this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
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Firefox

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This is not a good look for firefox (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml to c/firefox@lemmy.ml
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Almost all the links in my front homepage are sponsored now. What's next, a few ads in the bookmark bar? How about when I enter a URL, I then have to type "McDonald's" before I can actually navigate there?

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[–] zoostation@lemmy.world 71 points 1 week ago (8 children)

Just turn it off. If they don't have income they don't exist.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 27 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

Mozilla already has Scrooge McDuck amounts of money. It doesn’t need any more to maintain a browser and an email client.

From jwz, who founded Mozilla & Firefox:

.

Mozilla had a duty to preserve the open web.

Instead they cosplayed as a startup, chasing product dreams of "growth hacking", with Google's ad money as their stand-in for a VC-funding firehose, with absolutely predictable and tragic results.

And those dreams of growth and market penetration failed catastrophically anyway.

(Except for the C-suite, who made out quite well. And Google, who got exactly what they paid for: a decade of antitrust-prosecution insurance. It was never about ad revenue. The on-paper existence of Firefox as a hypothetical competitor kept the Federal wolves at bay, and that's all Google cared about.)

Now hear me out, but What If...? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?

As I have said many times:

In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:

  1. Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
  2. Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
  3. There is no 3.
[–] davel@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 week ago

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/mozilla-is-an-advertising-company-now/#comment-249969

Preemptive subtwit.

Let's say you run a nonprofit animal shelter. And for some reason, some people feel you should be seeing hockey-stick growth, but the donations aren't covering it.

So you decide to start up a side-line of selling kittens for meat.

Then you will inevitably have someone stroking their chin and saying, 'Yes, yes, but how could they afford to stay open if they weren't selling kitten deli slices?"

Some might say -- maybe you aren't an animal shelter any more. Some might say.

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