I wonder if this has anything to do with the Google ad monopoly case?
Firefox
A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox
It's probably at least a factor, yeah. They've been trying to reduce dependence on Google for a long time, which was always a smash hit with the community (not), but if there's a very concrete scenario where will stop paying, then the urgency ramps up quickly.
Time to switch to other fork
Burn the phoenix again.
Not good
Does this mean they are gonna brick ublock origin and force me to Google's 3.0 shit? (I forgot the name of it)
rockbottom: NOBODY wants to see the ads you throw in our faces. doesnt matter that, as you claim, those ad views pay you for your content. there is no good way to make those ads palatable.
69% of the world population doesn't use ad blockers. Google made their billions from people clicking on ads.
Not only are we technical folks (only 5% of the population not their target audience, it seems most people don't care enough about ads to ever try to stop them... at all.
Technically correct: literally no one does fit the criteria for not everyone.
I will go against the tide here and welcome this change. The web is powered by advertising and tracking. It will happen whether Mozilla is part of it or not. In that case, I would much rather have a website using a Mozilla advertising service that is more ethical and respects the user more than the ones from big tech. It's a lesser of two evils and I support this. I would of course rather have no ads at all but we don't live in a fairy tale world and evil companies exist. And like most ads currently in Firefox, I fully trust we will be able to disable them easily, just like we can right now.
I think this is a good thing that Mozilla is finally trying to distance itself from Google's money because it ensures that maintaining the nonprofit is more sustainable
If Mozilla starts being aggressive to ad blocking, I'll agree with the common opinion on this post. But for now I'm more less neutral. If the choice is Mozilla dies or they do some ad stuff, I'd rather the latter. Whether the current and former people running Mozilla have made the right decisions or not to get to this point is kind of irrelevant, because people do not want Mozilla to disappear (even if they claim otherwise) because Mozilla is still a major driver of privacy-oriented work in w3c and web in general.
Aside from that... The only real way to stop ads and tracking, or at least prevent selling and sharing of data outside of the 1st party collector, is a legal path. Whether Anonym/Mozilla is as private as they are claiming, their intent is at least what a realistic legal solution to web tracking would condone that would continue to allow for revenue via ads. There is no way ads will ever go away in a capitalist economy, so it'll need to do something, blocked or not.
Thanks but
We are targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026.
We need an alternative before that
Now imagine if they had something to advertise which people actually want!
I don't see how they think it's a good move. I'm not speaking about people being upset. Most of the Firefox users are either people having at least some tech knowledge or people which use it because of a person with some tech knowledge.
And most of these people use an ad-blocker, know how to install a fork and so on. So, from the beginning, I don't know who think it's a good idea other than to kill Firefox.
So long as they remain open source