this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2021
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Firefox

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Mozilla to put ads in Firefox address bar suggestions (support.mozilla.org)
submitted 2 years ago by MarcellusDrum@lemmy.ml to c/firefox@lemmy.ml
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[–] AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Vivaldi, Brave, and their stans are getting their pitchforks ready, forgetting that they don’t have to do the hard work of developing an engine because Google already does that for them.

I don't know about how Vivaldi works, but Brave stans can shut up. Their ad system is a hundred times worse than Mozilla's.

I mean, I don't like how they went about this either, but considering the alternative of a 100% Google dominated browser space, and the fact that you can just disable it and the base Firefox code is still open source, it's not a huge deal.

[–] adrianmalacoda@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Yeah, I'm not really defending them (from my point of view any feature that does something without my knowledge or consent being turned on by default is unacceptable) but from my point of view they'll always have to dance with a devil of some sort. I say people are going to complain no matter what based on past experiences: e.g. the "sponsored content on new tab", where they made sure to run all the "recommendation" logic locally so that no data was being sent out of the browser, that still wasn't enough because "ads are bad." So maybe from Mozilla's point of view there is no incentive to try to make these folks happy. People complained whenever they tried to offer Pocket or the VPN thing or the password manager because those weren't "core products" but they're also not allowed to monetize the "core product" either. It's like these people expect Mozilla to be able to synthesize money from air.

And, I am not really sure of the value of suggesting Vivaldi (which is vehemently anti-free software) or Brave (dodgy crypto scheme) which also further Google's dominance over the modern web as a side effect, when we have community versions of Firefox such as LibreWolf or IceCat which are basically the Gecko equivalent of those shady Chromium clones.

I think I'm starting to come around to Drew DeVault's position that it is impossible to implement the web as it exists today.