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0 pointscallahad8y ago0 comments

That tweet sounds like doublespeak, but Directory Tiles really did have some genuinely good ideas mixed in with the bad.

I don't know how far we got with it, but one of the ideas was to serve a generic bundle of ads, and then select which ones to display locally, based on an entirely private, client-side analysis of the browser's history. Now, that probably shouldn't have been on the new tab page, and probably not in Firefox at all, but if ads are going to be the way we fund the Internet, then that sounded like the best possible outcome: better targeting without remote tracking. Heck, even Brave ran with the idea for a while: https://brave.com/about-ad-replacement/

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bigbugbag8y ago

The only good ideas about tiles were lifted of opera and better implemented in extensions.

Serving ads is never a good idea, and no, ads are not the way we fund the Internet, commercial ads is what is destroying the WWW and the Internet.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/adver...

https://thenextweb.com/eu/2017/06/09/pirate-bay-founder-weve...

Simon_says8y ago

I've recently switched to a browser that doesn't fund itself through ads. It's not an iron law of the universe that the Internet needs ads to function.

revelation8y ago

You think because your code is running native you can spy on me better for ad purposes, and that's a feature? That is just tone-deaf.

smacktoward8y ago

The whole point is that they weren't spying on you. The observations of your behavior were made entirely client-side, in your browser, and never passed back to Mozilla or anybody else.

Defining that as "spying" strikes me as a big reach. It's no more spying than (say) Windows observing what programs you use most and adding shortcuts to them in your Start menu. Software adapting itself to fit the user better is a good thing, as long as it's done in a way that respects the user's privacy, which keeping the data 100% local absolutely does.

dang8y ago

This breaks the HN guidelines. Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: we've had to warn you a lot. Continuing to break the guidelines ends in bannage, so please clean up your act.

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