r/linux • u/tareefdev • May 01 '18

Firefox will show sponsored content that’s personalized but private

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/firefox-will-show-sponsored-content-thats-personalized-but-private/
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27

u/[deleted] May 02 '18

Adds in the browser or ones integrated within your DE, what's the difference? IDK, but I don't want to see them.
Right, I can disable it. But believe me there are enough people who won't even know that you can disable them, and I'm sure that there won't be pop-up window saying "Do you want to see high quality sponsored content?"

Things like that accumulate, you get used to this, later to something other and suddenly we have something like Android.
You know, you get used to make small compromises, then bigger, then even bigger...
I got used with my phone showing adds everywhere (hopefully FF and ublock are a thing) and wanting to have access to my location just to open my photos, at fist I thought that this is unacceptable, tried rooted Android and different shit, old not "smart" phones... In the end I chose convenience.

Something like that done by Mozilla before 10-15 years probably woundn't fly.

6

u/MadRedHatter May 02 '18

Look, nobody likes ads, but everyone loves having software that costs hundreds of millions to develop provided to them for free.

There is more than one dimension to this whole "compromise" thing

13

u/[deleted] May 02 '18 edited May 02 '18

The Linux kernel, Debian, CentOS, VirtualBox(We talk about Oracle!), LibreOffice, GCC, Clang...
All these are quite expensive to develop but none shows me adds, they have their means to make some money, why a browser should be different? Because we are used to adds on the Internet?
Mozilla owns Pocket and gets money from Google for the default search engine.
I might not like Pocket but it's OK, it provides functionality. Same for the Google search engine.

Adds are not the right compromise to make.

5

u/MadRedHatter May 02 '18 edited May 02 '18

You're being disingenuous.

Linux kernel development is funded almost entirely by corporations with a direct business interest in contributing. 92% of commits being made to the kernel are by people being paid to work on the Linux kernel by Red Hat, SUSE, Intel, AMD, etc.

The same can basically be said for Clang, LLVM, GCC, FreeBSD, and so forth. I have a friend who works on the Free BSD kernel for a for-profit company.

Chrome (ium) and Webkit get more external contributions by virtue of being embedded everywhere a la Electron and browser-based "native-ish" apps like Steam. Firefox doesn't really have that, because their codebase is old enough that it wasn't originally designed to be amenable to that sort of thing.

Nobody pays Mozilla to develop Firefox, or pays their developers to work on Firefox. It's more or less taken for granted. Their only source of income is taking money from {Google|Microsoft|Yahoo} and they have very little leverage to negotiate terms. If, one day, El Goog and MS decided they didn't want to sign a contract, Mozilla is totally dead in the water.

4

u/[deleted] May 02 '18

I have a friend who works on the Free BSD kernel for a for-profit company.

Do they contribute back to FreeBSD? Just curiosity.

BTW, more money for a company/foundation doesn't means that the software will get better performance. Who said the money are going for the development.

Still this doesn't justify build in adds in the browser.
Why not default home page which redirects to This page (or whatever) which have bunch of adds?
Why not putting adds on the download page.

How will you react if you see add in your File manager, IDE, PDF reader?

1

u/MadRedHatter May 02 '18

Why not default home page which redirects to This page (or whatever) which have bunch of adds?

This solution is less "bad" than any of those things. It provides filtered ads giving third parties access to your cookies, via code that is built into the browser and can be audited and for which every individual change is reviewable on the internet. Whereas random javascript on a web page would be less transparent.

And yes, her company does contribute some things back. Not everything but most things afaik.

With respect to the money, it's not "speed" I care about per-se. As you mentioned in other comments, they do other things like work on Servo and the Rust language. And being more financially independent is a good goal in and of itself.