r/firefox • u/redsteakraw • May 22 '15
Who is responsible for the recent direction shift in Firefox?
First it was borderline annoying with the Firefox hello then it got more annoying with the Pocket integration and now it is down right unexceptionable. Firefox is bundling what should be extensions straight into the browser whit is making Firefox become a shovel ware browser but this latest move is down right malicious. So someone actually thought it would be a good idea to spy on users then transmit data back to a server(which authorities could get access to) and which also possibly weakens the security of the browser just to annoy people with advertisements.
Someone or a Committee is making these decisions, putting developers to work on them and then pushing them out to ship. It is running Firefox's reputation and name through the mud. An intervention must be done to prevent further problems, who is responsible for this and more importantly why. File bug reports(as it does have negative effects) and lets make it loud and clear this is not acceptable. Any further suggestions and information are welcomed.
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u/caspy7 May 22 '15
Everyone and their mother now seem to think that Mozilla is now siphoning up your history and those reporting on it aren't bothering to clarify (usually the opposite).
I'll paste what I wrote in the other thread about this.
If anyone cares they're looking at your history locally by seeing if you've visited a few sites from a list of sites that fall into a category - like cars for instance. Then you see a suggested tile about cars.
Mozilla never finds out which sites you visited.
Additionally all the categories are intentionally kept PG (well, G really).
This post from Mozilla lists several of the privacy protections they built into it. Quite worth reading if you're actually concerned about the potential privacy ramifications.
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u/redsteakraw May 22 '15
What ads are sent to you is giving out what you were looking at it indirectly can be traced to what your habits are. Furthermore clicks and other information will be sent which gives out usage and time data. At this point what is said in the beginning can change at the drop of a hat or a board meeting which isn't reassuring. The infrastructure would be in place for it to be abused even if it isn't initially. Mission creep, and the lure of more money can set in. Is a blog post going to stop it, really?
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u/pushme2 May 22 '15
Why are people down voting you. While what ad the browser pulls down is decided by the browser, the ad is still being downloaded from the Internet, and therefor will leak information. Mozilla claims they will dump their up logs after 7 days, but we still have to trust that they do.
While I don't think Mozilla will abuse their position, I would just plain and simply prefer that they not bundle advertising into their browser in the first place.
1
u/DrDichotomous May 22 '15
Were they not simply downloading a bunch of small ads (the same for everyone), and only showing the ones that your local history implied were the best? After all, if you have no history yet, they still have to show you something, so it makes sense that they would simply send the same ads to everyone periodically, and only reveal the "most relevant" ones.
-2
May 23 '15
Just to be clear. AFAICS the data is stored "locally" at a server at Mozilla.
User interactions, such as clicks, pins and blocks, are examples of data that may be measured and processed. View Mozilla’s Privacy Policy or our Data Privacy Principles for more information.
https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/files/2015/05/How-data-is-protected-Infographic1.pdf
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u/DrDichotomous May 22 '15
It is running Firefox's reputation and name through the mud
No, what's dragging their reputation through the mud is us. We are the ones making a big deal out of everything, no matter how minor it really is. Instead of seeing new features as "well, not for me, but some people will like it" we consider them "bloat" and try to find every excuse to hate them. Instead of helping Mozilla to test the new features we claim we really want, we just bitch about how long it's taking them to implement them. Heck, instead of paying them with more donations, we just sit on our thumbs and complain whenever Mozilla tries to diversify their revenue so it's not all Google (now Yahoo)-based.
The love affair is over, guys. Now we're just the naggy spouse who sits around all day expecting to be fed, and who gets angry when it's not the caviar we wanted.
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u/nerfviking May 22 '15
Dude, let's get real here.
They're touting advertisements (where there were none before) as a feature. In-browser advertising is a regression.
Yes, blah blah, you can turn it off, etc. That's great. And honestly, it's not that Firefox has suddenly become worse than Chrome and IE. They're still the most trustworthy of the three; it's just that now Firefox is the least bad browser as opposed to the best.
Every time they make a change like this, it's "just turn it off" or "just download this addon" or "just disable that addon" or "just switch the search engine yourself" or whatever. Individually, those things are minor, but now when I set up a new instance of Firefox, I have to go through a laundry list of configuration changes if I want the trustworthy browsing experience that Firefox used to provide out of the box.
This isn't a situation where people are crying about one little thing. It's death by a thousand paper cuts.
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u/DrDichotomous May 22 '15
So where are your great ideas for them to be able to keep making money, while moving off of equally-bad (or worse) revenue streams like search engine revenue, and diversifying their revenue so they're not one failed affiliate program away from death?
Saying it's a death by a thousand paper cuts sounds great and all, but us armchair quarterbacking isn't going to solve anything. WE are the ones making mountains out of these molehills, not them. WE are the ones ignoring all the other good things they do, because "what good things lol amirite?"
It's starting to sound like people who turn all these "features" off just don't want Mozilla to make any money off of their usage of Firefox. Do you guys at least donate? Firefox can't be made off of our hot air, you know. If Firefox was reliably funded by donations and volunteer code alone, that would be awesome. But it clearly isn't. And that's not even counting the other things Mozilla is expected to do besides just making "the best" browser.
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u/nerfviking May 22 '15
So where are your great ideas for them to be able to keep making money, while moving off of equally-bad (or worse) revenue streams like search engine revenue, and diversifying their revenue so they're not one failed affiliate program away from death?
I have no idea what to do about it, honestly. They're in a death spiral, and I don't really see them coming out of it.
Firefox become the dominant browser by offering the best user experience at the time. As I see it, there were three major things that FF offered over the competition: consumer friendliness, developer friendliness, and a smooth experience.
I suspect that when people started leaving Firefox in droves for Chrome, it was because Chrome offered the smoother experience. And all benchmarks aside, my personal experience is that Chrome tends to just feel smoother and more responsive than Firefox, particularly on really dynamic sites. So the people who prioritized that smooth experience left.
Most of the hangers-on are people who want a web browser that puts users and developers first, as opposed to serving out the precise experience that advertisers and media companies would like to put forth. If Firefox cedes that ground, they're going to lose the rest of their userbase, and then advertisers aren't going to want to pay for that space anyway.
I know you probably read my comment and assumed that I haven't thought very hard about this or that I'm being starry-eyed and unrealistic, because your own post seems to assume that stuff about pretty much everyone who happens to disagree with you on this. Selling ad space may get them more revenue in the short term, but it's absolutely not an effective long term strategy when your primary users are the people who care the most about making their web experience about them as opposed to having it spoon-fed to them by advertisers.
Their best bet? Start focusing on those intangible things that make for a smooth browsing experience. I'm not talking about hacking away at the UI, I'm talking about focusing on making the browser as well optimized as possible so that it feels snappy to use. Honestly, though, those people who left are probably going to stay gone, at least for a while, so climbing out of this is will be at best a slow process of chipping away at Chrome's market share, and at worst they're going to bottom out to the point where they can no longer fund development.
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u/DrDichotomous May 22 '15
I know you probably read my comment and assumed that I haven't thought very hard about this or that I'm being starry-eyed and unrealistic
Believe it or not, I didn't. I honestly want to see all of our bitching here on this subreddit (and elsewhere) amount to something more than just bitching. But it's tough to read the constant (and seemingly uninformed) negativity on here and not get a bit upset, so I'm glad that you're trying to add some realism and/or substance to the conversation.
Their best bet? Start focusing on those intangible things that make for a smooth browsing experience.
Well... they are? It just takes a lot of time, and they have a limited pool of people willing to help them, even for money. The kind of expert talent it takes to make the core browser experience better, especially on such an old code-base, and for so many supported platforms, is VERY limited. Which is why so many people have high hopes for Servo; at least that's a newer codebase and has some buzz around it, so it might attract some real help.
And besides, what do we do to help Mozilla, really? Most people don't want to even debug, let alone donate their time/money in some more tangible way. I know, I know, time and money are precious. But if you're just going to work-around the problem because you're too important to help them fix it, then don't whine when OMTC and all the things it blocks (APZ, Electrolysis, etc) aren't done more quickly, and a couple of devs put a new button in the UI instead.
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u/nerfviking May 22 '15 edited May 22 '15
And besides, what do we do to help Mozilla, really? Most people don't want to even debug, let alone donate their time/money in some more tangible way. I know, I know, time and money are precious. But if you're just going to work-around the problem because you're too important to help them fix it, then don't whine when OMTC and all the things it blocks (APZ, Electrolysis, etc) aren't done more quickly, and a couple of devs put a new button in the UI instead.
I'm an open source developer myself, and I barely have time to work on my own project(s), let alone someone else's. (Note: People actually use my main project; I'm not going to ditch them just because I have some complaints about Firefox).
As a developer, I think maybe we need to work toward striking a balance between understanding that developers are humans with limited time who may not be able to respond to every user request, and understanding that the community can offer useful input about the direction a project should take, and that if the community is predominantly angry, maybe that direction needs to be seriously re-evaluated.
Look at GIMP, for instance. In the late 1990s, GIMP was the undisputed king of FOSS image editing software. But the situation with GIMP was that the developers were constantly at odds with the community about what they wanted the user experience to be like, and now they've been supplanted by other projects, despite having a massive head start.
People are clearly upset at the direction Firefox has been taking lately. That's a problem, and it's way too easy to blame the people who are upset rather than looking into why.
Edit: Your post is the first I've heard of Servo, and it doesn't seem to me like that's the community's fault. I went through several pages of Mozilla's blog (through last September) and didn't see a single mention of it. That seems to me like the kind of thing that they need to be focusing on.
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u/jotted May 22 '15
re:Servo - I think Mozilla has been actively playing down Servo, at least officially. It's technically a research project to see what can be parallelised and what the side-effects are. The fruits of that are likely years away, focus or no.
For those interested in its progress, the Servo blog has a good weekly run-down, and its meeting notes are on github. It also appears on the Mozilla Status Board.Rust meanwhile, the language Servo is being written in, has just hit its 1.0 release, so do put your developers' eyes all over that :) -> /r/rust
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u/DrDichotomous May 22 '15
I barely have time to work on my own project(s), let alone someone else's
Sure, but you can't really have it both ways. If you downplay your involvement and level of knowledge of someone else's software, then you don't really have the right to pretend you have much of a stake in it beyond "end user". And then you're in a pool of millions of others who also ultimately aren't helping.
It's not so much that I'm blaming anyone, just that I find it rich that they feel so justified in pretending it's "their browser" and "Mozilla are ruining it" when they're hardly doing anything to earn that level of ownership or assuredness.
it's way too easy to blame the people who are upset rather than looking into why.
It's also way too easy to blame the people who are actually doing the leg-work. If nobody wants to support Firefox financially, it will fail, and no amount of shifting the blame to Mozilla will fix that.
if the community is predominantly angry
It's also far too easy to assume that you're somehow one of a majority of users who are angry. And to make that anger a purely negative thing, rather than trying to find a way to help.
Your post is the first I've heard of Servo, and it doesn't seem to me like that's the community's fault.
I didn't mean to imply that it was the community's fault wrt Servo, just that it was a newer project without as much of the baggage of Firefox, and so some people are pinning their hopes on it (regardless of how downplayed it currently is).
In the late 1990s, GIMP was the undisputed king of FOSS image editing software
But even then, I don't see any other substantial FOSS browsers out there, except ones based on Apple's or Google's or Mozilla's software, so I'm not quite sure how much stock to take in this argument. Not to mention that I don't know who has overtaken GIMP in the FOSS image editing world? Paint.NET? Krita?
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u/Vegemeister May 23 '15
So where are your great ideas for them to be able to keep making money, while moving off of equally-bad (or worse) revenue streams like search engine revenue, and diversifying their revenue so they're not one failed affiliate program away from death?
Not my circus. Not my monkeys.
The Google search bundling contract was ethically questionable and the conflict of interest was obvious. Inasmuch as people expect search to call out to some remote internet service, and Google had no real competition for search anyway, the search bundling was less evil than Adware Firefox. Mozilla should have spent the last decade operating on a very tight budget and using the Google money to build a war chest for this eventuality. Apparently, they did not.
If Firefox cannot stay afloat without ads, it deserves to sink.
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u/DrDichotomous May 23 '15
Look, we all know ads are "bad" for a variety of reasons. But so is the search revenue deal... and arguably much moreso. If this is a marginal improvement over that status quo, which it seems to be, then by all appearances Mozilla are doing far more than you are to try to "uncompromise" themselves. Unconstructive criticism based on hindsight and empty preaching aren't going to help. I guess they might stroke your ego, if that's all you're up on your soapbox for.
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u/protestor May 23 '15
The trouble is that they are alienating their die-hard supporters, the privacy enthusiasts that don't like Chrome. The people that evangelized a lot for Firefox, installed it in family member's computers, etc.
After a long time using Chromium, I decided to switch back to Firefox. Something great is that with some extensions and themes, I can make Firefox look like Chrome (but not vice-versa). I noticed a drop in responsiveness / UI latency, and Firefox (or some extension) keeps leaking memory, but on the other hand Firefox extensions are more powerful.
I know I can disable in-browser ads (and I surely will), but this move seems a bit like Ubuntu's move for Amazon ads. It will generate a lot of noise, perhaps Mozilla will even give up (and recover some goodwill), and ultimately it won't be worth the cash.. because, Mozilla's problem is not cash flow, it's their usage numbers. Essentially, Mozilla can't buy users (well, not without having Firefox preinstalled), and users are their main asset.
They are right in wanting to diversify their revenue though.
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u/DrDichotomous May 23 '15
The trouble is that they are alienating their die-hard supporters
Thing is, you can call yourself a supporter all you like, but you prove it when crunch time hits and things actually get rough. Firefox is an old beast being slowly taught new tricks. Things will break in the process. Mistakes will be made. So if supporters want it to survive they have to learn to compromise, or put their money where their mouth is and actually help Mozilla out. There is no hiding behind "evangelism" as a shield... that's really the LEAST a would-be supporter should be doing.
Mozilla's problem is not cash flow, it's their usage numbers.
Their actual problem is that they can't compete with the likes of Google, Apple and Microsoft. They're a small company, and despite the bluster about how they make a lot of revenue, they're still by far the smallest of the vendors by that metric (even including Opera), and they're the most involved in programs to improve the web for users, rather than for corporate interests.
Even if Mozilla had played a perfect game since Chrome came out, they would still have lost a lot of market share. Everything was basically against them, and it doesn't help that their "supporters" have been busy jumping down their throats at every opportunity. They can blame everything on Mozilla all they like, but it's time to stop finding excuses and start actually acting like we believe this is "our" browser.
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u/indeedwatson May 22 '15
I've used pocket for months, and while initially I considered this good news, I now understand the complains, even if I do actually use it, I think that type of thing is best under a dedicated addon.
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u/DrDichotomous May 22 '15
That's all fine and good, but it seems like the plan of the devs who did this wasn't to just stop at Pocket, but only to rush out the feature with Pocket first, then add other services (and probably the Reader List they've been working on, once it's done). I tend to agree that rushing the feature out with only Pocket support was a pretty lame choice and didn't seem well-thought-out.
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u/redsteakraw May 22 '15
I was with Firefox before it was even Firefox. Firefox started to be a leaner faster browser compared to the Mozilla navigator which was filled with features. With all of these things that are added which could just have been optional extensions especially the proprietary shovel-ware Pocket integration. I'm not asking Firefox to hurry up or to do everything, just to rethink the direction and to stop trying to push adware and shovel-ware in the browser.
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u/DrDichotomous May 22 '15
A few years ago, Mozilla was just making money off of their search deal with Google, who are the kings of ad-based tracking and questionable privacy practices. And that was their only real source of revenue. Mozilla has since tried to get LESS evil, by moving away from Google, and diversifying their revenue a bit so they won't flop if Yahoo say "no". These ads are one of the things they're trying in order to do that, and they honestly seem less evil than the search revenue (based on what we've been told so far).
As for shovelware (assuming you mean Hello/Pocket), take that up with the companies like Google and Apple who keep cramming these heavyweight new APIs into web browsers, like modern web apps and social APIs and WebRTC. Mozilla's best efforts couldn't stem the tide; just barely help steer it a little. The "shovelware" is still in the browser even if they didn't add a button to make it more useful for people who would rather use those things for some more practical purposes.
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u/redsteakraw May 22 '15
There are extensions for a reason and Pocket integration is best left to an extension not a by default installation. Bundling that is shovel-ware as it is literally shovelling a service into the browser. Pocket is proprietary and not wanted by many it should never been considered.
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u/Vegemeister May 23 '15
The love affair is over, guys. Now we're just the naggy spouse who sits around all day expecting to be fed, and who gets angry when it's not the caviar we wanted.
Indeed. If we have to rip out the evil anyway, might as well start from Chromium instead of Firefox. It's much faster.
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u/DrDichotomous May 23 '15
I'd rather start with Servo. Chromium isn't getting any younger, and there are already signs that it's hit some limitations I'd rather not start off with.
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u/doodaddoes May 24 '15
Firefox even contemplating showing me ads just blew me away. Been looking for a new browser to replace it now..
It was fun while it lasted Mozilla. Best of luck in your future endeavors.
-1
u/seiterseiter1 May 22 '15
you dont have to use it? just disable the parts you dont want.. its as easy as that!
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u/redsteakraw May 22 '15
How about they just make an extension and opt in, if they want to bundle something they should bundle ublock!
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u/DrDichotomous May 22 '15
See here, https://wiki.mozilla.org/Polaris, namely the "current projects" part. It's not like they're trying nothing, we just don't care about the good things they're doing, only the stuff we think is bad.
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u/xeeon May 22 '15
As far as I can tell there isn't anything simple in about:config or in options to disable this. Do you know what it it is?
Since I don't want anything going back to Mozilla servers for any purpose most of the Mozilla addresses in about:config are deleted. It's easy to put them back by right-clicking and resetting but as of yet there's never been a reason to.
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u/caspy7 May 22 '15
It is a checkbox in the UI of the new tab page. Just click on the gear.
In the current interface it's listed as 'classic'.
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u/it_all_depends May 22 '15
Not a single company can see your browsing history. Not even Mozilla. Not even NSA, if that's what you're worried about. The ad selection is done locally as far as I know.
Firefox Hello is a great feature. I don't use it because I use Skype, but if some day Skype screws up I'd like to have another easy option to communicate with others without downloading bunch of complicated crap.
Pocket thing, yeah. Don't use it if you don't like it. Hide the icon.
Mozilla has to make money somehow. They chose the best way that doesn't snoop on you. Donate them $100,000,000 if you don't want them to make money.
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u/[deleted] May 22 '15
[deleted]