Despite its emphasis on protecting privacy, Mozilla is moving towards integrating ads, backed by new infrastructure from their acquisition of Anonym. They claim this will maintain a balance between user control and online ad economics, using privacy-preserving tech. However, this shift appears to contradict Mozilla’s earlier stance of protecting users from invasive advertising practices, and it signals a change in their priorities.
But that isn’t the balance that’s being struck. Mozilla is trying to balance between useful services being available for free and people’s right to privacy. If you’re using any websites that has staff employed, they’re more likely than not being paid for by advertising.
The model for most the content on the internet doesn’t work without advertising. The people who are “zero tolerance” on ads are going to prevent possible compromises from being made and just encourage an arms race. I don’t think we win that arms race, we get more insidious forms of tracking and brazen advertising.
Whatever compromise anyone tries to come up with will be ignored and exploited as hard as advertisers possibly can.
A compromise that actually works would depend on advertisers actually complying. The advertisers that do will be vastly outnumbered by the advertisers that don’t.
So we’re getting the arms race either way.
Honestly, despite the crypto, good on Brave browser for trying to subvert the advertising model by providing an actual monetization alternative
What does this even mean? Brave didnt find something to “subvert the advertising model”, they have a subscription lol. Mozilla is trying to keep its browser free and safe, especially now that it’s losing its billion dollar google funding.
Brave can make micro payments to content creators based on the number of views to the site, directly supporting content creators without ads or the need to join the patreon for each creator. It’s a fully optional system, off by default but prompted upon opening the browser for the first time. It’s a cool idea but they kind of spoiled it by making it be a crypto wallet with ads to earn the crypto.
Also, Brave doesn’t have a subscription…?
You haven’t heard about the Brave ads that let you slowly accumulate tokens that you can then use to tip creators or websites? I’m not saying it was a good plan, or an ethical plan, but it was… You know, something.
Unlike what Mozilla did, Brave didn’t enable this by default, but they heavily marketed it as a feature.
If Mozilla implemented some kind of tipping system, that could be interesting. Apparently, such a system already could exist under GNU Taler too.
brave also used it to scam people by taking tips for creators who weren’t on the platform. if the creator never signed up, they kept that money.
and they had an adblocker that replaced ads with their own, making the browser money instead of the site.
they have actively contributed to making the web worse. saying “at least they’re doing something” is like praising the hard work and entrepreneurial spirit of a mugger.
You’re 100% right about Brave being scummy.
And I hope my point didn’t come across as a defensd of Brave, but rather, “how is it that Mozilla is doing this thing in a worse way than a company that is infamously disreputable?”
https://brave.com/blog/mozilla-ppa/
Chromium shill
Lol chill, I use Firefox. I can still call out good things in other browsers even if I don’t like the browser as a whole for other reasons. None of what I said there was in support of chromium.