Mozilla Decides Against Ads In The New Tab Page

[balouba]

Agreed.

I don't see any wrong by putting some popular sites on New Tab page. They're easily removable and will be replaced by the actual user preferable ones after running a while.

For people attacking Mozilla for only trying to generate some revenue on this, take a close look at the list. Honestly I don't think Mozilla will get a cent from Wikipedia by listing it there.

Strangely, people lives comfortable by having some Search options preloaded in Search Box for years.

People don't care about what matter. They care about gossip. Welcome to Internet 3.0.

Spoiler: it sucks ass

[NothingMuchHereToSay]

Firefox with Ads? Why haven't I heard of this and why aren't people throwing BIGGER crapfests over it?

[Slartifartblast]

Makes this look very interesting, not tried it yet.

http://www.qupzilla.com/

[droste]

Firefox with Ads? Why haven't I heard of this and why aren't people throwing BIGGER crapfests over it?

Ads are not always bad. Bad ads are bad (flash ads for example). Ads are the thing that makes so much of the internet free to use. Some people seem to forget this most of the time.
I don't mind to have some non intrusive ads here and there to get the benefit to not have to pay for things.

[b15hop]

From what I understand, Mozilla already receives many millions of dollars from having google as the default search. More than enough for a non-profit web browser. I will drop Mozilla if they force ads on the tab page - and yes a suggested link is still an ad.

Same for me. I would drop Mozilla immediately if they did that.

[psychoticmeow]

Same for me. I would drop Mozilla immediately if they did that.

So you'd drop Mozilla if they did a thing they never even said or had plans to do? Useful information that...

[Luke]

This made me lift my ban on Firefox updates

I had Firefox pinned at version 26, late enough to play H264 by default (so that ability would not fingerprint as rare) but predating the "sponsored tiles" controversy. The danger with a browser supported by ads today would be the temptation to add tracking tomorrow. If you want tracking you can use Google Chrome with all the spyware enabled. I thought I was going to have to purge Firefox when that anti-Gay CEO triggered a boycott, but the rest of Mozilla heard the concerns of the community. The bigot is gone and so is the proposal for ads.

Thus, I installed Firefox 29 today and found there was exactly one plus of the new interface: customization actually works. I don't like the missing menu bar, but was able to remove the search bar and put the items I needed in the toolbar while keeping a long URL bar. Still, in the long run people on my side of the house really do need a browser written by folks who are not in it for the money, and whose top concerns are security and privacy. Right now the Torbrowser people base their work on Firefox, a dedicated security browser would likely replace that and they could be a driving force behind it. There are a lot of places where government surveillance of the Internet is used to torture and execute people, therefore there's Torbrowser for heavy work, but Torbrowser in turn requires a browser resistant to tracking by means other than IP address or DNS leaks, in short, and anti-fingerprinting browser.

If it wasn't for fingerprinting I would use rekonq for everything and be done with it. Rekonq, like Chrome, is based on webkit but does not come from people with a vested interest in tracking and ads. It might be an ideal starting point for an anti-tracking browser. The useragent might be hard to select, as it would have to be common, yet not rare alongside linux-only plugins. That rules out using an IE useragent, which is common but when used with gstreamer for h264 is rare and easily tracked. Could use Chrome or Safari, but stripped useragents for these with none of the OS versions and such would be rare. Probably would have to claim to be Firefox and never show any plug-in data that would not be possible in Firefox on Linux.

Maybe Mozilla will stay turned away from the Eye of Sauron for good, but then again, who can foretell the future? For now we should support them but cover our backsides in case this situation sours a second time.

[Luke]

Some of tbose parts of the Internet we would be better off without

Ads are not always bad. Bad ads are bad (flash ads for example). Ads are the thing that makes so much of the internet free to use. Some people seem to forget this most of the time.
I don't mind to have some non intrusive ads here and there to get the benefit to not have to pay for things.

As ad-supported sites go Phoronix is highly unusual, being an artisan project. I would not for one moment regret the replacement of Youtube and Google with distributed serving on end user machines and web search as distributed computing software running on the GPU. In fact I would like to see the replacement of paid phone company internet with mesh networking by wifi in dense areas and rooftop antennas with 1-5W tranceivers in rural areas. The whole concept would by symmetry, with all content initially served locally until it can be picked up by the distributed serving network. The Youtube website would be gone, replaced by "Youtorrent" software that stored the file on all viewer's machines and used the sum of them all to handle the bandwidth to new viewers.

The multihop nature of mesh networking would be similar to Tor by necessity and thus could be easily set up to obscure the original sources and final destinations of all content, like finding that "controversial" content travelled between two open wifi hotspots. Onion routing/encryption would also be possible as it is now.

The goal of all this would be to completely remove centralized servers and the phone companies from people's communications, just as people did not have to watch ads or pay bills to talk around the fire in the old days. Sweat equity, not paid product.

[kpedersen]

I am quite worried that Mozilla is even thinking about this.
More worried still that it took actual user feedback to decide it was a bad idea...
If they want money, they should make a product, not screw up an existing open-source project.

Luckily the way Linux and BSD works is via package / ports maintainers. I am quite confident that this advert nonsense will be patched out in the final repo by the maintainers anyway.

I am more than happy them adding adverts to the Windows and Mac OS X version however. Those platforms are rampant with monetized adware. A little bit more won't hurt

[Daktyl198]

To all the people worried that Mozilla is even THINKING about putting PRE-PINNED SITES on the new tab page for NEW USERS as another form of income: how about you donate to them? And while you're at it, why don't you donate the several hundred thousand dollars per year that this would generate, possibly allowing them to put a privacy-oriented search back as default (Startpage/DDG) instead of Google?

I don't understand how this many people could misread a god damned article. 1. Not ads, pre-pinned sites. Super easy to get rid of, and if you're lazy about it they go away by themselves as you browse... 2. they only affect NEW INSTALLS. Current users don't see a damned thing.

I installed Nightly on Friend's computer yesterday, and there were "suggested sites" on the new tab page. And you know what? I was grateful. A few of them were frequently visited by him, so I was able to simply pin the items already there (which had recognizable icons instead of thumbnails) instead of having to browse around and manually click and drag.