[user812]

The fundamental question is who decides. Ideally the browser is the product, but not the user. For that, the browser needs to solve the question of the flow of money.

Using Firefox makes you the product, because Mozilla monetizes you with selling you to Google. That is not a browser that "puts you first" or promotes the "open culture of the internet".

Giving people the ability to chose whether they want to participate in the monetization makes Brave more of a browser that puts "you first".

Besides that, Mozilla is basically a company, and their non-profit organization is basically a fig leaf. Even if you don't agree with this assumption, the browser is as commercialiced as any other project, as proven by Pocket, Google search partnership and Amazon affiliate links.

The Brave browser also doesn't claim this is "what the internet is about". On the contrary, the default settings in Brave make the Web essentially non-commercial and ad-free.

Finally and philosophically, there is no collective "we" you talk about, only users who are free to chose from a variety of browsers and products.

Other than that, there is definitely some form of irony in the fact that the people on brave.com wear a cap with a corporate logo, but are implied as being free from corporate influence. The message would be more consistent if there were no logo on the cap, and one could argue this implies that Brave is at best a transition towards a better state.

[bad_user]

> Firefox makes you the product, because Mozilla monetizes you with selling you to Google

That's hyperbole.

Firefox was the first browser that made switching search engines or dealing with multiple search engines easy. Firefox was also the first to have usable add-ons for blocking invasive ads and trackers, always promoted as the best add-ons in their addons.mozilla.org. The pro-privacy culture has basically grown on top of Firefox.

I'm using DuckDuckGo on Firefox and I installed it on iOS too, because it makes it easier than Safari to deal with multiple search engines.

As for Google Search, people forget that Google Search is first and foremost the best search engine and most people expect nothing less. And when they tried switching that default to others, people bitched and moaned about it. Google is so far ahead of everybody that for the general population it has no competition. The same reason for why Apple cannot replace Google's Search and cannot build their own search engine, so might as well make some money off of Google.

This is not selling the users to Google, this is simply providing a good user experience by default. If anybody wants to help and fight this, then the first step would be to provide a better search engine. Don't get me wrong, I like DuckDuckGo and will keep using it due to privacy concerns, but for many searches, especially local ones, the difference is night and day. Not to mention that DDG is also dependent on Microsoft's Bing and it will be a sad day when Microsoft closes access to its APIs. Because apparently it's pretty expensive to have your own web crawler ;-)

[user812]

What would Google do if Mozilla blocks all ads browser wide by default? (Which they can't do adhoc because it is probably explitically forbidden in their contract with Google)

The answer will give you a clue about the question who is the product.

Irregardless of semantics, Mozilla is entirely dependent on the privacy invading ad system.

Everyone knows that default settings matter, as around 80% of users never change much in their browsers, and it is this majority user base which forms the foundation for the contracts between browser makers and search engines.

[bad_user]

Irrelevant.

If Mozilla blocks ads by default, the question isn't what Google would do, the far better question is what will the publishers do.

If big publishers start to block Firefox's User-Agent, it's game over for Firefox. And yes, publishers are increasingly more aggressive in blocking users with ad-blockers installed.

Or did you think that the content producers will simply stand by while their revenue vanishes?

Nope, not going to happen and it will be getting worse, before it gets better. Ad-block users have been ignored only because they were a minority.

Want to bet that they'll try extending the DRM support to the HTML content itself and thus make it illegal to block ads? It's going to be fun.

[consto]

Deciding who can see what content based upon User Agent is nothing new, it's why User Agents are such a mess in the first place.

[Yoric]

> What would Google do if Mozilla blocks all ads browser wide by default? (Which they can't do adhoc because it is probably explitically forbidden in their contract with Google)

Just a few things:

1. Mozilla did explore this a number of years ago, concluded that

  a. if you block all ads, you break the revenue of pretty much the entire web, so that's probably not something you want;

  b. if you block all ads, you break loading of many websites, and that's not something an established browser can afford to do;

  c. if you do either, websites are just going to block your browser;

2. Mozilla actually came up with ideas for blocking all ads without breaking the web, decided that there were too many variables, too many ways to break everything by accident, and did not pursue this plan – however, as far as I can tell, Brave either reinvented the same ideas or picked up that plan.

Also, to answer your specific question, Google pre-emptively reacted against any attempt of Mozilla by launching Chrome. If you recall, they launched Chrome pretty much because they could not buy Mozilla.

> Irregardless of semantics, Mozilla is entirely dependent on the privacy invading ad system.

While we live in a world where ads = privacy invasion, this doesn't have to be the case. If you look at recent versions of Firefox and ongoing projects, Mozilla has stepped up on privacy protection and keeps doing so.

Again, it's hard to do without breaking the web. But some can be done, one step at a time, and Mozilla is working on it.

> Everyone knows that default settings matter, as around 80% of users never change much in their browsers, and it is this majority user base which forms the foundation for the contracts between browser makers and search engines.

True.

[user812]

Thanks for the explanation.

I don't blame or rate Mozilla, I was just trying to explain why they are unable to move, due to their ties to Google.

I don't think it's a good or bad thing, but it's the reality.

Mozilla is probably trying it's best under this conditions.

Besides that, solving technical problems is possible if there is the will to do it.

[Yoric]

> Besides that, solving technical problems is possible if there is the will to do it.

Right now, the problem is that it breaks either the web or the browser.

The alternative currently being pursued by Mozilla (and the W3C) is WebPayments, which should pave the way for websites paid for by micropayments, rather than ads.

[user812]

Until Mozilla is free from Google et al., all "problems" related to blocking ads are merely theoretical.

[mverwijs]

Yet it was (the company) Opera that first included adblocking by default.

[simias]

>Ideally the browser is the product

I disagree. I don't have anything against paid software but it's not the only possibility, a lot of the software I use are open source projects maintained by volunteers, not products. I ideologically refuse to consider that every piece of software is a product.

Now regarding Firefox things are not really clear cut, Mozilla is effectively non-profit but clearly their well being (and the salaries of the people working for it) clearly revolves around their browser having a decent market share. The whole "selling you to Google" stems from that.

[oblio]

> I ideologically refuse to consider that every piece of software is a product.

1. Who pays for the hosting? How do they pay for it?

2. Who pays for the site development? How do they pay for it?

3. Who pays for the site content? How do they pay for it?

The vast majority of sites out there are commercial products, in some forms or another. Even Wikipedia is, they're periodically begging for money.

Since we have this problem that running websites costs money, how are they going to pay for it? The ad model is quite reviled by techies. What's the alternative? How do websites make money to keep running?

[simias]

I don't understand, are you talking about code hosting or simply just considering web services?

Regardless, hosting is a separate issue. You have open source projects who provide a piece of software that you're free to host yourself or pay somebody else to host for you. See for instance the Roundcube webmail.

It's similar to how I need to buy a computer to be able to run Emacs, that doesn't mean that Emacs itself is a product. Of course many web services are actual products and you pay for both the development and the hosting.

Here we're talking about a web browser though so the point is moot anyway.

[pmontra]

Software is not only web sites/applications. In that very same application domain there are pieces of software like the Apache http server. AFAIK the Apache Foundation is founded by donations. Is httpd a product? They're not selling it and apparently they don't sell data about its users.

[oblio]

Ok, but my questions haven't been answered: how do we pay for websites?

There's the ad model, which people don't like, the subscription model, which almost no one uses (it's used successfully for webapps, but not by websites, there's maybe 10 or 20 successful subscription based sites in the billions of sites out there).

What else is there that doesn't involve somehow turning the browser into a product?

[simias]

Putting ads in your websites doesn't turn your browser into a product any more than putting ad into a PDF turns your PDF reader into a product or getting robocall turn your phone into (more of) a product. That's completely orthogonal.

Well in the case of Brave that might not be completely true because they have this whole agenda regarding ads but that's specific to this particular browser, not a fundamental aspect of web browsing technology. ELinks is not a product because you can use it to view ads for instance.

[oblio]

Putting ads in my websites turns me into a product.

We need to turn this whole ecosystem on its head. How do we do that? I'd rather have the browser manage payments to the sites I use based on some usage statistics, but in this case, we still need some sort of payment system, probably centralized. It might not be turning the actual browser into a product, but it does make it put it awfully close to one.

[user812]

Everything is a product when you define product as "that which is produced", which is the coherent and 'materialized' output of human activity.

[pjmlp]

I bet your work doesn't depend on selling software unless you are using two measures here.

[LiterallyDoge]

Firefox seems like they respect the user to me. Putting Google, the most popular search engine, as the clearly visible and easily changeable default makes the most sense, in my head.

[proofbygazing]

> Using Firefox makes you the product, because Mozilla monetizes you with selling you to Google. That is not a browser that "puts you first" or promotes the "open culture of the internet".

Why not? The idea of being targeted with more effective ads based on what I look at is microscopic when compared to the things that got me excited about the internet originally, and it doesn't even seem to contradict them.

[ahartmetz]

Without rejecting ads outright (which is IMO a valid position), it's hard to argue against ads based on site content, anonymous user statistics, or terms of the current search.

The most objectionable thing is tracking specific users, which results in a lot of data that can be abused, and further power imbalance of companies and states vs. citizens. The latter clearly does contradict early internet ideals.