Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page

https://www.neowin.net/news/firefox-640-is-now-showing-a-bookingcom-ad-in-the-new-tab-page/

128 87 8 years ago

taohansen2• 8 years ago

This is deeply upsetting to me because I have continually pushed Firefox to friends and family as the only alternative to Google's strongarm dominance of our virtual lives.

I have no other alternative to recommend my social circle and feel, daily, increasingly helpless to do anything about a future determined to shake down the miracle of humanity for pocket change.

Mozilla Corp--the for-profit business arm of nonprofit Mozilla Foundation--has sold out its users before in a partnership with German ad company Cliqz and again in a marketing blitz for Mr. Robot. No amount of outrage from its users has changed their behavior. Perhaps because we are locked into a browser duopoly, Mozilla Corp feels privileged to continue to abuse user trust.

How do we take back user privacy when the world's computing window becomes poisoned by those impassioned for money? It is deplorable behavior.

kiriakasis4• 8 years ago

It was not a paid placement or advertisement.

I would like that people were more explicit in why they despise ads. For me it is because they are unsecure, often outside the control of the site owner and heavily rely on tracking.

For a long time my impression of Mozilla is that they are trying to "sanitize" ads on the web by experimenting on advertisements that are non-tracking by design.

(this does not cover cliqz, I never found a good reason for that and honestly think they should be more transparent about it or cancel it)

Clearly we see that Mozilla has no interest in being an holy warrior against advertisements, but as said above ads can work while respecting privacy.

How do we take back user privacy when the world's computing window becomes poisoned by those impassioned for money? It is deplorable behavior.

non-profit or for-profit every company still needs money to keep existing

b_b• 8 years ago

It's not the fact that Mozilla sanitizes or does not sanitize the ads to prevent user tracking. It's the fact that there was never any explicit knowledge that ads like this would even show up on the browser homepage, which violates further trust in Firefox and Mozilla.

gpm• 8 years ago

Reasons to despise ads?

they are unsecure, often outside the control of the site owner and heavily rely on tracking.

- They attempt to influence me into buying things I do not want or need.

- They take up some of my attention, a resource that I consider very valuable.

- They create perverse incentives to create content that advertising buyers appreciate (particularly worrisome when we are talking about a browser, that I have to rely on to not sell out my privacy).

- The are often promoting things that are often objectively bad for me (e.g. energy drinks).

- They apply all sorts of psychological tricks, many with negative consequences (e.g. implying that I look bad).

The fact that Mozilla wasn't paid for this means very little. This is clearly Mozilla experimenting with a new channel of advertising that could be monetized in the future if successful.

xg152• 8 years ago

I would like that people were more explicit in why they despise ads.

Sorry, but no. Ads are not a good way to monetize software. Period. This has been discussed enough in countless articles during the last two years. The reasons are well-known by now. If you still managed to miss all that has been written about ads, I recommend Pinboard's talk about website obesity as a starting point.

asginio• 8 years ago

1. They're ugly. 2. They're insecure. 3. They spy on users. 4. They lie. 5. They are a form of psychological manipulation. 6. They encourage consumerism and wasteful spending. 7. They waste economic resources that could be better spent elsewhere. Customers are the ones who pay for a company's marketing budget. 8. They lead to centralization of power in large firms.

dominotw2• 8 years ago

How do we take back user privacy when the world's computing window becomes poisoned by those impassioned for money? It is deplorable behavior.

Would enough users pay money for a browser?

_asummers• 8 years ago

Technically with moves like this, we already are. The question should instead be phrased: would enough users opt into giving money instead of being advertised to, and that's much trickier. You'd lose some opportunity cost with an ad or not model and having to support that, but I think a nontrivial amount of people would rather spend money than be advertised to.

zzzcpan4• 8 years ago

There are definitely enough users who would donate money to support a fork of a browser that pursues their interests. Not enough who would support Mozilla though.

Marsymars• 8 years ago

I paid for Opera back in the days when they had the option to pay for an ad-free version. They eventually decided to shelf that model. shrug

g_b• 8 years ago

Iridium browser seems like a good alternative. It is firefox with a focus on privacy.

taohansen2• 8 years ago

Their webpage says Iridium is built on top of Chromium.

SlowRobotAhead2• 8 years ago

This is deeply upsetting to me because I have continually pushed Firefox to friends and family as the only alternative to Google's strongarm dominance of our virtual lives.

Agreed. Frankly, this is not a good time for Mozilla to fuck around.

amaccuish• 8 years ago

Don't actually have a problem with this, even though I have an ad blocker installed, since in Mozilla's statement they said they don't share any data to display the ad, and I have far more trust in Mozilla than other organisations. As long as there is a way to switch it off, it's all good with me.

reitanqild2• 8 years ago

Upvoted you as well as a number of the more sceptical replies.

I can understand a number of the things Mozilla does, but they have been so clumsy lately :-/

hartator• 8 years ago

It’s okay though because it’s Mozilla and we trust Mozilla.

pbhjpbhj• 8 years ago

Sarcasm?

Mozilla burned their trustability with me at least.

samfisher832• 8 years ago

Someone has to pay their programmers. It's through ads via partnership with Google or other ads.

anonymousab2• 8 years ago

There are ways to go about this that are much cleaner and less suspect.

By simply shoehorning this into the existing Snippets functionality and deploying it without warning they're continuing a dark interaction pattern with their users.

Their response to the issue - a weird way of maybe saying they weren't paid for this and that it is purely to help users - is either a weasel words lie or a ridiculously out of touch action that is not cognizant of how much goodwill they've been tarnishing over the past year.

Neither bodes well for them.

chrischen• 8 years ago

What are those ways? Develop a separate search engine product where their primary revenue would be from ads there so they can release a web browser to track you more to increasse the reveneu from such ads that do not appear in your browser, but are aided by your browser?

dependenttypes3• 8 years ago

Someone has to overpay their manager, marketing, and executive personnel with money that they receive from donations supposedly for improving Firefox.

samfisher832• 8 years ago

If you look at their financial statement they received 6 million in donations. They paid 250 million dollars for software development. So donations cover just 2.4% of their software development expenses. That doesn't include sga expenses or any of their other expenses.

If you really want you can just build the browser your self and change the startup page.

Tharkun2• 8 years ago

The more they pull stunts like these, the more i realize it's time to fork FF and get rid of all their garbage. Make Pocket optional, remove the (paid?) list of URLs that's apparently preloaded, remove all of the phone home shit.

Xylakant2• 8 years ago

Go ahead. Really. You’ll quickly find that even just forking and building and distributing your releases for every FF-Release (not to speak of keeping your patches up-to-date) will consume a substantial amount of resources. Just consider the case that a 0day drops, FF gets an urgent maintenance release at what’s midnight in your TZ and your patch doesn’t apply cleanly. That’s why every time something controversial happens there’s talk of “it’s time to fork” and no real, sustainable fork appears.

zzzcpan4• 8 years ago

Just consider the case that a 0day drops, FF gets an urgent maintenance release

It's only urgent if the browser is adtech optimized and delivers tons of random third party js, html on every page visit by default. Otherwise with sensible defaults that block all that the risk of exploitation of any 0day is too small to make it urgent.

yorwba2• 8 years ago

it's time to fork FF and get rid of all their garbage.

The nice thing about Firefox is that you don't even need to fork for that.

Make Pocket optional

Go to about:config and set extensions.pocket.enabled to false.

remove the (paid?) list of URLs that's apparently preloaded

If you mean the stuff that's displayed on new tab pages (like the snippet in TFA), you can get rid of it by changing "Firefox Home Content" at about:preferences#home .

remove all of the phone home shit

I've deliberately enabled all telemetry, because I think it's data that Mozilla should have (check about:telemetry to see what they're measuring) but you can disable it under "Firefox Data Collection and Use" at about:preferences#privacy .

I agree it'd be better if Firefox came with a sane configuration by default, but the fact that you can change it at all makes Firefox a good enough browser for me.

switch0072• 8 years ago

I think it's completely fair to judge Firefox by its defaults though, because I imagine a tiny percentage will fully tweak their about:config to more privacy-conscious settings, and that percentage will go down the more non-technical people install it.

Tharkun2• 8 years ago

Go to about:config and set extensions.pocket.enabled to false.

That doesn't remove Pocket, it merely disables it. It's a stupid feature and a stupid default. It should be an extension that users can choose to install (or not).

remove the (paid?) list of URLs that's apparently preloaded

This might be an android thing only, but when I type, for instance "sea", the URL bar autocomplete will suggest "sears.com", even though I have search disabled and have never visited sears.com. There are a bunch of these which seem to have come out of nowhere.

greenyoda• 8 years ago

Waterfox has done this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfox

throwaway2048• 8 years ago

the language they used surrounding this is pretty gross:

it "was an experiment to provide more value to Firefox users through offers provided by a partner" and "not a paid placement or advertisement".

I think its concerning that Mozilla is that deep into the marketing double-think.

xg152• 8 years ago

What I don't get is how they keep doing those "it might look like an ad except we don't even get paid" stunts. Honestly, to me this seems even worse than actually inserting genuine ads. That would be horrible as well, but at least I knew they are a way to support Mozilla.

Those "partnerships" on the other hand seem all about showing that Mozilla is willing to sacrifice any kind of UI integrity or user control in order to advertise their user base as capital - without even gaining them anything.

What is going on there?

...or are some people in charge at Mozilla really delusional enough to believe the "this is our thank you to our users" line?

pseudalopex4• 8 years ago

Mozilla representatives stressed that Mozilla didn't receive any money for integrating Pocket. They conveniently left out that Mozilla did receive money for referrals. The statement that the Booking.com ad "was not a paid placement" may be intentionally misleading.

Escolte• 8 years ago

Is Mozilla that lacking in money that they have to do this?

Paul-ish• 8 years ago

Mozilla struggles with diversity of revenue sources. They make 95%+ of their income from their search deal. That's a lot of eggs in one basket.

basic1• 8 years ago

IIRC their Yahoo deal runs out in 2020, they'll be in trouble after that.

dawnerd2• 8 years ago

I don’t get how people can defend Mozilla over this yet blast chrome for simply being a Google product. Yeah there’s concern over what Google tracks but I’d be using their search and services in Firefox anyways.

propogandist3• 8 years ago

"Simply being a google product"

which, like all Google products, are constantly phoning home and mining data across all your web behaviors. Recent changes are hostile towards privacy. Worse still, for mobile devices they don't allow add-ons given it will impact mobile ad-revenue, all the while the OS itself is mining user data. Disabling the data-mining is nearly impossible. Google makes tens of billions off this data also.

Firefox, on the other hand, is injecting an text ad to the default tab, but clearly it's not very targeted. It appears they're doing the equivalent of affiliate marketing, where they'll take a commission if they drive a sale. The lack of targeting will mean the effectiveness will be questionable.

Unlike Google, Firefox is also not in the data-hoarding business and this is a feature that's trival to disable. They just screwed up by not disclosing this test to their (privacy concious) users.

Firefox gets a lot of revenue by allowing Google to be the default search engine and they will need to figure out monetization strategies to get away from that model. Standing up their own infrastructure to monetize their users without selling them out to a competitor is a good starting point.

dawnerd2• 8 years ago

I think you missed my point. I would be using google regardless so the data mining in the browser is kind of a moot point. So my choice becomes a browser with ads or a browser without.

dependenttypes3• 8 years ago

are constantly phoning home and mining data

This seems to sadly be also true in Firefox nowadays with things like telemetry, crash reporting, safebrowsing.downloads.remote, etc.

coffekaesque• 8 years ago

Honestly I don't care how harsh this sounds but they should fire their entire marketing department. Or the people who are approving the bullshit we've been seeing for the past what, 2~3 years?

They're either completely clueless, don't care about damaging the brand or are just malicious. And in the process, accordingly to themselves, they aren't even making money just partners and good feels, right?

We can't afford to lose Mozilla and Firefox.

Signez• 8 years ago

Is Mozilla in any way a democratic organization? I understand that the Corp is 100% owned by the Foundation, but how does it work?

Can we do anything, as users, to stop these people from hurting Mozilla, without stopping to use Firefox everyday?

Are they, in any way, accountable to their bad performance for all those recent years?

pseudalopex4• 8 years ago

The Corporation CEO answers to the Corporation directors. The Corporation directors answer to the Foundation. The Foundation is controlled by the Foundation directors. The Foundation directors elect themselves.

pseudalopex4• 8 years ago

Mozilla denied taking money to integrate Pocket but admitted much later to getting money for referrals. "It was not a paid placement" may not mean "we did this for free".

boramalper4• 8 years ago

I can see how upsetting this is but let’s go on a hyperbole and compare it with Chrome. The fact that we have a say about the future of Firefox is a feature that no other (proprietary) browser has.

Beware of your negativity bias.

tapoxi• 8 years ago

Lets compare. Chrome has never showed me ads. Most developers target Chrome and you're less likely to experience issues. Chrome is also open-source (BSD) as Chromium, and I can use a fork (such as Vivaldi, MS Edge, Opera, Brave, or Ungoogled Chromium) if I have an issue with upstream.

boramalper4• 8 years ago

Chrome has never showed me ads.

Totally fair, but this alone by no means indicate that Chrome is more privacy-friendly than Firefox.

Firefox was the first browser to implement DNT (Do Not Track) alongside other major browsers in early 2011, whereas Chrome/Chromium implemented it nearly two years later at the end of 2012.[0]

Most developers target Chrome and you're less likely to experience issues.

…and don’t you find it worrisome that interoperability might one day completely fade away?

Chrome is also open-source (BSD) as Chromium

Yet Google still has a massive influence over the project. For example, see what I wrote about DNT above. Chromium also syncs all your data to Google’s servers the moment you login to any Google service.[1]

[0] https://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?revision=156566&view=...

[1] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/09/23/why-im-l...

tln• 8 years ago

Chrome shows me ads for Google products all the time!

plorg• 8 years ago

I've never been a big fan of start pages, even (or especially?) those with supposedly personalized content. Bookmarks are fine, but tiles showing most frequently visited sites seems like a pushy way of forcing the user use bookmarks, and I'm not really into that kind of user manipulation. Like this case, these personalized start pages always seem like they're designed to give the browser creator access to the user's attention (impeding the use of the browser as the metaphorical dumb pipe). It always seemed that, as in this case, these pages would be the first place for the browser maker to sell access to the user's attention.

On new Firefox setups I'll specifically turn off all the splash page widgets and/or set the homepage to about:blank. The search bar in the middle of the front page is just a shortcut for the super bar anyways.

mnutt• 8 years ago

I used to use Firefox’s Recommended Stories, but eventually disabled them because they were very clickbaity, and usually when I was opening a new tab I was working on a particular task and it would distract me from whatever that was.

john_moscow• 8 years ago

Unfortunately that's inevitable given that the public expects a browser to be a free product. The money to pay software developers for keeping the product up-to-date has to come from somewhere: so it's either selling the users' data, or having a paid subscription, or something similar to what Wikipedia does.

ken• 8 years ago

Why does it have to come from any of these?

Companies need web browsers (and their component parts), too. They're going to pay engineers to work on them, anyway. That's how development is supported for Linux, Git, Postgres, Ruby, etc.

If every Git command started displaying ads tomorrow, would you say that that's "unfortunately inevitable" given that people expect version control to be a free product, and that the Git developers need to be paid somehow, and there's only 3 possible ways for that to happen?

("It was not a paid placement or advertisement", they say, so it's doubly strange to try to excuse it as a necessary revenue source. There is no revenue for Mozilla here.)

gweinberg• 8 years ago

An unpaid ad is still an ad.

vesak• 8 years ago

A big dilemma for them. They need money, but they cannot demand it from their users, nor will they get enough (I guess?) by asking. Not sure what they should do. Perhaps dismantle the corporation, stick with the non-profit. I know I would pay them a monthly sub if it was just the non-profit.

Or perhaps just go for Apple and Safari, whose bottom line depends on respecting privacy.

switch0072• 8 years ago

Wikipedia's campaign worked well enough that I now donate monthly. I'd rather Mozilla bugged me in-browser about setting up a monthly donation rather than paying marketing people to craft statements to explain these kind of bs decisions.

orev• 8 years ago

Ask any open source project how many donations they get and it might be just barely enough to run the severs, if they’re lucky, and not nearly enough for much else. The idea that large OSS projects can be supported by individual contributor donations (or the other terrible idea: selling stickers or t-shirts) is just not in touch with economic reality.

Mozilla’s handling of this situation is really a problem, but it’s not hard to understand that they need to find sustainable ways to make money if they want to continue their mission.

mindcrash• 8 years ago

Response from Mozilla:

"This snippet was an experiment to provide more value to Firefox users through offers provided by a partner. It was not a paid placement or advertisement. We are continually looking for more ways to say thanks for using Firefox. In a similar vein, earlier this month we offered Firefox users a free opportunity to enjoy a live concert from Phosphorescent."

Well, maybe it's just me but it seems every single time Mozilla fucks up they respond with a excuse like "yeah, but it was just a experiment".

If they keep going on like this, thousands of former Firefox users will switch to Brave - which due to its latest codebase is basically technologically Chrome but designed from bottom to top with privacy and security in mind. And former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, who - politics aside - seemingly DOES know how to run a company focusing on PEOPLE using the web and building a browser with PEOPLE using the web in mind will be there and happily welcoming them to the Brave community.

And it's not like these idiots EVEN need the money because it is an open secret the likes of Google are giving Mozilla $300+ million dollars on a year-to-year basis to keep them afloat and "competing" with Chrome anyway!

teilo• 8 years ago

I switched 100% from Firefox to Brave, once I discovered: All my Chromium extensions work great (including 1Password); they fixed pdf.js so it now works properly on PDFs behind auth (in the Beta); and the Wildvine component (which is optional and opt-in) works great with Netflix.

wtmt• 8 years ago

Your thoughts about Brave haven't considered its model of collecting payments for people without their consent. See this recent discussion [1] and contemplate whether Brave is really significantly better than Firefox for the points you mention. I'm not condoning this experiment by Firefox, but just stating that Brave is not run by great thinkers either.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999

rb666• 8 years ago

I am sure all the people complaining here regularly donate to Mozilla.

mikroskeem• 8 years ago

C'mon Firefox... you can do better than this

Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page

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