We really need some form of frictionless micropayment system that goes directly to the publishers.
I would gladly pay for ad-free web content (for example, NYT and WSJ) if they made it possible for me to pay them via a consumption based model instead of trying to force me into an expensive yearly subscription.
That's what Brave enables (although they also "pre-collect" payments for those publishers who may not be aware of their "service" - quite scammy, so I uninstalled their browser from desktops and use it only on my phone)
Google already offers something like this with Google Contributor. You load a fixed amount onto your ad-free pass, select which publishers you want to browse ad-free who have opted-in, and it will deduct a small amount (typically 1 - 4c) for each webpage you view ad-free.
The catch is, publishers don't seem to be signing up, presumably because they're making far more than 4c / pageview by showing ads to you. The publishers I added seem to have all abandoned the program long ago. I've been a member for over a year and have still only spent 6c.
Right now publishers make zero from me because I have a couple layers of ad blockers. If I'm willing to pay X for some number of ad-free articles, which does not have to be unlimited, then publishers would be making X dollars more.
Yup. That's why I don't pay for HBO, so I totally get it. If they want to make it $2, at least they'd get something from me. Until then, there's always Putlocker. Their loss, really.
Based on their logic ads in newspapers aren't ads because customer information isn't shared with the advertiser until they connect with the ad and visit their store.
that's not quite right. newspaper ads are paid placement, while these are not. being paid for placement is an essential feature of advertising. so to differentiate from that, mozilla uses the term "offer" here.
Paid placement is just one model of advertisement. Other well known ones are paid per impression, per click, per action. This is obviously the last one.
I guess Mozilla is confident enough not many people understand what CPA ads are to claim they are not ads.
That's the same DoubleSpeak telemarketers used to say when you asked if they were a telemarketer. "No No, we're just informing you of this new offer in the middle of your dinner with your family."
It's an experiment in hurting the good will of their brand.
I still use Firefox but it's painful sometimes. Not as painful as Chrome, but Mozilla seems determined to come up with unexpected new ways to fuck up Firefox for some reason.
Every one of these actions is a short-term cash grab. The real amazing part is how privacy advocates let these transgressions, or what Mozilla calls "experiments", slide.
Phoning home by default, necessary to display such "snippets" of course violates people’s privacy. That this is done not to pointlessly wish a happy new year but with commercial motives makes it even worse.
It's already phoning home to retrieve vital security updates, without which your privacy would be at much greater risk than Mozilla learning that a certain IP address uses Firefox.
I don't think that's a proper meaning for privacy.
I consider privacy to be that it is my choice how much of my personal data I reveal to a third party not directly involved with any of the parties I am doing business with.
Showing privacy-conserving ads doesn't violate what I consider privacy, some people might object to ads in general but there doesn't seem to be a better funding model (considering Mozilla doesn't want to continue being 90% funded by deals with search engines and donations being a drop in the bucket).
Open Source needs to figure out a funding model and Mozilla seems to be making positive headway into the realm of privacy-sensitive ads. Google and Chromium on the other hand is making headway into privacy-violation ads.
The minimum annual cash burn to have a high quality browser engine, js runtime, and UI seems to be several hundred million dollars.
FF is now utterly dependent on google for cash (and to be fair, google really needs FF to exist to pretend chrome isn't close to a monopoly). But who knows how long that will last and if/when google will exert control. One of the best things for Mozilla to do as an org is to figure out a non-google-dependent revenue stream.
Oh, don't get me wrong: Mozilla wanking about with firefox phone from 2011 to 2015 while watching their browser marketshare crater from 30% to 15% is infuriating. However, they're the only alternative we've got.
Those are entirely different buckets of money. Money the foundation spends on things like the IHR, do not come out of the revenue from the Google search deal. Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corp are two different entities (though MoFo owns MoCo). In the same way, donations to MoFo do not pay for browser developer salaries.
I sometimes wonder why Firefox needs to be actively developed at all. The Web already has all the features it needs to be insanely successful, as evidenced by the fact that it's insanely successful. Why do we need to add more?
Sure, security fixes are important, but it seems like browser developers spend more of their time on new features. Things like a new and exciting way to use asterisks in JavaScript, or another UI redesign, or an API for websites to interact directly with smart waffle irons. Maybe if Mozilla didn't develop these things, they wouldn't need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on their browser.
Even if you were right about that, Firefox doesn't really have a say. Chrome is intent on rapidly adding more Web features. If Firefox doesn't keep up with the pace, websites will stop working in Firefox because they use the new Chrome-supported features. This is a huge threat to Firefox, and has been made even worse by Edge adopting Chromium. Chromium now has huge market share, making any feature adopted by Chrome essentially mandatory for all browsers.
This is why Mozilla needs a stable source of revenue - both for the engineering work to remain competitive, and for marketing so they can persuade users to use Firefox and lessen Google's influence over the Web.
Is there a reason to keep doing that? I mean what is the point in reimplementing Chromium as Firefox? Shouldn't they just fork Chromium and stop wasting resources chasing it? And focus those resources on something that can give them competitive advantage over Google.
If they fork Chromium then Google has won and we enter the next IE-era of the web; one browser engine to rule them all, terrible for everyone involved except Google.
I'm not sure I agree that Mozilla bears no responsibility for Web feature bloat. While you're right that Google currently appears to be stuffing every feature imaginable into their web browser at a breakneck pace in a desperate attempt to make it literally impossible for anyone else to write one, other browser vendors don't need to take it lying down. Imagine if Mozilla, Apple, and (pre-Chromium-fork) Microsoft all collectively agreed not to implement any more Web features: would websites really give up ~30% of their audience (including the lucrative iPhone crowd!) just to use some Chrome-only dingus?
As a nonprofit, Mozilla is in a great position to lead a charge like that. But they've chosen instead to make the problem even worse. On top of everything Google does, Mozilla also creates and implements its own dubiously necessary features (WebVR comes to mind) and uses venues like the Mozilla Hacks blog to promote them to developers.
> would websites really give up ~30% of their audience (including the lucrative iPhone crowd!) just to use some Chrome-only dingus?
Websites? Maybe not that much (at first, at least). But from IE experience: There are many intranet-style tools that would most certainly go "well, our tool X is only supported on Chrome, deal with it"[1]. Which, of course, only further cements Chrome's monopoly because everyone would just go "well, I have to run Chrome anyway, so why bother installing another browser?"
Well there is "privacy" in the sense of people not accumulating dossiers on you and then there is "privacy" as the "right to be left alone".
I see pop up messages that have to be dismissed as harassment, pure and simple.
Firefox has a chance to show it is different from Google but it harasses me just like Google and refuses to hire developers in the same 99% of the world that Google won't hire developers, why should I expect Firefox to be any different from Chrome?
Long-term the answer for us is a migration away from "The Google Platform" and towards Gopher, telnet BBSes, and anything else where hipsters fear to tread.
Yep. I once considered donating to them for developing a browser I quite like and that's needed in the current landscape, but they obviously want to be for profit in the scummiest way possible, so - yeah.
There should be another organisation taking over Firefox development.
They keep using that word 'experiment' to mean 'I can run whatever code I want on an end user's computer' which is not right. It's an ad. You're pushing ads. It's not the worst thing in the world if you just call it what it is, but using the 'experiments' mechanism to push ads is scummy and to me a violation of trust.
I've been running Firefox inside of Firejail, a sandbox, lately, primarily as a light form of exploit mitigation, and I think maybe you should too, just in case Mozilla decides to experiment with attacking your computer as well.
I think today I'm going to experiment with QuteBrowser and some other more fringe browsers that are available for Linux.
Which definition of ad requires it to be a paid placement? As far as I understand it the word advertisement is a pretty broad term. You could advertise for someone for free, perhaps because you have an existing relationship, or perhaps you could advertise for something other than monetary payment. It's an advertisement.
Worse, it's an advertisement, for a commercial service, in a place that I didn't want it to be. The last place I wanted something like that to be, really.
we can debate the semantics but i don't think it's a stretch to consider monetary exchange as a feature of advertising (perhaps a more narrow version of your general exchange of value definition). with that said, another commenter noted that this could be paid per action after the fact (CPA), so it could very well be called an ad by any definition.
i agree that we shouldn't place ads everywhere, especially in "safe" places. but i'm also concerned with the viability and longevity of firefox.
Agreed, it has become clear that this has become Mozilla's version of shouting "it's just a social experiment bro!" after fucking with somebody. It's not cute, it's antisocial.
If you want to avoid running random experimental mozilla code on your machine without any kind of confirmation needed by you remember to go to about:preferences#privacy in the "Firefox Data Collection and Use" and turn "Allow Firefox to install and run studies" to off.
I would also set the about:config options "network.allow-experiments" and "app.normandy.enabled" to false.
the hubbub over this seems overblown. sure, there is advertising value to booking.com, but if no data is shared with them until you click on the offer, this seems like a decent privacy-respecting effort to find another revenue stream for mozilla that's not google. if you already use booking.com, it's 20 bucks free.
moreover you can turn off snippets in the about:preferences > Home tab.
at least it's not chrome, which constantly and intrusively monitors you for advertising value.
Please don't resort to whataboutism to defend a move that would obviously alienate a very core part of Firefox's userbase. Being better than Chrome is a very low bar. This hubbub seems overblown to you, but not to others, and from your comments on this thread, you don't seem to understand why.
Firefox has traditionally been the _only_ major browser that champions the traditional freedoms that many folks (myself included) associate with the web. For me personally, that involves looking at the commercial internet as a subset of the internet as a whole, which is a successful decentralized system which has reached escape velocity. The legacy of Firefox is the legacy of that system. You seem to presume that the corporation and its profitability is necessary for Firefox to be successful, and so a "decent privacy-respecting effort to find another revenue stream" rooted in advertisements is reasonable. I don't agree on principle, and I don't agree in practice, because these things take away the sole differentiator that prevents Firefox from becoming Chrome with less market share.
This is probably the central thing that might make sense for you to think about: what is the market differentiator for Firefox? Why would anyone bother to use it versus Chrome? Being less obnoxious in doing sketchy things but still doing them is not a good reason. Not doing sketchy things is a good reason.
i deny your whataboutism and counter with slippery slope!
but seriously, i don’t think it’s a big deal because
1) no personal data is shared up front
2) it's an experiment
3) you can turn it off/block it
4) some people might appreciate the discount
5) there’s a wide non-slippery gulf between complete ad blocking and complete tracking
6) mozilla might find a decent compromise between those extremes, which is sorely missing
7) i trust mozilla to course-correct if necessary, as they have in the past.
i don’t want ads everywhere either, and i applaud your principles, but please apply them to helping mozilla find non-ad and non-google revenue streams (assuming you’re not anti-revenue as well). please work through and put forth a rationale, not an emotional appeal, and refrain from condecscension.
n.b. - i've used firefox since it was called phoenix (v0.3).
Please allow me to apologize in advance for the long rant that is to follow.
I think you're proving my point by insinuating that I need to put forth a way for Mozilla to find non-ad and non-Google revenue streams, and I also think you're misunderstanding me by implying I'm putting forward an emotional appeal -- I actually could care less about whether or not Mozilla Corp chooses to uphold the open source values that propelled it to success and relevance, I merely think it's poor decision making to ignore that if they wish to survive.
This, of course, was the heart of the question I posted to you at the end of my comment, and it is also something that you still haven't answered. Let me reiterate it: what is the key differentiator of Firefox? Why do people use it? You are talking about why you don't think it's a big deal. The thing is, whether you (or anyone else) thinks it is a big deal or not is simply not directly relevant to Mozilla and Firefox (although it is a signal). The question of whether it's strategically a good decision for them is actually important. I believe that it is not. To further illustrate that, let me make some arguments by comparison.
Is Python ad-supported? Is the Linux Kernel ad supported? Ruby? Nginx? There are companies that make products which utilize Python or are greatly involved in the Python ecosystem, and those companies contribute back to the ecosystem because it serves their purposes. Likewise with the Linux Kernel, Ruby, Nginx, Python, and many other excellent pieces of open source software. Would you dilute the reference protocols and implementations for these products by diluting key parts of their functionality with advertising in a form that is essentially malware?
No. You wouldn't do that because it would compromise the trust of your core users and ultimately result in negative momentum. You wouldn't do that because ultimately, it's poor product management. Healthy businesses that operate with a division between the open source and closed source areas are well trodden territories, and one of the easiest ways to kill the healthy business line that depends on the open source product's mindshare is to dilute it. This is what you're not addressing, and based on your arguments, it may be something that you don't understand. What Mozilla Corp just did was a bafflingly poor product management decision. It was an experiment with little reward and what appears to be high risk. Time will tell. They may have lost sight of the the need to add value first in order to rake in profits long term, and the need for that to sometimes take longer, more expensive paths to result in the most lucrative circuit.
This, of course, is something that the original core contributors to all of these projects understood quite well. They produced software, but they were first and foremost constructing protocols. Protocols can be created in purely informational theoretic terms and be released into the wild, and upon critical mass of mindshare adoption, operate self-sustainably in their current form. It is certainly the case that money and other resources can scale up the rate of development and scope of these protocols as well as the ecosystem around it, but it is not a requirement. The organization and labor that construct these protocols are motivated by a variety of motivations, but often times, one of the core motivations is the desire to mutate the way that things flow in societal infrastructures by improving them. When attempting to build one of these mutations, focusing on profitability prematurely is ironically one of the easiest ways to doom it, or precluding it from ever occurring. It will get you stuck in local minima and distract you from executing correctly. Why did Google beat every other search engine? They figured out how to do search properly, better than every other competitors.
Mozilla Corporation (if it can) needs to figure out how to do the browser properly, better than every other one of its competitors. If no...
While I'm not thrilled Mozilla ran an experiment placing ads in the browser, I am confident that anything they release will be easy to disable via about:config or some other configuration.
However, looking closer at this situation there is a bit of a troubling fact that `experiments.enabled` - the configuration directive used here - doesn't appear in about:config but certainly is being used:
Mozilla's in a weird spot. I understand they need to be profitable but springing these types of "experiments" on users is eroding trust and is damaging long-term. There's got to be a better way to manage these changes so that it doesn't feel like adware is being surreptitiously injected into your web browser.
The Wikipedia method of getting in your face begging for money seems unpleasant as well but at least that doesn't leave you questioning their motives and judgement.
If you disagree with what Mozilla just did, now is a terrible time to show your support for them; given their data-driven philosophy, they'll conclude that running ads on the New Tab page led to an X% increase in donations and do it again in the future.
“This snippet was an experiment to provide more value to Firefox users through offers provided by a partner,” a Mozilla spokesperson told VentureBeat. “It was not a paid placement or advertisement. We are continually looking for more ways to say thanks for using Firefox.
Yuck, what a slimey piece of PR babble. I guess all those IE toolbars weren’t spyware after all - they were trying to provide value to their users! I guess all those unwanted flyers tucked in my mailbox aren’t ads either, they just want to provide me value...
Mozilla's death will be one of the saddest dead-horse-beatings to be ever seen. Personally I've switched to Chrome after so many years of using Firefox and I'm not looking back. I'll be stabbed in the back, but I won't say I didn't expect it! Also the knife in my back will be placed by competent people, keeping my bleeding to a minimum ^_^
I've switched because chrome manages my accounts seamlessly across my Android phone and Desktop. It's an unfair advantage Google has. I don't know how Mozilla can compete in the long run.
From your answer, I assume you own an Android phone. Mozilla could compete because Firefox has Sync, but Firefox on Android is some seriously laggy shit with built-in ads, so it's going to be hard for them to win.
Either Mozilla has been infiltrated by malicious actors or the modern crop of web-focused developers are so numb to current status quo of mass ads and tracking that they are unable to see alternatives or understand why people would be upset.
Maybe, but my best guess is they've been 'infiltrated' by people with absolutely no ideological commitment to what Mozilla has traditionally stood for and instead view it as "just another job". Probably people with a stronger marketing background than anything else.
I think it's the best explanation for shit like this or the "mr robot tie in." These sort of advertisements aren't the sort of ideas a software developer with a commitment to free software and privacy would think up. These are the sort of ideas that come from people with a marketing background. I doubt these were bottom-up ideas, the order almost certainly came from the top down. I hate to say it but Mozilla's upper and middle management probably need to be gutted if this kind of crap is ever going to stop, and I doubt that will happen.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadI would gladly pay for ad-free web content (for example, NYT and WSJ) if they made it possible for me to pay them via a consumption based model instead of trying to force me into an expensive yearly subscription.
The catch is, publishers don't seem to be signing up, presumably because they're making far more than 4c / pageview by showing ads to you. The publishers I added seem to have all abandoned the program long ago. I've been a member for over a year and have still only spent 6c.
https://contributor.google.com/
Right now publishers make zero from me because I have a couple layers of ad blockers. If I'm willing to pay X for some number of ad-free articles, which does not have to be unlimited, then publishers would be making X dollars more.
The energy spent feeling smart would be better directed at your reading comprehension.
I guess Mozilla is confident enough not many people understand what CPA ads are to claim they are not ads.
i don't like ads either, but i'm ok with mozilla experimenting to find more privacy-respecting revenue streams and lessen their reliance on google.
I still use Firefox but it's painful sometimes. Not as painful as Chrome, but Mozilla seems determined to come up with unexpected new ways to fuck up Firefox for some reason.
Every one of these actions is a short-term cash grab. The real amazing part is how privacy advocates let these transgressions, or what Mozilla calls "experiments", slide.
I consider privacy to be that it is my choice how much of my personal data I reveal to a third party not directly involved with any of the parties I am doing business with.
Showing privacy-conserving ads doesn't violate what I consider privacy, some people might object to ads in general but there doesn't seem to be a better funding model (considering Mozilla doesn't want to continue being 90% funded by deals with search engines and donations being a drop in the bucket).
Open Source needs to figure out a funding model and Mozilla seems to be making positive headway into the realm of privacy-sensitive ads. Google and Chromium on the other hand is making headway into privacy-violation ads.
The minimum annual cash burn to have a high quality browser engine, js runtime, and UI seems to be several hundred million dollars.
FF is now utterly dependent on google for cash (and to be fair, google really needs FF to exist to pretend chrome isn't close to a monopoly). But who knows how long that will last and if/when google will exert control. One of the best things for Mozilla to do as an org is to figure out a non-google-dependent revenue stream.
Privacy respecting ads are a good compromise.
I’m making no judgement about that but there are two sides to fiscal longevity: getting more money is one, the other is to focus spending.
1. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2017/
Firefox exists partially outside the regular market, so normal strategies may not apply quite the same way.
Sure, security fixes are important, but it seems like browser developers spend more of their time on new features. Things like a new and exciting way to use asterisks in JavaScript, or another UI redesign, or an API for websites to interact directly with smart waffle irons. Maybe if Mozilla didn't develop these things, they wouldn't need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on their browser.
This is why Mozilla needs a stable source of revenue - both for the engineering work to remain competitive, and for marketing so they can persuade users to use Firefox and lessen Google's influence over the Web.
As a nonprofit, Mozilla is in a great position to lead a charge like that. But they've chosen instead to make the problem even worse. On top of everything Google does, Mozilla also creates and implements its own dubiously necessary features (WebVR comes to mind) and uses venues like the Mozilla Hacks blog to promote them to developers.
Websites? Maybe not that much (at first, at least). But from IE experience: There are many intranet-style tools that would most certainly go "well, our tool X is only supported on Chrome, deal with it"[1]. Which, of course, only further cements Chrome's monopoly because everyone would just go "well, I have to run Chrome anyway, so why bother installing another browser?"
[1]: Yes, SAP, I'm looking at you.
I see pop up messages that have to be dismissed as harassment, pure and simple.
Firefox has a chance to show it is different from Google but it harasses me just like Google and refuses to hire developers in the same 99% of the world that Google won't hire developers, why should I expect Firefox to be any different from Chrome?
Long-term the answer for us is a migration away from "The Google Platform" and towards Gopher, telnet BBSes, and anything else where hipsters fear to tread.
There should be another organisation taking over Firefox development.
They keep using that word 'experiment' to mean 'I can run whatever code I want on an end user's computer' which is not right. It's an ad. You're pushing ads. It's not the worst thing in the world if you just call it what it is, but using the 'experiments' mechanism to push ads is scummy and to me a violation of trust.
I've been running Firefox inside of Firejail, a sandbox, lately, primarily as a light form of exploit mitigation, and I think maybe you should too, just in case Mozilla decides to experiment with attacking your computer as well.
I think today I'm going to experiment with QuteBrowser and some other more fringe browsers that are available for Linux.
obviously you'd share info once you click on it. i don't like ads either, but this seems better than the standard track-you-out-the-wazoo ad.
Worse, it's an advertisement, for a commercial service, in a place that I didn't want it to be. The last place I wanted something like that to be, really.
i agree that we shouldn't place ads everywhere, especially in "safe" places. but i'm also concerned with the viability and longevity of firefox.
Why should that matter? It makes not a lick of difference to me whether they got paid for it or not.
I would also set the about:config options "network.allow-experiments" and "app.normandy.enabled" to false.
moreover you can turn off snippets in the about:preferences > Home tab.
at least it's not chrome, which constantly and intrusively monitors you for advertising value.
Firefox has traditionally been the _only_ major browser that champions the traditional freedoms that many folks (myself included) associate with the web. For me personally, that involves looking at the commercial internet as a subset of the internet as a whole, which is a successful decentralized system which has reached escape velocity. The legacy of Firefox is the legacy of that system. You seem to presume that the corporation and its profitability is necessary for Firefox to be successful, and so a "decent privacy-respecting effort to find another revenue stream" rooted in advertisements is reasonable. I don't agree on principle, and I don't agree in practice, because these things take away the sole differentiator that prevents Firefox from becoming Chrome with less market share.
This is probably the central thing that might make sense for you to think about: what is the market differentiator for Firefox? Why would anyone bother to use it versus Chrome? Being less obnoxious in doing sketchy things but still doing them is not a good reason. Not doing sketchy things is a good reason.
but seriously, i don’t think it’s a big deal because
1) no personal data is shared up front
2) it's an experiment
3) you can turn it off/block it
4) some people might appreciate the discount
5) there’s a wide non-slippery gulf between complete ad blocking and complete tracking
6) mozilla might find a decent compromise between those extremes, which is sorely missing
7) i trust mozilla to course-correct if necessary, as they have in the past.
i don’t want ads everywhere either, and i applaud your principles, but please apply them to helping mozilla find non-ad and non-google revenue streams (assuming you’re not anti-revenue as well). please work through and put forth a rationale, not an emotional appeal, and refrain from condecscension.
n.b. - i've used firefox since it was called phoenix (v0.3).
I think you're proving my point by insinuating that I need to put forth a way for Mozilla to find non-ad and non-Google revenue streams, and I also think you're misunderstanding me by implying I'm putting forward an emotional appeal -- I actually could care less about whether or not Mozilla Corp chooses to uphold the open source values that propelled it to success and relevance, I merely think it's poor decision making to ignore that if they wish to survive.
This, of course, was the heart of the question I posted to you at the end of my comment, and it is also something that you still haven't answered. Let me reiterate it: what is the key differentiator of Firefox? Why do people use it? You are talking about why you don't think it's a big deal. The thing is, whether you (or anyone else) thinks it is a big deal or not is simply not directly relevant to Mozilla and Firefox (although it is a signal). The question of whether it's strategically a good decision for them is actually important. I believe that it is not. To further illustrate that, let me make some arguments by comparison.
Is Python ad-supported? Is the Linux Kernel ad supported? Ruby? Nginx? There are companies that make products which utilize Python or are greatly involved in the Python ecosystem, and those companies contribute back to the ecosystem because it serves their purposes. Likewise with the Linux Kernel, Ruby, Nginx, Python, and many other excellent pieces of open source software. Would you dilute the reference protocols and implementations for these products by diluting key parts of their functionality with advertising in a form that is essentially malware?
No. You wouldn't do that because it would compromise the trust of your core users and ultimately result in negative momentum. You wouldn't do that because ultimately, it's poor product management. Healthy businesses that operate with a division between the open source and closed source areas are well trodden territories, and one of the easiest ways to kill the healthy business line that depends on the open source product's mindshare is to dilute it. This is what you're not addressing, and based on your arguments, it may be something that you don't understand. What Mozilla Corp just did was a bafflingly poor product management decision. It was an experiment with little reward and what appears to be high risk. Time will tell. They may have lost sight of the the need to add value first in order to rake in profits long term, and the need for that to sometimes take longer, more expensive paths to result in the most lucrative circuit.
This, of course, is something that the original core contributors to all of these projects understood quite well. They produced software, but they were first and foremost constructing protocols. Protocols can be created in purely informational theoretic terms and be released into the wild, and upon critical mass of mindshare adoption, operate self-sustainably in their current form. It is certainly the case that money and other resources can scale up the rate of development and scope of these protocols as well as the ecosystem around it, but it is not a requirement. The organization and labor that construct these protocols are motivated by a variety of motivations, but often times, one of the core motivations is the desire to mutate the way that things flow in societal infrastructures by improving them. When attempting to build one of these mutations, focusing on profitability prematurely is ironically one of the easiest ways to doom it, or precluding it from ever occurring. It will get you stuck in local minima and distract you from executing correctly. Why did Google beat every other search engine? They figured out how to do search properly, better than every other competitors.
Mozilla Corporation (if it can) needs to figure out how to do the browser properly, better than every other one of its competitors. If no...
However, looking closer at this situation there is a bit of a troubling fact that `experiments.enabled` - the configuration directive used here - doesn't appear in about:config but certainly is being used:
https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-esr45/source/browser/experim...
Looks like someone filed a bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1517147
The Wikipedia method of getting in your face begging for money seems unpleasant as well but at least that doesn't leave you questioning their motives and judgement.
Now it is a good time to show your support to the project.
Yuck, what a slimey piece of PR babble. I guess all those IE toolbars weren’t spyware after all - they were trying to provide value to their users! I guess all those unwanted flyers tucked in my mailbox aren’t ads either, they just want to provide me value...
I find it a bit bizarre.
Maybe, but my best guess is they've been 'infiltrated' by people with absolutely no ideological commitment to what Mozilla has traditionally stood for and instead view it as "just another job". Probably people with a stronger marketing background than anything else.
I think it's the best explanation for shit like this or the "mr robot tie in." These sort of advertisements aren't the sort of ideas a software developer with a commitment to free software and privacy would think up. These are the sort of ideas that come from people with a marketing background. I doubt these were bottom-up ideas, the order almost certainly came from the top down. I hate to say it but Mozilla's upper and middle management probably need to be gutted if this kind of crap is ever going to stop, and I doubt that will happen.