I know there have been a lot of people who were quite angry about the Pocket integration (and more so about some of Mozilla's more recent experiments with Mr. Robot), but I don't think this is a bad thing (what is mentioned in the post).
> While advertising is the business model of the web, it has evolved into one that doesn’t put the user first. We believe the current model of web advertising is broken because it doesn’t respect user privacy, isn’t transparent, lacks control, all the while trending towards click-bait and low-quality content.
Well, they're right there. The problem is that things don't function without money (and I don't know that relying on Google paying a huge amount for being the default search provider is a good business model). If Mozilla really can do this while protecting the privacy of the user (and avoiding clickbait), then I think it might be a worthwhile experiment.
For my part, I'm going to see how it works, but will disable if it's not satisfactory.
Of course, someone will probably have to audit their code to ensure they really are protecting our privacy...
Here is more information (linked from the article) about how the sponsored stories are personalized while respecting user privacy. The client will download an unpersonalized list of sponsored stories and then filter the list on the client-side by comparing it to the user's browsing history. So the user sees relevant sponsored stories without Mozilla or publisher servers seeing personally identifiable information.
Huh. That's incredibly simple and seems pretty effective. Of course, the sponsored sites could try to track user preferences themselves by fingerprinting Firefox visitors across distinct sites, but at least Firefox does have some anti-tracking features enabled by default.
I'm one of those people angry at the mandatory pocket integration: I don't really have a problem with how they described they're integrating this into the recommendations while keeping user data private (I still have a problem with the mandatory integration but that's a different issue). Hell, I can even imagine it providing some value to the user if it's handled correctly.
> Of course, someone will probably have to audit their code to ensure they really are protecting our privacy
Not doable, because despite declaring (at the time that Mozilla merged with them) that Pocket would become open source, that never happened. To put it another way, we're a month away from the one year anniversary of the date that Mozilla decided to begin operating a closed source, for-profit service.
PS: This is your periodic reminder that the thing you're probably thinking of when you hear the name "Mozilla" actually went away years ago and doesn't exist anymore.[1] It's got the same name and looks kind of the same, like an alien in a human suit, but it's silly to give this any more weight than it deserves. If it helps, think of Mozilla as having undergone a reverse takeover. (It's more complicated than that, and most of it actually predates the Pocket stuff, but if it helps, it helps.)
The only advertising in that was directing people from Mr. Robot to Firefox. The extension was bungled to hell but it wasn't adware. It wasn't intended to be seen by anyone that didn't specifically enable[1] it. It also did nothing unless you specifically enabled[1] it.
[1] To be very clear, the extension was 'enabled' by default, but only loaded a function to check for an about:config value. Without that value, it shut down and did nothing at all.
I can only imagine the outrage if Google or Apple or Microsoft attempted to do the same. But for whatever reason, because it's Mozilla many people are willing to give them a pass in violating the core values that they allegedly believe in.
They started this some weeks ago, and it's supposed to retrieve the missing parts over time. I assume they are just busy checking which parts are legal to open source.
DuckDuckGo has some open source extensions and SDKs to integrate with their service. DuckDuckGo itself, however, is not open source. Do you realize how misleading it would be if someone said this, and then I showed up with a link to their open source extensions, and how misleading it would be to try and appear as if I'm refuting something that I'm not actually refuting? That's exactly what you've done here with regard to my comment about Pocket.
There's a reason why nobody else posted the link you did in the 12 hours between my comment and yours, including the dozens of Mozilla/Pocket employees who saw what I wrote. It's because that's not Pocket, and what I wrote about Pocket still not being open source is true.
I don't think anyone believes companies can operate without money.
However, Mozilla said we should use their software because they care about users and user privacy.
It makes sense to therefore complain when they break that promise arguing that they need money. Then, they're like everyone else and we might as well use Chrome.
Pocket integration is bad (and yes, I use Pocket every day) because you're forcing bloatware on your users without any advantage over an extension (for those who like me would install it). Then, there's the Mr. Robot fiasco. There goes their "users/user's privacy first" presumed competitive advantage.
Anger abound regarding advertising etc but question: what's the alternative for Mozilla to be a viable company without depending on money from advertising either in the form of Pocket and new tab or via search engines paying for default?
We can all pay a subscription to use Firefox instead. But of course Firefox is open source so...
I mean I'd love for something like Facebook to cost $10 a year, I think that could work. But I don't see any other business model for Mozilla besides charitable donations.
By law, Mozilla can't use charitable donations to fund browser development. The rules around what charities can spend their donations on is pretty specific. Mozilla's charity funds are used for web-related education and outreach. Of course, Mozilla could use non-charitable (i.e. not tax-deductible) donations to fund browser dev.
The U.S. but not just the U.S. It's not programming per se; if the United Way wants some DB code done, that could be charitable since the effort isn't to build infrastructure but is part of, say, helping kids in hospital.
I hope this rule/ruling goes away for BSD type open source, but it's real.
Someone tries to make this plea in every thread, but it's bunk and shows an ignorance of history, an ignorance of the concrete figures actually at play, and it helps perpetuate the image of a frail non-profit that Mozilla really rides hard, piggybacking on the circumstances and accumulated goodwill from an era that no longer matches reality today.
Mozilla in 2018 brings in 10 times as much revenue as it did in 2008, but is 1/10th as effective and doing 1/10th as much good work.
It's a commitment hash. He wants to be noted as saying something without saying it right now. When he does say it, you can verify that he had the comment ready now by checking the hash. Its for predictions you only want to reveal after they happen.
And again, your comment is just anger and not an actual answer of what alternatives there are. What is your point? Do you care to actually answer my curiosity on what business models besides advertising are available to fund the continuing development of Firefox?
As the author of the comment, I don't think so. (And I think my interpretation has more weight.)
> What is your point? Do you care to actually answer my curiosity on what business models besides advertising are available to fund the continuing development of Firefox?
I made it very clear in my original comment. A sustainable model existed 10 years ago—when Firefox was consequently an effective instrument for actually advancing the mission, and the way the project was managed was an example of the right way to run a project. And that model still exists. Since then, though, Mozilla has thrown the mission and principles half out the window while simultaneously asserting a defense that they need to make money.
Hearing this plea after what Mozilla has done is like going to a burger joint you really like and being told that they had to raise prices because all burgers now come with a special ingredient, and the special ingredient is spit.
When you read my comments, are you ignoring every fourth sentence or something?
Mozilla is not in a downward spiral due to money. We are not in a situation where Mozilla leadership must decide to jump and hope to survive, or don't jump and be burned alive. Mozilla is in a better financial position than it was 10 years ago; its year-over-year expenses vs support is stable, while in absolute terms they're bringing in much more and have half a billion USD in assets.
Let's suppose there is no published source to corroborate the statement I wrote. Is the statement ipso facto untrue?
Alternatively, let's say there's a source, but I don't provide it. Does that effect whether my statement is true or not true?
Thirdly, now let's suppose there's a source available, they've measured it, found a result that agrees with what I wrote, and I offer it up. Now what happens? Does that change anything for you? Do you say, "Oh, when I wrote [citation needed] before, what I really meant is that I disagreed with you and was trying to express that through a sideways remark. I've considered the information in the source you provided, though, and have now adjusted my mental model accordingly."
I just want your answers before I invest any significant effort into trawling through data and putting work into a response. Otherwise, it would just be a massive waste of time on my part, right?
The general tone of your two comments is that I've been disingenuous, when the real disservice to the conversation is the zero-effort, thread-derailing snark.
Here's a more verbose way to say exactly the same point I was making, but possibly (hopefully) less susceptible to zero-effort dismissals from the kinds of people who like scoring easy points by taking potshots against auxiliary details instead of taking the main thrust of the argument into consideration:
"Mozilla in 2018 brings in 10 times as much revenue as it did in 2008. Is it 10 times as effective and doing 10 times as much good work? The same as before? Or is it closer to 1/10 for both?"
1. You're sorry? No you're not. Now that is disingenuous.
2. When responding to a comment about your inability to engage rather than writing out snarky one-liners, choosing to rebut it by replying in the form of a snarky one-liner doesn't do anything to help your case.
3. Respond to the content of my message or fuck off.
I believe the answer to that question is that the user can't really be sure that the code is really disabled.
Personally, I have had Pocket disabled since the moment it was deployed and I am happy enough with that. I don't really have any reason to think that they are still siphoning data off me, like Windows 10. At least, I trust that if they did I would read about it on HN.
Why single out Pocket, then? Why not bundle other extensions, like uBlock or Privacy Badger, or TabMixTree or hundred of others. After all, you don't have click on them.
Now only if hardware accelerated composition for Linux and hardware accelerated video decoding for Linux could be implemented using extensions...
Firefox users were asking for a read-it-later feature and Firefox devs were looking into implementing it. It was already something they were going to add to the product. They picked Pocket because it was a lot easier than making something from scratch, and they worked with Pocket to change their privacy policy and open-source the browser addon.
If they had it as a priority, they could make it as an extension, so those asking for it would have it and those not wanting it would not. They already have (or had) APIs for that. No need to bloat the core product.
It was an extension. And a good extension at that.
But they baked it inside browser so that it can't be removed and shipped it enabled by default. Lots of outrage. Then yes, they shipped a way to "disable" it but still not a removable extension.
That was the last time I either used Firefox or Pocket. Never felt a need again - Safari and self hosted Wallabag and Pinboard have been my setup since.
For one, the very presence of a useless feature, enabled or disabled, increase the chance of vulnerabilities. It also introduces more uncertainty. If I turn it off, is it really off? Is there a bug that misreads user preferences? Far worse, when a feature is for advertising and monetization, conflict of interest are introduced. The fact that they're quietly turning it on for some users is already a huge breach of trust.
I've heard zero complaints about the reading list feature in Microsoft Edge.
Which is funny because, in terms of their primary purpose, there's not much difference between Edge's Reading List and Firefox's Pocket.
If most detractors were honest with themselves the reason that Pocket had the backlash is because people saw it as a move towards the commercialisation of Firefox. The fact that Mozilla now owns Pocket outright seems to be largely ignored.
The kinds of people who would complain about the reading list feature in Microsoft Edge are probably using firefox not Microsoft Edge.
Personally I was very sad when Mozilla started bundling an extension for a third party commercial service that I didn't trust and had overlapping functionality with other services that I use and have trusted for many years. It's slightly better now that they've acquired Pocket, but a huge part of why I use firefox is because I don't like feeling like I'm the product when I'm using the internet.
What difference made the search bars in IE if you never clicked on them?
Mozilla should never have added Pocket by default, and should remove it. But they won't, just like they set a default search engine for you: they need money. They might be a non-profit, but they do pay wages and have other costs and therefore they need a business model. They choose cooperating with advertisment companies.
Sometimes I think Mozilla's FireFox acts as an supposedly user-focused advertisement for the web whereas the web is abhorrent. When thinking along these lines, it is beneficial for Google to give Mozilla money so there is atleast someone that pretends to make the web work only for the user. After all, Google wants the web in its current state to appear like a good thing.
We really need new browsers that do not play along with advertizers. But I think with the hype train that FireFox has it is difficult to get people to stop and think if things are really going well with it.
> "What difference made the search bars in IE if you never clicked on them?"
The Pocket button is tiny. I often forget it's there. Furthermore, other browsers have similar "Read It Later" features, do you have a problem with those too?
"Read It Later" type services are useful in browsers as alternative to bookmarks. Are you going to complain that bookmarks should be an optional browser feature as well? Are you really that bothered by a couple of small buttons in the corner of your browser UI?
"If most detractors were honest with themselves the reason that Pocket had the backlash is because people saw it as a move towards the commercialisation of Firefox. The fact that Mozilla now owns Pocket outright seems to be largely ignored."
It would be a fully removable extension if it actually did. Nothing less. Even after Pocket code is open source, if at all - the least I am going to accept from Firefox is:
We recently started testing personalized recommendations, and we will soon experiment with showing an occasional sponsored story within the Pocket Recommendations section in New Tab Page in Firefox Beta.
Arrgh. Do not want. At all. I don't want "personalized" anything. I don't want Firefox to collect data about me. I run "Fennec", a version of Firefox without the crap, on my phone. That's what F-Droid, the all open source app site, loads.
I'm not that fanatical about privacy. I just hate ads in my face. I have enough ad blocking that I'm barely aware that the Internet has ads.
There's no more collection than what is happening when Firefox collects and stores browser history locally. If you disable that, the personalisation will probably be nonfunctional. According to mozilla, no "personalisation data" is sent to mozilla, it's all done locally.
> we were excited to find that people used New Tab more when this feature was enabled.
They say it like it's necessarily a good thing. When you add functionality to the page, it will most likely increase engagement time, but that does not mean that new feature is good(or bad), all it means that users spend more time on that page.
Absolutely! And more, it may be that the users are getting more distracted and less productive, although it seems they don't recognize this possibility.
I have tried to use the new tab with everything integrated (another search bar? most visited/pin without reordering, pocket articles) and Mozilla snarks and tips (which I like and find elegant) the feeling each time I open a new tab is the same as when I open my phone with the intent of doing something and, after being bombarded with icons and notifications, completely forget what I wanted to solve in the first place.
It is horrible UX to me. At least I can disable it as I did and I love my empty new tab without any suggestions whatsoever.
Just to dig a bit deeper, I believe browsers chrome should be removed (or greatly reduced) and we should try something new. I don't want to see an endless list of open tabs or your shiny buttons, I want to absorb content. Using Vimperator/Pentadactyl/qutebrowser,etc in the past without system borders opened my eyes to how websites can be beautiful when they are not in a cage and I can't unsee the bloat.
The best Mozilla product of the past couple years, to me, wasn't FF Quantum, but Firefox Focus. I want Focus for the desktop. Amnesic, secure, fast, unbloatable.
I have become convinced that advertisers are a huge problem and not fixable. Helping to destroy the advertising industry might become my primary activistic ambition.
Count me in. But I'm not so much interested in destructive activity, but positive constructive change. Abandoning FireFox and spreading the word about it would be a good start to gain momentum for browsers that are loyal to the users independently of economic incentives.
Let alone that Mozilla is using marketshare as a metric for FireFox tells me that they aren't the developer I want to have for my browser.
> browsers that are loyal to the users independently of economic incentives
...and how are those browsers possibly sustainable? Creating a browser is incredibly expensive[0]. If you want reasonable compatibility with the de facto Web you have to build atop Chromium, WebKit, or Gecko, the availability of which is predicated on the financial stability of Google, Apple, or Mozilla respectively.
By all means, use a third party browser if it better suits your needs, but there's no escaping the hard dependency on the business models you so vehemently oppose.
The same could be said about operating systems and many other complex software projects. Advanced video and picture creation and manipulation, for example, and yet we have Kdenlive and GIMP. And we also have Debian and GCC and then some. None of them decided to take the route Mozilla has taken to fuel financial needs.
Also, I advocate for not supporting "the web" on purpose. I want to easily share and access information, not "have experiences" in my browser. That makes the goal relatively easy to achieve.
> While advertising is the business model of the web
Come on Mozilla, stop spreading this bull! Is LWN.net not part of the web? Is tagesschau.de not part of the web? Are my personal pages not part of web? None of them have advertising as their business model. This statement really shows how derailed Mozilla is thinking.
Mozilla should just make themselves honest, turn into a pure for-profit cooperation and do their business at least a little bit more honestly.
So, they are not part of the web or are they? A lot of pages on the web work by providing porn. Is porn the business model of the web? This is just ridiculous.
There are many projects that need money to survive and don't sell their users.
Mozillas need for money does not excuse in the slightest their choices, or is machiavellianism all the sudden accepted?
I mean, your comment says that if you need millions to sustain your sites you are free to act shadey. Sorry, but no, that wouldn't make it okay. In the case of Mozilla it would just show their hypocritical inconsistency.
Yes, it is accepted. What is so wrong about advertising? Why is it bad that someone making a product wants to market it? There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. The problem is how the ad-tech industry deals with advertising. There is no regard for privacy and no control for the consumers. It's become a shady practice because of lack of privacy, transparency and lack of regard for the end user.
Mozilla is clearly saying these things are important to them and will be central to their mission so what's the problem here? It's not like they'll inject ads from Google or Facebook.
Instead of dissing at their attempts to make themselves self-sustainable, we should be supporting them by giving them a chance. May be they'll do ads right, may be they'll fail but one thing I'm sure of is that if they fail to make it work without compromising the user, they'll just give it up.
Mozilla is our biggest if not the only hope of an open and healthy web. I don't mind supporting them by seeing a couple of ads every now and then as long as I'm in control and they respect my privacy.
First, all advertising platforms are malware distribution platforms, because the people who run ad platforms have every incentive to push through all the ads submitted to them and negative incentive to stop the ones which are malware. Nobody in the ad industry wants people to talk about this, but as long as the malware authors are using them to distribute malware, they can't pretend it never happens and they shouldn't be allowed to ignore people who say it does.
Second, advertising requires data to be effective, which leads to tracking, which is, itself, a form of malware.
I have no idea what sources you consider trustworthy so I won't blindly link them, but search "your brain on ads" and you'll get lots of results talking about how ad exposure affects people.
But you don't necessarily need the brain scans to see that advertising preys on human psychology and emotional weakness, because of how effective those kinds of ads are. If advertising was just "Here's my product. Here's what it can do. Here's why you might want it." I don't think we would have gotten to where we are now -- where advertising is basically just a mix of exposure therapy and negging.
Why was no one ever so militant against advertising in newspapers? "There are pages of ads, whole sections, just ads!! I didn't look in the newspaper to see ads!"
For a couple hundred years the newspaper functioned as the prime media distribution system and generated revenue off of advertisements. Now that we've shifted that over to electronic means I find it almost humourous how advertising and partnering is suddenly considered evil. Like staff and servers are magically free because journalists and printing presses must have been in the 1920's.
Like it or not, unless you're charging a subscription, the only viable model for the Internet at scale so far is finding someone who will pay to piggy-back on your service.
Why was no one ever so militant against advertising in newspapers? "There are pages of ads, whole sections, just ads!! I didn't look in the newspaper to see ads!"
Because newspaper ads didn't track us, didn't bounce and shake, and didn't execute malware on our computers.
> Why was no one ever so militant against advertising in newspapers?
Because newspaper ads weren't audio-video presentations that jumped over the text you were trying to read and prevented you from reading it, among numerous other differences between modern web ads and classic print ads.
They've bundled advertising software into a critical piece of software that should do only what its user wants it to do. They've already gotten it very wrong.
It's a very fine line between content and chrome. Most people can't tell you where their browser ends and their OS begins, nor where a web page ends and their browser begins.
It's all just “the computer is showing this to me”. This is why people put up with “Upgrade AVG!” notifications and click “Fix your computer now!” adverts.
Most people see a computer as a service, not a tool: most services are annoying, but you have to put up with them if you want the service; all PCs are the same anyway (unless you can afford a Mac, which is somehow something other than a PC), so there's no better service you can get.
My point is: unfortunately, most people don't care. We're very much in the minority.
TLDR;
"First we enabled DRM, then we sideloaded an advertising extension, now we're an advertising platform, but don't worry because we're changing the world."
Part of the problem is how complex the web stanards are these days.
Try building a browser from the ground up today. Part of the issue is the stanards committees keep adding onto what was supposed to be a document format. We have added onto the spec so much that its a mess. Ironically, it was netscape that probably screwed up the web the most by adding javascript. That boat has sailed, but we keep adding more and more features to the specs.
QupZilla (to be renamed Falkon in the next major version) is an option I like. Overall it is very Firefox-like, but it is a Qt app using Qt WebEngine, which is Chromium integrated into Qt. (I've only used it on Linux and briefly on Mac, but there is a Windows build too.)
How fast do they get patches in when the Chromium part has a security issue? That's usually where all these "let's just fork the last good version of $browser" or "let's just fork their engine and build a new UI around it" endeavors come crashing down in flames.
I'm not sure how quickly Qt does it, and then WebEngine on Linux is typically supplied by your distro, so more delay. There is an AppImage, which does bundle it, however, and the Windows build would too. This is my main source of hesitation in switching over full time.
Advertising software is the killer of good. Mozilla's situation is more like I'm having a perfect hair day, got the perfect outfit and in the best shape of my life, everything is literally perfect; I better just shit in my pants so things aren't too perfect.
I went back and re-read the Manifesto at https://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto/, and I'm not seeing an obvious place where this specific project violates any of Mozilla's principles. Would you mind saying more about your concerns in this case?
So just gonna go through their list of bullet points about how this is Different™ (tl;dr: not very):
* Privacy "Delivers personalization without needing to vacuum up all of your personal data or sharing it with others."
But...
> Your Firefox browser compares your browsing history with the list of related websites to sort and filter through each day’s stories and recommend the ones that are most likely to interest you... The entire process of sorting and filtering which stories you should see happens locally in your copy of Firefox. When Recommendations from Pocket are displayed on your new tab, we collect information about how many times they appear and whether or not you interact with them [1]
So that's the exact same model the Brave browser was (is still?) pushing: FF will use your browser history to decide which ads (and "personalized stories") to show you; but will do it locally rather than serverside. This is good if your only concern was the collected private data leaking to third parties; it is less good if your concern is with the use of that private data in the first place.
* Quality. "Rewards valuable content, worthy of your time. Not driven by clicks."
I see literally nothing that supports this statement. They're selling native advertising slots in a push-model content stream, and tracking clicks on those ads just like the rest of the industry. The incentive is towards the highest bidder whose ads won't actively repel too much of the userbase too quickly.
* Control. "If you see a story you’re not a fan of, you can hide it. Or you can disable sponsored content altogether."
No snark on this one; this is good. The entire feature can be disabled, or the advertising slots can be disabled within the feature; the controls for this are clear and unobfuscated.
* Transparency. "Sponsored stories will be clearly marked."
Because that's the law, pardner
* Openness. "As an open organization, all code in Firefox is open source"
> This is good if your only concern was the collected private data leaking to third parties; it is less good if your concern is with the use of that private data in the first place.
Can you go into more detail on this?
Firefox uses private data locally every time you start typing in the address bar. What leads someone to object to this particular use (specifically for privacy reasons), but to leaving history on in the first place?
Imagine if your browser history was local but every time you use the history feature to revisit a page that URL was sent to Mozilla. How private is that really?
The Pocket code tells Mozilla what ads are being shown and which are clicked on. Since they know that the criteria for ad X is that phrase Y or Z is in the history, then they are gathering data on the type of content you are looking at on the web. This is only one step removed from the actual URLs.
> The Pocket code tells Mozilla what ads are being shown
Really? It definitely shouldn't do that.
> and which are clicked on
That's pretty hard to avoid, though. How much of a problem it is depends on how precise the targeting is. But since you're showing interest by clicking the ad, there's not necessarily much of a privacy issue.
With the Pocket / Brave model, the user's private information still winds up in the advertisers' hands -- in the form of which ads the engine recommends be shown to the user. The advertisers may not be able to directly see which specific sites or pages the user has in their history, but they still get the aggregate information which is what they were after in the first place.
The one advantage to the local parsing compared to serverside is that there isn't a cloud full of everybody's browser history ready to be hacked or resold. That's a real benefit, I don't want to undersell that, but it's not the entirety of the story.
As for your example: Firefox using your browser history to autocomplete urls as you type in the address bar is innocuous because that information never goes anywhere but to that user; it's solely for the user's benefit. Firefox using that same browser history to tell advertisers which subjects the user might be interested in is not innocuous; it's broadcasting information to third parties that the user might prefer be kept private. The user's data is no longer being used for the user's benefit, but for the advertiser's.
i may hold a minority opinion here but i love pocket and use the new tab suggestions a lot when reading on my commute for example. I am a bit worried about these personal recommendations tough - i rather liked that the suggestions weren't personalised and gave me articles i would never have found or searched myself, now it may become just another filter-bubble around me...
If you don't want these "features", then the easiest option is to delete .xpi files under "/usr/lib/firefox/browser/features/" directory. That's much easier than patching Chromium source code.
I know there have been a lot of people who were quite angry about the Pocket integration (and more so about some of Mozilla's more recent experiments with Mr. Robot), but I don't think this is a bad thing (what is mentioned in the post).
> While advertising is the business model of the web, it has evolved into one that doesn’t put the user first. We believe the current model of web advertising is broken because it doesn’t respect user privacy, isn’t transparent, lacks control, all the while trending towards click-bait and low-quality content.
Well, they're right there. The problem is that things don't function without money (and I don't know that relying on Google paying a huge amount for being the default search provider is a good business model). If Mozilla really can do this while protecting the privacy of the user (and avoiding clickbait), then I think it might be a worthwhile experiment.
For my part, I'm going to see how it works, but will disable if it's not satisfactory.
Of course, someone will probably have to audit their code to ensure they really are protecting our privacy...
> It’s important to us to get this right.
Especially these days ;)
Here is more information (linked from the article) about how the sponsored stories are personalized while respecting user privacy. The client will download an unpersonalized list of sponsored stories and then filter the list on the client-side by comparing it to the user's browsing history. So the user sees relevant sponsored stories without Mozilla or publisher servers seeing personally identifiable information.
https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab-reco...
Huh. That's incredibly simple and seems pretty effective. Of course, the sponsored sites could try to track user preferences themselves by fingerprinting Firefox visitors across distinct sites, but at least Firefox does have some anti-tracking features enabled by default.
Anecdotal of course but here goes:
I'm one of those people angry at the mandatory pocket integration: I don't really have a problem with how they described they're integrating this into the recommendations while keeping user data private (I still have a problem with the mandatory integration but that's a different issue). Hell, I can even imagine it providing some value to the user if it's handled correctly.
> Of course, someone will probably have to audit their code to ensure they really are protecting our privacy
Not doable, because despite declaring (at the time that Mozilla merged with them) that Pocket would become open source, that never happened. To put it another way, we're a month away from the one year anniversary of the date that Mozilla decided to begin operating a closed source, for-profit service.
PS: This is your periodic reminder that the thing you're probably thinking of when you hear the name "Mozilla" actually went away years ago and doesn't exist anymore.[1] It's got the same name and looks kind of the same, like an alien in a human suit, but it's silly to give this any more weight than it deserves. If it helps, think of Mozilla as having undergone a reverse takeover. (It's more complicated than that, and most of it actually predates the Pocket stuff, but if it helps, it helps.)
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940727
Yeah, the Mr Robot adware is more proof of that.
The only advertising in that was directing people from Mr. Robot to Firefox. The extension was bungled to hell but it wasn't adware. It wasn't intended to be seen by anyone that didn't specifically enable[1] it. It also did nothing unless you specifically enabled[1] it.
[1] To be very clear, the extension was 'enabled' by default, but only loaded a function to check for an about:config value. Without that value, it shut down and did nothing at all.
I can only imagine the outrage if Google or Apple or Microsoft attempted to do the same. But for whatever reason, because it's Mozilla many people are willing to give them a pass in violating the core values that they allegedly believe in.
> despite declaring (at the time that Mozilla merged with them) that Pocket would become open source
https://github.com/Pocket
Pocket itself isn't open source, they just have an org on GH which has some tools inside.
They started this some weeks ago, and it's supposed to retrieve the missing parts over time. I assume they are just busy checking which parts are legal to open source.
DuckDuckGo has some open source extensions and SDKs to integrate with their service. DuckDuckGo itself, however, is not open source. Do you realize how misleading it would be if someone said this, and then I showed up with a link to their open source extensions, and how misleading it would be to try and appear as if I'm refuting something that I'm not actually refuting? That's exactly what you've done here with regard to my comment about Pocket.
There's a reason why nobody else posted the link you did in the 12 hours between my comment and yours, including the dozens of Mozilla/Pocket employees who saw what I wrote. It's because that's not Pocket, and what I wrote about Pocket still not being open source is true.
No.
I want a browser. I don't want Pocket. They bundle them. => This is bad and I will be angry.
I don't think anyone believes companies can operate without money.
However, Mozilla said we should use their software because they care about users and user privacy.
It makes sense to therefore complain when they break that promise arguing that they need money. Then, they're like everyone else and we might as well use Chrome.
Pocket integration is bad (and yes, I use Pocket every day) because you're forcing bloatware on your users without any advantage over an extension (for those who like me would install it). Then, there's the Mr. Robot fiasco. There goes their "users/user's privacy first" presumed competitive advantage.
Anger abound regarding advertising etc but question: what's the alternative for Mozilla to be a viable company without depending on money from advertising either in the form of Pocket and new tab or via search engines paying for default?
We can all pay a subscription to use Firefox instead. But of course Firefox is open source so...
I mean I'd love for something like Facebook to cost $10 a year, I think that could work. But I don't see any other business model for Mozilla besides charitable donations.
By law, Mozilla can't use charitable donations to fund browser development. The rules around what charities can spend their donations on is pretty specific. Mozilla's charity funds are used for web-related education and outreach. Of course, Mozilla could use non-charitable (i.e. not tax-deductible) donations to fund browser dev.
Ah I guess I meant non-charitable then! I'm pretty clueless on how the money aspect in a non-profit works.
By law in which jurisdiction?
In what jurisdiction can't you use donations to pay for programming effort?
The U.S. but not just the U.S. It's not programming per se; if the United Way wants some DB code done, that could be charitable since the effort isn't to build infrastructure but is part of, say, helping kids in hospital.
I hope this rule/ruling goes away for BSD type open source, but it's real.
You can use donations of course, but they won’t qualify as charitable for tax purposes.
Someone tries to make this plea in every thread, but it's bunk and shows an ignorance of history, an ignorance of the concrete figures actually at play, and it helps perpetuate the image of a frail non-profit that Mozilla really rides hard, piggybacking on the circumstances and accumulated goodwill from an era that no longer matches reality today.
Mozilla in 2018 brings in 10 times as much revenue as it did in 2008, but is 1/10th as effective and doing 1/10th as much good work.
0307ea7a0f89f4c893e89e6a4992b82b1a812c22e9510410f9e4279a52368d04
What's "0307ea7a0f89f4c893e89e6a4992b82b1a812c22e9510410f9e4279a52368d04"..? A checksum of your comment?
It's a commitment hash. He wants to be noted as saying something without saying it right now. When he does say it, you can verify that he had the comment ready now by checking the hash. Its for predictions you only want to reveal after they happen.
No way, that is so cool..!
Thanks for explaining.
No problem!
And again, your comment is just anger and not an actual answer of what alternatives there are. What is your point? Do you care to actually answer my curiosity on what business models besides advertising are available to fund the continuing development of Firefox?
> your comment is just anger
As the author of the comment, I don't think so. (And I think my interpretation has more weight.)
> What is your point? Do you care to actually answer my curiosity on what business models besides advertising are available to fund the continuing development of Firefox?
I made it very clear in my original comment. A sustainable model existed 10 years ago—when Firefox was consequently an effective instrument for actually advancing the mission, and the way the project was managed was an example of the right way to run a project. And that model still exists. Since then, though, Mozilla has thrown the mission and principles half out the window while simultaneously asserting a defense that they need to make money.
Hearing this plea after what Mozilla has done is like going to a burger joint you really like and being told that they had to raise prices because all burgers now come with a special ingredient, and the special ingredient is spit.
Your point is not at all obvious, you're just saying "they used to be better, now they're spitting in my food gahh"
When you read my comments, are you ignoring every fourth sentence or something?
Mozilla is not in a downward spiral due to money. We are not in a situation where Mozilla leadership must decide to jump and hope to survive, or don't jump and be burned alive. Mozilla is in a better financial position than it was 10 years ago; its year-over-year expenses vs support is stable, while in absolute terms they're bringing in much more and have half a billion USD in assets.
>1/10th as effective and doing 1/10th as much good work. [citation needed]
Let's suppose there is no published source to corroborate the statement I wrote. Is the statement ipso facto untrue?
Alternatively, let's say there's a source, but I don't provide it. Does that effect whether my statement is true or not true?
Thirdly, now let's suppose there's a source available, they've measured it, found a result that agrees with what I wrote, and I offer it up. Now what happens? Does that change anything for you? Do you say, "Oh, when I wrote [citation needed] before, what I really meant is that I disagreed with you and was trying to express that through a sideways remark. I've considered the information in the source you provided, though, and have now adjusted my mental model accordingly."
I just want your answers before I invest any significant effort into trawling through data and putting work into a response. Otherwise, it would just be a massive waste of time on my part, right?
For future reference, you could save everyone some time and just say that you made up the numbers.
Without evidence there is no way to evaluate the credibility of the claim.
The general tone of your two comments is that I've been disingenuous, when the real disservice to the conversation is the zero-effort, thread-derailing snark.
Here's a more verbose way to say exactly the same point I was making, but possibly (hopefully) less susceptible to zero-effort dismissals from the kinds of people who like scoring easy points by taking potshots against auxiliary details instead of taking the main thrust of the argument into consideration:
"Mozilla in 2018 brings in 10 times as much revenue as it did in 2008. Is it 10 times as effective and doing 10 times as much good work? The same as before? Or is it closer to 1/10 for both?"
I'm sorry if asking for evidence to back up claims is thread-derailing snark.
1. You're sorry? No you're not. Now that is disingenuous.
2. When responding to a comment about your inability to engage rather than writing out snarky one-liners, choosing to rebut it by replying in the form of a snarky one-liner doesn't do anything to help your case.
3. Respond to the content of my message or fuck off.
I'd be very happy to pay $20 a year to use Firefox, however I don't think enough people would do this for them to ha e enough revenue.
I had a glimmer of hope when I saw this headline.
"Oooh, I hope, they're going to move Pocket out to an optional extension!"
If only.
What difference would that make, compared to if it's there and you never click on it?
I believe the answer to that question is that the user can't really be sure that the code is really disabled.
Personally, I have had Pocket disabled since the moment it was deployed and I am happy enough with that. I don't really have any reason to think that they are still siphoning data off me, like Windows 10. At least, I trust that if they did I would read about it on HN.
Why single out Pocket, then? Why not bundle other extensions, like uBlock or Privacy Badger, or TabMixTree or hundred of others. After all, you don't have click on them.
Now only if hardware accelerated composition for Linux and hardware accelerated video decoding for Linux could be implemented using extensions...
Firefox users were asking for a read-it-later feature and Firefox devs were looking into implementing it. It was already something they were going to add to the product. They picked Pocket because it was a lot easier than making something from scratch, and they worked with Pocket to change their privacy policy and open-source the browser addon.
If they had it as a priority, they could make it as an extension, so those asking for it would have it and those not wanting it would not. They already have (or had) APIs for that. No need to bloat the core product.
It was an extension. And a good extension at that.
But they baked it inside browser so that it can't be removed and shipped it enabled by default. Lots of outrage. Then yes, they shipped a way to "disable" it but still not a removable extension.
That was the last time I either used Firefox or Pocket. Never felt a need again - Safari and self hosted Wallabag and Pinboard have been my setup since.
And Bonzi Buddy was just helping us to do our shopping (or whatever the hell it did).
For one, the very presence of a useless feature, enabled or disabled, increase the chance of vulnerabilities. It also introduces more uncertainty. If I turn it off, is it really off? Is there a bug that misreads user preferences? Far worse, when a feature is for advertising and monetization, conflict of interest are introduced. The fact that they're quietly turning it on for some users is already a huge breach of trust.
I've heard zero complaints about the reading list feature in Microsoft Edge.
Which is funny because, in terms of their primary purpose, there's not much difference between Edge's Reading List and Firefox's Pocket.
If most detractors were honest with themselves the reason that Pocket had the backlash is because people saw it as a move towards the commercialisation of Firefox. The fact that Mozilla now owns Pocket outright seems to be largely ignored.
The kinds of people who would complain about the reading list feature in Microsoft Edge are probably using firefox not Microsoft Edge.
Personally I was very sad when Mozilla started bundling an extension for a third party commercial service that I didn't trust and had overlapping functionality with other services that I use and have trusted for many years. It's slightly better now that they've acquired Pocket, but a huge part of why I use firefox is because I don't like feeling like I'm the product when I'm using the internet.
What difference made the search bars in IE if you never clicked on them?
Mozilla should never have added Pocket by default, and should remove it. But they won't, just like they set a default search engine for you: they need money. They might be a non-profit, but they do pay wages and have other costs and therefore they need a business model. They choose cooperating with advertisment companies.
Sometimes I think Mozilla's FireFox acts as an supposedly user-focused advertisement for the web whereas the web is abhorrent. When thinking along these lines, it is beneficial for Google to give Mozilla money so there is atleast someone that pretends to make the web work only for the user. After all, Google wants the web in its current state to appear like a good thing.
We really need new browsers that do not play along with advertizers. But I think with the hype train that FireFox has it is difficult to get people to stop and think if things are really going well with it.
You know Mozilla owns Pocket now, right? They're not tracking you or selling your data to someone who does.
The second part doesn't follow from the first.
If they're willing to force-install an advertisement on browsers, who knows what they're doing behind the scenes.
> "What difference made the search bars in IE if you never clicked on them?"
The Pocket button is tiny. I often forget it's there. Furthermore, other browsers have similar "Read It Later" features, do you have a problem with those too?
"Read It Later" type services are useful in browsers as alternative to bookmarks. Are you going to complain that bookmarks should be an optional browser feature as well? Are you really that bothered by a couple of small buttons in the corner of your browser UI?
Ah, so unilateral install of unwanted commercial applications are fine for you as long as each one defaults to a standard icon.
You'll be happy when they add the Nike, Netflix, Tesla, or Chanel logos then so long as each is only a standard icon?
"It's just one icon ..." well two that I know of so far.
> "You'll be happy when they add the Nike, Netflix, Tesla, or Chanel logos then so long as each is only a standard icon?"
Quoting myself...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16233707
"If most detractors were honest with themselves the reason that Pocket had the backlash is because people saw it as a move towards the commercialisation of Firefox. The fact that Mozilla now owns Pocket outright seems to be largely ignored."
Pocket really should be optional. This move to monetize that integration suggests to me that Pocket is here to stay.
Mozilla acquired Pocket last year, so I assume they want to use it as much as they can.
extensions.pocket.enabled=false
Which would be the default, if Mozilla cared about users.
It would be a fully removable extension if it actually did. Nothing less. Even after Pocket code is open source, if at all - the least I am going to accept from Firefox is:
1. pocket as a fully removable extension
2. turned off by default
I don't understand why Mozilla prioritised integrating and then buying a closed-source alternative to the existing open-source project Wallabag.
How does deeply integrating one service provider — making it harder for their competition — promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the web?
You can disable pocket.. that's the first thing i did when i installed firefox.
That's what I thought, too. But no:
We recently started testing personalized recommendations, and we will soon experiment with showing an occasional sponsored story within the Pocket Recommendations section in New Tab Page in Firefox Beta.
Arrgh. Do not want. At all. I don't want "personalized" anything. I don't want Firefox to collect data about me. I run "Fennec", a version of Firefox without the crap, on my phone. That's what F-Droid, the all open source app site, loads.
I'm not that fanatical about privacy. I just hate ads in my face. I have enough ad blocking that I'm barely aware that the Internet has ads.
There's no more collection than what is happening when Firefox collects and stores browser history locally. If you disable that, the personalisation will probably be nonfunctional. According to mozilla, no "personalisation data" is sent to mozilla, it's all done locally.
https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab-reco...
> we were excited to find that people used New Tab more when this feature was enabled.
They say it like it's necessarily a good thing. When you add functionality to the page, it will most likely increase engagement time, but that does not mean that new feature is good(or bad), all it means that users spend more time on that page.
Absolutely! And more, it may be that the users are getting more distracted and less productive, although it seems they don't recognize this possibility.
I have tried to use the new tab with everything integrated (another search bar? most visited/pin without reordering, pocket articles) and Mozilla snarks and tips (which I like and find elegant) the feeling each time I open a new tab is the same as when I open my phone with the intent of doing something and, after being bombarded with icons and notifications, completely forget what I wanted to solve in the first place.
It is horrible UX to me. At least I can disable it as I did and I love my empty new tab without any suggestions whatsoever.
Just to dig a bit deeper, I believe browsers chrome should be removed (or greatly reduced) and we should try something new. I don't want to see an endless list of open tabs or your shiny buttons, I want to absorb content. Using Vimperator/Pentadactyl/qutebrowser,etc in the past without system borders opened my eyes to how websites can be beautiful when they are not in a cage and I can't unsee the bloat.
The best Mozilla product of the past couple years, to me, wasn't FF Quantum, but Firefox Focus. I want Focus for the desktop. Amnesic, secure, fast, unbloatable.
I have become convinced that advertisers are a huge problem and not fixable. Helping to destroy the advertising industry might become my primary activistic ambition.
You can probably buy ads to get the word out.
ads against ads (like ads for installing ad blockers) is actually something I'm considering doing.
Count me in. But I'm not so much interested in destructive activity, but positive constructive change. Abandoning FireFox and spreading the word about it would be a good start to gain momentum for browsers that are loyal to the users independently of economic incentives.
Let alone that Mozilla is using marketshare as a metric for FireFox tells me that they aren't the developer I want to have for my browser.
> browsers that are loyal to the users independently of economic incentives
...and how are those browsers possibly sustainable? Creating a browser is incredibly expensive[0]. If you want reasonable compatibility with the de facto Web you have to build atop Chromium, WebKit, or Gecko, the availability of which is predicated on the financial stability of Google, Apple, or Mozilla respectively.
By all means, use a third party browser if it better suits your needs, but there's no escaping the hard dependency on the business models you so vehemently oppose.
[0]: http://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/12/maintaining-independent-...
The same could be said about operating systems and many other complex software projects. Advanced video and picture creation and manipulation, for example, and yet we have Kdenlive and GIMP. And we also have Debian and GCC and then some. None of them decided to take the route Mozilla has taken to fuel financial needs.
Also, I advocate for not supporting "the web" on purpose. I want to easily share and access information, not "have experiences" in my browser. That makes the goal relatively easy to achieve.
I actually liked the Pocket on the New Tab page. I've found genuinely interesting articles that I wouldn't have come across otherwise.
As long as they keep it non-political and simply informative, I am checking it out.
> While advertising is the business model of the web
Come on Mozilla, stop spreading this bull! Is LWN.net not part of the web? Is tagesschau.de not part of the web? Are my personal pages not part of web? None of them have advertising as their business model. This statement really shows how derailed Mozilla is thinking.
Mozilla should just make themselves honest, turn into a pure for-profit cooperation and do their business at least a little bit more honestly.
Your personal pages don't need millions of dollars just to survive like Mozilla does
So, they are not part of the web or are they? A lot of pages on the web work by providing porn. Is porn the business model of the web? This is just ridiculous.
There are many projects that need money to survive and don't sell their users.
Mozillas need for money does not excuse in the slightest their choices, or is machiavellianism all the sudden accepted?
I mean, your comment says that if you need millions to sustain your sites you are free to act shadey. Sorry, but no, that wouldn't make it okay. In the case of Mozilla it would just show their hypocritical inconsistency.
Yes, it is accepted. What is so wrong about advertising? Why is it bad that someone making a product wants to market it? There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. The problem is how the ad-tech industry deals with advertising. There is no regard for privacy and no control for the consumers. It's become a shady practice because of lack of privacy, transparency and lack of regard for the end user.
Mozilla is clearly saying these things are important to them and will be central to their mission so what's the problem here? It's not like they'll inject ads from Google or Facebook.
Instead of dissing at their attempts to make themselves self-sustainable, we should be supporting them by giving them a chance. May be they'll do ads right, may be they'll fail but one thing I'm sure of is that if they fail to make it work without compromising the user, they'll just give it up.
Mozilla is our biggest if not the only hope of an open and healthy web. I don't mind supporting them by seeing a couple of ads every now and then as long as I'm in control and they respect my privacy.
> What is so wrong about advertising?
It inherently shades into malware.
First, all advertising platforms are malware distribution platforms, because the people who run ad platforms have every incentive to push through all the ads submitted to them and negative incentive to stop the ones which are malware. Nobody in the ad industry wants people to talk about this, but as long as the malware authors are using them to distribute malware, they can't pretend it never happens and they shouldn't be allowed to ignore people who say it does.
Second, advertising requires data to be effective, which leads to tracking, which is, itself, a form of malware.
Advertising is psychological warfare. It aims to change and shape the future behaviour of its targets by feeding them specifically-designed messages.
I have no idea what sources you consider trustworthy so I won't blindly link them, but search "your brain on ads" and you'll get lots of results talking about how ad exposure affects people.
But you don't necessarily need the brain scans to see that advertising preys on human psychology and emotional weakness, because of how effective those kinds of ads are. If advertising was just "Here's my product. Here's what it can do. Here's why you might want it." I don't think we would have gotten to where we are now -- where advertising is basically just a mix of exposure therapy and negging.
How many of those porn pages have no advertising?
Why was no one ever so militant against advertising in newspapers? "There are pages of ads, whole sections, just ads!! I didn't look in the newspaper to see ads!"
For a couple hundred years the newspaper functioned as the prime media distribution system and generated revenue off of advertisements. Now that we've shifted that over to electronic means I find it almost humourous how advertising and partnering is suddenly considered evil. Like staff and servers are magically free because journalists and printing presses must have been in the 1920's.
Like it or not, unless you're charging a subscription, the only viable model for the Internet at scale so far is finding someone who will pay to piggy-back on your service.
Why was no one ever so militant against advertising in newspapers? "There are pages of ads, whole sections, just ads!! I didn't look in the newspaper to see ads!"
Because newspaper ads didn't track us, didn't bounce and shake, and didn't execute malware on our computers.
> Why was no one ever so militant against advertising in newspapers?
Because newspaper ads weren't audio-video presentations that jumped over the text you were trying to read and prevented you from reading it, among numerous other differences between modern web ads and classic print ads.
I'm unconvinced by your loud assertions. What is the business model of LWN etc. and how could that apply to Mozilla's revenue needs?
Mozilla is spreading garbage completely independent of how their business model relates to the economics of other sites.
Just as a counter example, LWN.net does have ads for non subscribers (or starving Hacker subscribers, like in my case).
Scary. They'll need to be very careful to get this right.
But if they manage to get it right it might be a better deal than relying on revenue from Google?
They've bundled advertising software into a critical piece of software that should do only what its user wants it to do. They've already gotten it very wrong.
It's a very fine line between content and chrome. Most people can't tell you where their browser ends and their OS begins, nor where a web page ends and their browser begins.
It's all just “the computer is showing this to me”. This is why people put up with “Upgrade AVG!” notifications and click “Fix your computer now!” adverts.
Most people see a computer as a service, not a tool: most services are annoying, but you have to put up with them if you want the service; all PCs are the same anyway (unless you can afford a Mac, which is somehow something other than a PC), so there's no better service you can get.
My point is: unfortunately, most people don't care. We're very much in the minority.
Firefox has absolutely lost it's mind. This is EA-level corporate double-speak.
Mozilla's integration with Pocket is at direct conflict with their values: "Internet for people, not profit". I expected better of them.
Wow. Much altruism. Such revolution.
TLDR; "First we enabled DRM, then we sideloaded an advertising extension, now we're an advertising platform, but don't worry because we're changing the world."
What Windows browser would you suggest instead? Chrome is made by a literal advertising company and Edge seems nice but relatively feature-poor.
Sadly, Firefox is still the 'lesser of all evils', even though everyone continues to get more and more evil as time moves forward.
Yep. We're down to Safari, Edge, FF and Chrome. Everything else is just a fork of one of those.
Part of the problem is how complex the web stanards are these days.
Try building a browser from the ground up today. Part of the issue is the stanards committees keep adding onto what was supposed to be a document format. We have added onto the spec so much that its a mess. Ironically, it was netscape that probably screwed up the web the most by adding javascript. That boat has sailed, but we keep adding more and more features to the specs.
Chrome is a fork of Safari (is a fork of Konqueror).
QupZilla (to be renamed Falkon in the next major version) is an option I like. Overall it is very Firefox-like, but it is a Qt app using Qt WebEngine, which is Chromium integrated into Qt. (I've only used it on Linux and briefly on Mac, but there is a Windows build too.)
How fast do they get patches in when the Chromium part has a security issue? That's usually where all these "let's just fork the last good version of $browser" or "let's just fork their engine and build a new UI around it" endeavors come crashing down in flames.
I'm not sure how quickly Qt does it, and then WebEngine on Linux is typically supplied by your distro, so more delay. There is an AppImage, which does bundle it, however, and the Windows build would too. This is my main source of hesitation in switching over full time.
Probably Chrome or Firefox. Haven't used Windows in a long time, but I'm using Firefox Dev edition on mac.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Snark is just bad.
Advertising software is the killer of good. Mozilla's situation is more like I'm having a perfect hair day, got the perfect outfit and in the best shape of my life, everything is literally perfect; I better just shit in my pants so things aren't too perfect.
Agreed, and hilarious. The new Firefox recently replaced Chrome as my default browser.
Important principles require inflexibility.
I went back and re-read the Manifesto at https://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto/, and I'm not seeing an obvious place where this specific project violates any of Mozilla's principles. Would you mind saying more about your concerns in this case?
I don't think it does, in part because the list is stuffed with platitudes. Except #9, which is awfully convenient.
They want to become a mainstream browser again. A less evil Chrome.
Commendable I guess but I have no interest in supporting the internet economy.
I've been using Pocket's recommended articles a lot lately. They have solid article picks.
What's the current state for the release of the Pocket server-side and mobile app code?
So just gonna go through their list of bullet points about how this is Different™ (tl;dr: not very):
* Privacy "Delivers personalization without needing to vacuum up all of your personal data or sharing it with others."
But...
> Your Firefox browser compares your browsing history with the list of related websites to sort and filter through each day’s stories and recommend the ones that are most likely to interest you... The entire process of sorting and filtering which stories you should see happens locally in your copy of Firefox. When Recommendations from Pocket are displayed on your new tab, we collect information about how many times they appear and whether or not you interact with them [1]
So that's the exact same model the Brave browser was (is still?) pushing: FF will use your browser history to decide which ads (and "personalized stories") to show you; but will do it locally rather than serverside. This is good if your only concern was the collected private data leaking to third parties; it is less good if your concern is with the use of that private data in the first place.
* Quality. "Rewards valuable content, worthy of your time. Not driven by clicks."
I see literally nothing that supports this statement. They're selling native advertising slots in a push-model content stream, and tracking clicks on those ads just like the rest of the industry. The incentive is towards the highest bidder whose ads won't actively repel too much of the userbase too quickly.
* Control. "If you see a story you’re not a fan of, you can hide it. Or you can disable sponsored content altogether."
No snark on this one; this is good. The entire feature can be disabled, or the advertising slots can be disabled within the feature; the controls for this are clear and unobfuscated.
* Transparency. "Sponsored stories will be clearly marked."
Because that's the law, pardner
* Openness. "As an open organization, all code in Firefox is open source"
Shades of Brave, again, but fair enough.
[1]https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab-reco...
> This is good if your only concern was the collected private data leaking to third parties; it is less good if your concern is with the use of that private data in the first place.
Can you go into more detail on this?
Firefox uses private data locally every time you start typing in the address bar. What leads someone to object to this particular use (specifically for privacy reasons), but to leaving history on in the first place?
Imagine if your browser history was local but every time you use the history feature to revisit a page that URL was sent to Mozilla. How private is that really?
The Pocket code tells Mozilla what ads are being shown and which are clicked on. Since they know that the criteria for ad X is that phrase Y or Z is in the history, then they are gathering data on the type of content you are looking at on the web. This is only one step removed from the actual URLs.
> The Pocket code tells Mozilla what ads are being shown
Really? It definitely shouldn't do that.
> and which are clicked on
That's pretty hard to avoid, though. How much of a problem it is depends on how precise the targeting is. But since you're showing interest by clicking the ad, there's not necessarily much of a privacy issue.
With the Pocket / Brave model, the user's private information still winds up in the advertisers' hands -- in the form of which ads the engine recommends be shown to the user. The advertisers may not be able to directly see which specific sites or pages the user has in their history, but they still get the aggregate information which is what they were after in the first place.
The one advantage to the local parsing compared to serverside is that there isn't a cloud full of everybody's browser history ready to be hacked or resold. That's a real benefit, I don't want to undersell that, but it's not the entirety of the story.
As for your example: Firefox using your browser history to autocomplete urls as you type in the address bar is innocuous because that information never goes anywhere but to that user; it's solely for the user's benefit. Firefox using that same browser history to tell advertisers which subjects the user might be interested in is not innocuous; it's broadcasting information to third parties that the user might prefer be kept private. The user's data is no longer being used for the user's benefit, but for the advertiser's.
i may hold a minority opinion here but i love pocket and use the new tab suggestions a lot when reading on my commute for example. I am a bit worried about these personal recommendations tough - i rather liked that the suggestions weren't personalised and gave me articles i would never have found or searched myself, now it may become just another filter-bubble around me...
If you don't want these "features", then the easiest option is to delete .xpi files under "/usr/lib/firefox/browser/features/" directory. That's much easier than patching Chromium source code.
Where is the source code for Pocket service? Announcement says everything is open source but I cannot find it...