| >"Simply being a google product" which, like all Google products, are constantly phoning home and mining data across all your web behaviors. Recent changes are hostile towards privacy. Worse still, for mobile devices they don't allow add-ons given it will impact mobile ad-revenue, all the while the OS itself is mining user data. Disabling the data-mining is nearly impossible. Google makes tens of billions off this data also. Firefox, on the other hand, is injecting an text ad to the default tab, but clearly it's not very targeted. It appears they're doing the equivalent of affiliate marketing, where they'll take a commission if they drive a sale. The lack of targeting will mean the effectiveness will be questionable. Unlike Google, Firefox is also not in the data-hoarding business and this is a feature that's trival to disable. They just screwed up by not disclosing this test to their (privacy concious) users. Firefox gets a lot of revenue by allowing Google to be the default search engine and they will need to figure out monetization strategies to get away from that model. Standing up their own infrastructure to monetize their users without selling them out to a competitor is a good starting point. |