Two new blog posts from Mozilla both apologize for the privacy-preserving ad measurement controversy and describe how they still plan to push forward into the online ad industry. Definitely disappointing to anyone who was hoping they’d back down after the backlash. Worth remembering that Brave is also technically an ad company and manages to make a decent product, but I still can’t help feeling that we need less ad-tech, not more.
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Brave gives you contextual ads not targeted ads. Only targeted ads use and leak user data. I have seen many questions in this forum about how data is actually leaking through ads and still many people do not understand it. In the links bellow i am providing very clear explanation by a former Brave employee - Johnny Ryan.
He actually advocates about privacy very heavily, used to work for Brave and has very clear explanations about the topic. He explains mainly about how data is leaking through “real time bidding”
You can find more of his videos on youtube.
I wonder how Mozilla can get away from the reliance on Google for money. I honestly have no clue.
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Well, both of above-linked post are nothing more than marketing BS; lot of text, (close to) no meaning.
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By providing paid non browser services - but they don’t manage that well as we have seen from what they do offer
In the end, I’m inclined to blame the management and their business decisions
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+1. I have no idea where OP see Mozilla’s apology.
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Well, half-apology, but I didn’t want to risk editorializing my post title too much.
It’s been clear to us in recent weeks that what we haven’t done is step back to explain our thinking in the broader context of our advertising efforts. For this, we owe our community an apology for not engaging and communicating our vision effectively. Mozilla is only Mozilla if we share our thinking, engage people along the way, and incorporate that feedback into our efforts to help reform the ecosystem.
We’re going to correct that, starting with this blog post. I want to lay out our thinking about how we plan to shift the world of online advertising in a better direction.
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I’d start by cutting the ceo out of mozilla. That would lift off 7 million $ of yearly salary. Source
I do see this as an attempt to develop more of a business than just “we take a paycheck from Google”, but this also goes against a lot of what they’ve talked about for years.
Brave has played in the ad space for years with contextual ads. In my opinion they do it so well that I don’t mind them. Vivaldi does search deals, bookmark, and speed dial default placements. Arc is working on an Arc for Teams for funding. So many options that could be explored before copying the business strategy that Chrome employs.
That said, I have sympathy for them. Whether they see it or not I think they’re struggling. If there is a positive to take from there recent decisions is that the new CEO has firmly moved Mozilla in the direction of being a product focused company instead of pretending they don’t have a business to run. Culture change is hard. I hope they continue to course correct.
The web is ad-based because of Google. There could be so many other ways to monetize everything.
An interesting podcast with Arc CEO:
Although, I’m not a fan of Arc, that discussion was really interesting.
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I don’t see anything new. Their CEO is just saying “Mozilla is in the arena, trying stuff”, but they are mostly failing and losing more user trust everyday.
The only people who currently use firefox are people interested in FOSS & privacy, and old people who were born before chromium. How did they lose the browser wars to a company in a post-2008 financial crisis, post Snowden era where hating privacy invasive companies is the coolest thing ever, nobody knows.
Just make them give up Firefox and let some actually sane and stable company/organization with a vision lead the project. Mozilla looks like a headless chicken more than anything. They were supposed to be the user voice in creating web standards, but the only thing they have created is a graveyard of projects to rival google. Mozilla is literally the biggest issue with Firefox imo.
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