting their previous CEO over contributions to an anti-gay marriage campaign.
First stage: Identify homophobia in upper echelons.
Second stage: Insert ads.
What process, exactly, are those logical stages of?
Mozilla is a company who wants to make money, not some charitable foundation trying to make the world a better place.
Mozilla is a confusing beast, though. The Mozilla Foundation is a not-for-profit body (which just may be trying to make the world a better place) but its subsidiary the Mozilla Corporation is a company that wants to make money. The two are different parts of the strange Jekyll-and-Hyde creature that has emerged from the ashes of Netscape -- their aims and ideals may not be the same
What "just who we are at Mozilla" doesn't tell us is whether Mr. Nightingale works for the Foundation or the Corporation.
"Mozilla is a confusing beast, though. The Mozilla Foundation is a not-for-profit body (which just may be trying to make the world a better place) but its subsidiary the Mozilla Corporation is a company that wants to make money. The two are different parts of the strange Jekyll-and-Hyde creature that has emerged from the ashes of Netscape -- their aims and ideals may not be the same"
The very same can be said of the raspberry pi foundation with the charity having its subsidiary trading arm. That arrangement is far more opaque than it should be.
OK, so I liked firefox. But they just introduced Australis which bust my user experience. The 'classic theme restore' isn't so bad, partly because I'm not totally against the curved tab markers.
But it broke at least one of the extensions I use, badly. I'm not an extension writer, so I can't tell how good/bad the code is, but it's worked more or less unchanged for ages.
So I went to palemoon which is more or less firefox without the UI changes for Australis, and everything works fine.
So why did they do this? Not to mention that the version number system is so broken resulting in everyone putting insane version ranges in their addons, and it makes the whole boiling thing useless.
"So I went to palemoon which is more or less firefox without the UI changes for Australis, and everything works fine."
I'd recommend Pale Moon to any Firefox user who is fed up with it. Pale Moon totally disagrees with the UI changes that Firefox have made, and it also doesn't have a manic release cycle which breaks add-ons.
I'd wish they'd learn to re-code their Firefox v3.0 for >2014 again. I also find it amusing that the current release of Firefox... Um version 29 IIRC, also breaks Forcastfox AGAIN!! Forcastfox, was probably the first major Plugin I used on Firefox. Well that and ABP anyway.
But, hay lets not stand in the way of a better tomorrow. Just because something used to work, and work very well mind. Now suddenly doesn't anymore. The wost thing about all this, is that the so-called "Alternatives", just happen to all use the latest Mozilla Code.
Methinks its time for a new player to step up into this Game. Mozilla have now clearly lost the Thread!
So they want to join Google in the stalking business now. This would remove their last selling (sorry, giving away) point vs Chrome. New business model: we look like Chrome (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/29/firefox_29_redesign/), we act like Chrome, and we are nearly as good as Chrome. Good luck.
The worrying bit, if the allusions in the article are to be believed, is that this is borne out of financial desperation rather than opportunistic greed. Is there a good, FOSS, light-weight (as Firefox was meant to be, long ago) browser left? Don't say Chromium; their scraps are as poisoned as the real thing, offered to smother the competition, only to be withdrawn when no longer needed. See iGoogle, Sketchup, and numerous other services Google suffocated under its wings.
You want an alternative ?
Try NetSurf, currently V3.1, with nightly builds for those who like living on the edge.
No, it doesn't do everything the major browsers do, but if you can code in C, the devs will be happy to talk to you.
http://www.netsurf-browser.org/
Well I had written a rather lengthy comment but then FF crashed before I hit submit. The Register doesn't retain a copy even if you've hit preview so you'll have to do without my pearls of wisdom apart from a brief summary:
If you don't like FF, still around 50% of users are on MSIE it must be good (though my experience differs!) why not go with the crowd...? Many years ago I BOUGHT my copy of Netscape, that was before MS wrecked the business model by providing MSIE free. If FF cost 50 dollars I'd pay up rather than be forced to use MSIE (yes I've tried the various other choices but I still prefer FF, yes, even FF29).
If you do like FF then contribute effort or cash otherwise it may die (eventually) provide feedback at mozilla.org and maybe even influence change, grumbling in public here won't do any good.
Some changes are for the better, some for the worse. Often changes are for the better but the initial user perception is that they are for the worse because they involve forgetting the old way to do something and learning the new. If changes really do turn out to be for the worse they'll probably be improved or removed in a later version.
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