Even though not technically a rug pull, this is a rug pull. The end of real growth in the tech sector turned the internet into a cesspool. Not happy with stable returns these companies repositioned themselves as cybercriminals. They abused source contributors, collected donations as seed capital for launching for profits, and stole the data of billions. Taking inspirations from the villains in their beloved cyberpunk novels, they crafted a very real dystopia.

I tried to read the blog post but doublespeak and marketing crap gives me an insta-migraine so I checked Reddit.

Mozilla now doubling down on ads in Firefox

Did whoever wrote that pile of marketing gibberish actually say a goddamned thing?

Oh, they said something. They said they believe it’s right and proper for advertisers to intrude into our lives and steal our time and attention, and they’re going to help them do that while claiming to be the “good guys” by inventing some nonsense that “protects privacy” a little more. Never mind that everyone’s main objection to ads isn’t that they compromise our privacy; we object to ads because they intrude on our experience, waste our time and disrupt our ability to focus on the content we seek.

The obvious corollary to this is that ad blockers will eventually be crippled, just like on Chrome, no doubt with the same “security” excuse.

From another thread

"Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers" - founders of Google in 1998.

But the siren song of money always wins.

Pack it up boyz, goin' back to books now. The internet is a fuck and everything will be an ad. uBlock Origin in all of its zeal and strength may not be enough to protect us from the endless and ceaseless onslaught that will be the internet to come.

it's so fucking over changing my username immediately

Welp, time to start figuring out how to use Gemini (or alternatively RETVRN to Gopher).

In reality, the best parts of the web are (and have always been) text-based. I mean, obviously we have lots of fun with our emotes on Hexbear, but the essential feature is being able to communicate with each other via text. My favorite little corners of the internet are inevitably someone's niche blog or fansite which is almost 100% text-based. And, pivot-to-video be damned, the most effective and useful technical tutorials are text-based, especially since they can be easily updated and maintained.

This is why Mothra is the most advanced web browser. The only one to have a fully integrated "moth mode"! However, for us mere mortals I am excited about the ladybird browser as an alternative (in a couple of years most likely).

Mozilla continues to do everything but make sure the product that people care about actually fucking works. Layoffs, investments in shit no one will care about (VPN, Pocket, AI etc.), and now wanting to become an ad company? Librewolf is a nice fork and all but the web fucking sucks now.

S P O N S O R E D L I N K S B Y P O C K E T

Also, yes Mozilla, I'm sure the reason people aren't switching to Firefox is because it lacks good advertising support.

100%, Google is leaning into Mozilla to make this happen.

Fuck the ad-based Internet right back to the putrid hole it came from. The second uBO stops working is the second I stop using that browser.

I wasn't always this way. I used to not block ads to help support creators. I used to have ads on my website 15 years ago. And for this transgression, I sincerely apologize.

Now I make money at my day job and everything I post, which is a substantial amount, is free and untracked (except for 5 days of web server request logs).

Sure I can't write full time with this model, but we're billions of people. If we each just made 10 minutes of good content a week, that's more than we can possibly consume.

And I'd rather have more good content than I could possibly read than the mountains of AI-generated SEO tripe that advertising brings.

Scratching one more company off the very very short list of software corps I think I could work at without experiencing total self-loathing

:(

Everything on the Internet has to choose between forcing users to watch shitty ads, or selling white labeled shit from alibaba 😮‍💨

Damn this website just got me onto Firefox like a year ago

This corporate bullshit is so difficult to read. I hate it.

The fucking nerve to say any of these Ad funded services are free or even services (does someone robbing you count as a service?) is enough to justify using guerilla warfare against these fuckers. We need to start documenting, sniffing out, exploiting, and flooding the APIs of all these ad driven sites till they become unusable. Just claim we are doing AI research. If I have to switch to command line web browsing, webscraping, and undocumented API calls via scripting to not see ads then so fucking be it.

Everyimw I think about Mozilla I get sad. Like they'll just make a random feature like pocket so that /maybe/ the CEO can get paid more than several million dollars instead of spending that salary on actually making the browser better

fucking betrayed i just finally dumped chrome completely

next i'll finally move to linux and somehow every linux build will be bought up by microsoft or something

the web is dead. long live the web.

I guess it's time to move to another browser very soon.

I understand that a high quality web browser in this modern age is really expensive to develop. Mozilla, which is like an ant compared to the gorillas called Apple and Google, needs to find the funds it takes to develop that browser and pay the people who work on it.

That said, it's really the bigger picture here that's totally fucked. The web browser is supposed to be a tool for the user, not for the advertiser. I don't give a shit about someone else's advertising, or their ability to reach me and to target my attention span. But in many ways the advertising model props up the entirety of the modern web as we know it. It's kind of a condemnation of the entire ecosystem, but I don't know if anyone has thought of a sustainable alternative model.

Further, I view it as a kind of condemnation of the modern WWW that web browsers must be so complex. It feels like half of the development of web browsers is just based on supporting advertising in some way or another, and making sure the 700 ad scripts that run when you load a page don't bring the browser to a screeching halt (a form of supporting advertising). Another 25% is dedicated to making sure crap web frameworks like React run well.

There is real innovation in the web browsing space. Wasm, WebGL, and so on. The fact that you can play a fully interactive 3d game in your web browser without having to download and run it locally is impressive. But is it all really worthwhile?

The worst thing is I don't have an answer to any of this. I realize most of this stuff is extremely dumb and pointless, but it feels like the Internet has been totally overwhelmed with AI spam, shitty websites that necessitate javascript to even view them for basic information, and endless ad and user tracking. This announcement is especially rich because Firefox is still both better than Chrome & basically second class compared to it. Many web devs (or their employers) treat Chrome like the standard and Firefox as an afterthought. I just imagine now Mozilla taking that beautiful little fire fox and caging it and poking it with cattle prods to see if it can find new ways to make its ember glow.

I'd love for an alternative to the WWW to spring up, and you'd think something like the Gemini protocol could be it. But if you've ever used it, you'd realize it kind of sucks to use. A website like hexbear wouldn't even be possible on Gemini. It had its heart in the right place but doesn't meet the moment, and IMO never will.

we may have to start making excuses for the lack of terror

So like, which fork is good?

Nonono they’re pinky promising that they’re gonna be “””ethical””” so it’s completely ok now or something

I guess we've got to hope that the LadyBird project succeeds and we get a usable browser sometime before 2030 https://ladybird.org/