Mozilla abandons plan for ads on Firefox's new-tab page

Discussion in 'other software & services' started by ronjor, May 10, 2014.

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  1. ronjor

    ronjor Global Moderator

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  2. Rasheed187

    Rasheed187 Registered Member

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    Yeah right, "that's not who we are at Mozilla". Every time you search via FF, it gets redirected to Mozilla, instead of going directly to Google, resulting in a slowdown. I can´t believe that I´m the only one who´s complaining about this. :thumbd:
     
  3. TheWindBringeth

    TheWindBringeth Registered Member

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    I find the article's title and wording questionable give what that blog entry says...

    New Tab Experiments
    https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2014/05/09/new-tab-experiments/

    IOW, it sounds like they are moving forward on this but trying to reassure people that they need not be concerned about it. Which, of course, they should be.

    @Rasheed187: I just looked and don't see that happening with FF 29.0.1 for Windows. The subject might deserve a separate thread, but since we are here for now... What build of Firefox? Pre-release or release? Exactly how are you searching? What search plugin? Is it one that is shipped with Firefox or some other one you've added? Please post a snippet from your capture so we can see the requests that bounce off Mozilla servers. Redact if you need to but preserve the higher level picture so other interested parties can investigate/duplicate.
     
  4. ronjor

    ronjor Global Moderator

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  5. Compu KTed

    Compu KTed Registered Member

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  6. Dave0291

    Dave0291 Registered Member

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    They say that, but I want to see how much choice they actually have once ad partners start waving their wallets at Mozilla. If they do it the way that Opera did and stick to popular website links on the page, that might not be bad at all. I don't really consider that advertising anyway. But the way they keep wording things, that isn't how it is going to be. It sounds more like the Facebook advertising model, which means I would have another reason in a growing list to be turning away from FF. We'll just have to wait until they start testing it in the pre-release channel.
     
  7. TheWindBringeth

    TheWindBringeth Registered Member

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    I think business purposes & financial relationships are aspects to pay attention to when evaluating whether something is an "advertisement" or not. I think for our purposes, another important factor would be how the system operates and to what degree it exposes users to those privacy/security threats that Internet advertising is well known for. Some will recall that earlier descriptions of this New Tab thing were of a static set of sponsored/ad tiles, tailored to locale/language, and bundled with the software itself. The Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, herself, blogged "These sponsored results/ ads would not have tracking features." (emphasis hers). I posted this link in the older thread, but I'll post it again: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=973273. I would encourage people to look through the bug reports, paying close attention to those bugs dealing with remotely hosted links, reporting, and/or targeting.

    I believe you will find that the entries communicate an expansion of capabilities and move towards a more traditional, ad serving network model. One where sponsored/ad tiles can be periodically retrieved from servers, and when requesting those Firefox will pass (mostly TBD at this point) targeting information to those servers along with a cookie based user identifier. Here is one that I bookmarked: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=993906. IIRC, some aspects are also touched upon in other bugs but I don't feel like reading through them all again to re-find the other ones with important comments.

    I don't run nightlies, and won't given the default settings and experiments Mozilla intends to push on people that are trying to help it, but I've seen the screenshots with the purposefully subtle and generic indicator meant to make these sponsored/ad tiles easily overlooked. What makes its way into earlier nightlies will of course be informative. However, I think what is more informative are the bug reports and other developer communications. For they provide not only a glimpse into the design objectives but also a glimpse into the minds of those developers working on this. Which is helpful, because we're interested in where they are willing and wanting to take things... what it will become over time (years)... not just what it will be like initially.
     
    Last edited: May 14, 2014
  8. ArchiveX

    ArchiveX Registered Member

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  9. TheWindBringeth

    TheWindBringeth Registered Member

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    Well he is from Germany so perhaps he has an excuse for not being good at parsing English. At least he, too, added an update/correction to his article. It's a shame he didn't correct the title as well.
     
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