I hope someone makes a nice little plugin to remove the ads

At this early stage, the ad experiments are not a forgone conclusion, but simply an experiment to come.

Here's what Johnathan Nightingale, VP Firefox, had to say.

A lot of our community found the language hard to decipher, and worried that we were going to turn Firefox into a mess of logos sold to the highest bidder; without user control, without user benefit.

That’s not going to happen.New Tab Experiments [blog.mozilla.org]

But we will experiment. In the coming weeks, we’ll be landing tests on our pre-release channels to see whether we can make things like the new tab page more useful, particularly for fresh installs of Firefox, where we don’t yet have any recommendations to make from your history.

Disabled auto update. :-)

Hmm. I guess if there was a "paid, no ads" version then people can choose. I'd generally be in favour if the ads mean less reliance on Google for Mozilla's revenue.

I don't like the idea of circumventing ads... generally they're relevant and they pay the bills of the services I use.

I've set Firefox to open my startpage when I open a new tab. There sure is no advertising there.

This startpage is a simple HTML-page, with a collection of links to the sites I visit most. I have absolutely no desire to let the browser decide what links are on a new-tab page.

Mozilla is run by people not competent enough to perform janitorial duties let alone run a browser. Every thing they have done has made it more difficult to customize Firefox forcing the need for more extensions to do what previously could be done natively.

Currently you can configure the new tab URL by going to about:config and editing browser.newtab.url. Hopefully they'll overlook this and users won't have to get yet another extension to do something natively.

- John

>>less reliance on Google for Mozilla's revenue

We all know the old saw... You're either the customer or the product. If something is free, you're the product.

Mozilla Corp burns through over $100,000,000 per year and att last count 85% of that came from Google. As far as Mozilla is concerned, Google is the customer and you are the product.

By my count, the browser wars for the top browsers have shaped up like this...

* IE - owned by the traditional axis of evil, Microsoft.
* Chrome - owned up upstart axis of evil Google.
* Firefox - utterly in the thrall of said upstart axis of evil.
* Safari - owned by up and coming axis of evil, the largest tech company in the world known for locked-down, closed source, overpriced proprietary hardware.

At least there's still Opera. Oh wait...

With version 8.5 (released in 2005) the advertisements were removed entirely and primary financial support for the browser came through revenue from Google (which is by contract Opera's default search engine)
-- src: [en.wikipedia.org...]

So yes, let's all moan and shout because Firefox is going to serve ads on new tabs. Let's block those ads.

BTW, as background, Firefox's agreement with Google expires in November of 2014. If they don't renew. Firefox loses 85% of revenue overnight... Goodbye FF.

I don't like the idea of circumventing ads... generally they're relevant and they pay the bills of the services I use.

at the moment, they aren't hurting.

[eweek.com...]


If google doesn't renew their deal, I would expect microsoft to make a good offer.

I'd like to know what percentage of their expenses are *browser* expenses. (not those other things they do)

If they stick ads in the browser itself without a paid option to opt-out they can stick the browser where the sun doesn't shine.

While they'll be sorely missed, I will find an alternative.

why would a *paid* opt-out option be ok?


isn't firefox still FOSS ?

I shouldn't really say this.

But thanks for the entertainment folks.

Then again, I also share the [mostly] mutual chagrin.

There are certain things about Firefox I would miss, but honestly I just don't find it a great browser. It has great dev tools, but for example I just logged into Asana (task mananger) with FF for the first time in a long time. It works just fine in Chrome and IE, but in FF it's a complete mess for me and unreadable.

Every time I try to go back to FF as my default browser, I'm stymied by things like that.

Every thing they have done has made it more difficult to customize Firefox forcing the need for more extensions to do what previously could be done natively.

I suspect that is because of potential security issues.

We live in the real world. These things need to be paid for. If we want to retain FF as a viable alternative we should accept that they will be looking to help support the project. We don't have to like it, so we can go and use the alternatives.
I'd rather have FF there, than be limited to effectively two main browsers.

why would a *paid* opt-out option be ok?

They need money and apparently donating to the cause doesn't get an opt-out, so make the donations cancel the ads, aka a paid version.

That's how all the other apps do it.

The really need a premium version, or to open up the plug-ins to accept micropayments so the app developers can charge and firefox collects 30% of whatever they collect in the app store, something of that nature would wean them off the Google soup kitchen.

bing would want that default search box sponsorship. maybe yahoo, too.


besides showing some ads, would the associated data be collected?


fresh article: [fool.com...]

Wow, I so don't want or need to be shown more ads.

I've set Firefox to open my startpage when I open a new tab. There sure is no advertising there.

I've always pointed FireFox to one of my pages .. When I open FireFox, I've got everything I need right there .. news, weather, mail, stocks, my bookmarks, and a couple of different search indexes in case I want to search for something right away - plus a number of other things all personalized and mostly put on by me - for me.

Mozilla is run by people not competent enough to perform janitorial duties let alone run a browser. Every thing they have done has made it more difficult to customize Firefox forcing the need for more extensions to do what previously could be done natively.

I totally agree with this, but it's all in the name of "not breaking the Web", a.k.a. totally foolproofing the settings, which is absolutely insane. It is the very reason I have switched to K-Meleon, which uses Gecko, but is fully customizable without plugins.
Amazing!
Great as long as you use Windows! :)

This may be obvious, but what is the problem with Firefox and others being completely financially dependent on Google?
Also, I don't understand how it works — it can't be just from the default search engine preference!

(Sorry for my n00b questions, but I am new here! I have been a Webmaster for a number of years, [since ~2005-ish] but do it just for fun! :) I love this site, but I've just gotten around to making an account now)

Welcome ThomasW!

what is the problem with Firefox and others being completely financially dependent on Google?

Whether or not it's a problem for you is a philosophical question I don't want to tackle, but the reason it's a problem for Firefox is simple....

Let's say your company creates an open-source operating system.
Let's say that company gets 90% of its funding from Microsoft....

Let's say your company creates an open-source image editing program.
Let's say that company gets 90% of its funding from Adobe....

In all those cases if your one "customer" decides not to "buy" from you anymore, you instantly disappear as a viable company unless you find another funding source.

what would it take to just fund the browser work?

In all those cases if your one "customer" decides not to "buy" from you anymore, you instantly disappear as a viable company unless you find another funding source.

Thank you for the clear explanation!
Yeah, I guess it is pretty unstable. Kind of like monocultures.

Does Google pay them that much just from the default search engine setting though? That seems a rather small price to pay!

I would be willing to pay if Mozilla still had a mind of its own and its entire strategy of competing with Google Chrome was "be a good customizable browser", rather than "become Google Chrome".

I lost it after I needed to install a plugin to enable the status bar
HOW INSANE IS THAT?!?!?
It should be enabled by default as far as I'm concerned!
I would love to hear the rationale for removing that!

I'm overjoyed to have found K-Meleon, which lets me customize the browser to look how any good browser should, AND gives me the choice of using Mozilla bookmarks, IE Favorites, AND Opera Hotlinks, all at the same time if I want to; but it does make me a bit uneasy that K-M is completely dependent upon Mozilla, which is completely dependent upon Google.

I read a handful of articles before posting my first post in this thread, but to be honest, I was pretty ignorant of the actual funding arrangements before that, so I don't know as I can answer any better than I already did.

I just recall that there's a contract for Firefox to use Google as the default browser and they get a huge kickback, but I don't know the exact details of what exactly they get paid for (i.e. what the terms of the contract are). I haven't seen any dirty details, but they might be out there somewhere.

I have not tried K-Meleon. For me the main thing is that I have one of those laptops with a medium screen (15") and high res (1920x1080) which means upsizing things and, as a general rule, I've found that Chrome handles this the best (I would say webkit, but that's not really true - it's not just a rendering problem, it's how the overall application deals with DPI). So every time I try to change, I find myself coming back to Chrome.

Similar thing with search. I go through periods where I want to get away from Google search, but every time I do a "blind search" test like the Bing challenge they were pushing, I choose Google 70-80% of the time with rest being split 1:2 with Yahoo! and Bing (so in other words I choose Google 4x as often as the nearest competitor).

So, long story short, I have been assimilated... which at times frightens me.

Yeah, K-Meleon is definitely best for user choice and customizability, but definitely not for super-smooth rendering or stability (at this point anyway). The most current version is still in beta, so there are still a few kinks to be worked out. It's quite fast though!
The latest stable version's Gecko release is from 2006. :/

If you want an alternative search engine, Ecosia [ecosia.org] might be a fun one to try!
I haven't tested it too much myself, but there's a Google tab on the site so you can compare results easily!

As far as alternative Web browsers, I always thought the multi-engine idea was cool, like Lunascape and Avant use, even though I really have no use for them personally. I can see how they might be convenient for *real* Web developers! XD