Why ads in Firefox are no big deal

Pretty funny, boomboomcars :) Somebody has to pay the bills. Currently Mozilla receives most of its funding from Google. If this broadens their revenue base that is a good thing. Or users could start paying.

hahahahaha yeah, I know.

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Sorry, bad taste.

Actually, I still have to take a look at the iceweasel package and see if it would be usable with Slackware, as I'm fairly sure Debian will strip out those ads.

I've also looked into Chromium, but my computer seems to be having problems at the moment, and compiling it seems to lock up the machine. I need to run some memory and processor diagnostics later this weekend.

Testing completed. Cpuburn is blowing up after about 3 minutes. So my processor is overheating.The fans are fine, and I've cleaned out all the dust bunnies from the vents. But cpuburn is still blowing up. I'll have to try tearing it down and making sure the thermal paste is still OK. :( But that's a job for another time.

Someone will come up with a hack that will either block the ads or disable the feature. They always do.

> Someone will come up with a hack

From the sound of it, they're on the opening screen when you first install the browser. It should be a matter of minutes to remove them. Now, if Mozilla makes them difficult to remove or puts them back on a regular basis, then all the complaints are justified.

I think it's a stupid idea that won't work and will simply inconvenience the core base of users, but what do I know, The mere fact that they've decided to do it is a strong indication that it's time for me to look for another browser though.

jdixon, then how do you propose they generate money? I've never been comfortable with Google being their main funder.

tuxchick, good point. I think sometimes we confuse "Free" and "free". It's unfortunate that the English language does not have different words for these two very different ideas.

In German you can say "Frei" or "Kostenlos", two unmistakably different words.

In Spanish you can say "libre" or "gratis", again allowing for no misinterpretation.

Frei/libre/Free is the holy grail that we all cherish. Kostenlos/gratis/free is something that often comes as a side benefit.

Now to my point, there is nothing wrong with Free/Kostenlos/libre software also making an income. Actually this is a good thing in that it encourages expansion of the offering, and the longevity of the project.

> jdixon, then how do you propose they generate money?

TC, if I knew how to make money I wouldn't have to work for a living.

But how they make money is their concern. What the browser on my machine does is mine. When those two conflict, it's time to find a new browser.

Making money is easy. First you start with some special cotton-based paper...

Google pays the Mozilla Foundation something like $300 million/yr for being the default search engine in Firefox. We know that Google mines every byte of data that passed through their servers. We don't know everything they do with it, but it's made them hundreds of billions of dollars. How is putting a few ads on the default home page worse than that? It's easy as pie to change your default home page, as easy as using a different search engine.

The one that pays the piper calls the tune, and advertisers are more willing to pony up the cash than users. We're not the real customers of anything that is ad-supported, we're part of the product.

Firefox is open source so it should be easy to strip the advertisement code and rebuild the binaries from source. I bet patches will be available so there will be no need to look for the code ourselves.

TC, I've given up caring. Unless I encrypt everything I send (and even then, someone, somewere is going to be able to break it), my traffic is completely open to those that want to see it......

If Google or anybody wants to mine my transmissions, it's a waste of time as far as I am concerned simply because I still retain an ultimate power: I can choose or not choose to accept any offer that is made. The best moves I ever made were to deliberately and step by step, remove all the unwanted advert topics from Amazon other than a very special subset I do remain interested in - it cut their emails down by over 95%.

This is only on the "new tab" page. These ads don't appear when you open the browser. They appear when you make a new blank page. They only continue to appear until your browsing history replaces all the preset links on the "new tab" page with sites from your history. It doesn't seem like a really big deal. I may prefer to have blank boxes until my history populates them, but some would actually like there to be some preset choices.

> Making money is easy. First you start with some special cotton-based paper... Here in BC, you start off with a roll of plastic :D

I like Ridcully's tactic... and outlook on the situation.

Personally I have no issues with ad supported software as long as it isn't too in your face. Like Tuxchick said, they have to make money.

When you search in Google the first few results are adverts. Doesn't stop people using it.

How about a little routine in every FireFox browser that makes a "nice" process to generate Bitcoin?

Firefox could, literally, make them money. :^)

> When you search in Google the first few results are adverts. Doesn't stop people using it.

It stops some people, and those who do use it do so voluntarily. Firefox doesn't appear to be giving the user the option of turning it off.

It's as simple as adding:

127.0.0.1 http://www.google.com

to /etc/hosts.