IAB Urges People To Stop "Mozilla From Hijacking the Internet" 499
hypnosec writes "In its latest attempt to stop Mozilla from going ahead with its proposed default blocking of third-party cookies in Firefox, the Interactive Advertising Bureau took out a full page ad urging users to stop 'Mozilla from hijacking the Internet.' Through the advert, IAB has claimed that the Firefox maker wants to be the 'judge and jury' when it comes to business models on the web. According to the IAB, Mozilla wants to eliminate the cookies which enable online advertisers to reach the right audience. IAB notes that 'If cookies are eliminated, it is clear to us that consumers will get a less relevant and diverse Internet experience.'"
Getting rid of cookies is okay (Score:2, Informative)
Netscape created this cookie mess, it's about time someoen took a stand against cookies and Mozilla is the perfect organization.
Get this advertisers: no one wants a personalized visit to pages on the web.
Ads went from text only, to static banners, to animated banners, to Flash-based banners, to multiple banners, to inline graphics, and now with HTML 5 they can even bypass a browser's setting not to show graphics or animations.
Most don't want personalized ads, in fact, most hate ads.
What is the IAB? (Score:0, Informative)
Note that the IAB is the Interactive Advertising Bureau [wikipedia.org], so there is your grain of salt.
Re:Excellent (Score:5, Informative)
Why was I forced to google to find out wtf the IAB is? I'm not an MBA and have nothing to do with the ad industry, and I imagine few other slashdotters do either. It's the international Advertising Bureau.
BTW, good mods on the parent post. The IAB is afraid of us taking OUR internet BACK.
Re:fud (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, there you go. The selfish knee-jerk ad-hating with no awareness of reality or real business.
Yes, the ad-supported model isn't ideal, and has been exploited by bad people. But the reality is that you get free content where the percentage of pixels on a page devoted to ads is typically much less than the percentage minutes of ads on free OTA television, and less than the percentage of inches in a $4.95 magazine. Oh boo-hoo.
If you bother to take a deep dive into reality, there are tens-of-thousands of long-tail websites that rely on advertising to remain online and perhaps even pay salaries. They also pay hosting providers who happen have people working for them. Those hosting providers also have their own vendors, and so on. The economic ecosystem extends far beyond that website on which you run ad-blocker and steal their content by breaking the social contract of using their bandwidth and consuming their content in exchange for seeing their ads.
Yeah, this won't be a popular response. But it's true.
Re:Excellent (Score:5, Informative)
Wait a minute. A couple of days ago the kerfluffle on Slashdot was that Mozilla removed the "disable JavaScript" option from the options screen of Firefox 23.0. I thought that made them evil. Now, they're going to disable third party cookies, so now that makes them good again? I'm so confused.
Mozilla removed the menu option to disable Javascript. They aren't removing the option to disable/enable 3rd party cookies, they're just changing what it's set to when you first install it.
Personally, I run NoScript so the Java thing doesn't affect me, and already turn off 3rd party cookies.
Re:Excellent (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Excellent (Score:5, Informative)
Blocking third-party cookies doesn't stop companies from including advertisements on web pages. What it does is stop companies from being able to collect data that tells them "From our tracking cookies, you went to sites X, Y, and Z, so we should show you advertisements for this group of products because we think that you will be more likely to respond to them than advertisements from that group of products.
Re:Excellent (Score:5, Informative)
Hopefully no-one. When I started surfing there weren't any ads... NONE. Pages were made by people that cared about the topics they were writing about. And this isn't going to stop ads... it just going to stop them from tracking you. The add can still be there, you can still click on it if you want their crap.
Re:Excellent (Score:3, Informative)
You seem to be confused.
Mozilla isn't making ads go away. They will remain. However, they will no longer be invasive or able to track you. Ads will pay for content like they always have.
Re:Self-regulatory (Score:5, Informative)
You have either not used Safari much, or you haven't looked closely at it.
Do you know how effective the blocking of 3rd party cookies in Safari is? It isn't. It's useless because people found ways to circumvent it quite a while ago and it's never been fixed.
Don't believe me? Clear all of the cookies from Safari, and then visit one website of your choosing. Now, count the number of cookies you have. You'll notice you've got several 3rd party cookies that failed to be blocked.
So, no Safari doesn't already do this -- they have a setting which looks like it should, but my direct experience with it is that it is completely ineffective at doing any blocking of 3rd party stuff.
I wish it did work better, but the reality is, it doesn't. In fact, it doesn't appear to work at all.
Re:Excellent (Score:4, Informative)
Most savvy users use noscript in firefox to control who is allowed to run javascript, rather than disabling it entirely and breaking most modern websites.
Re: fud (Score:4, Informative)
Says the commenter on the ad supported web site.
you mean the same site that lets me turn off advertising by clicking a check box on the home page?
Re:fud (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, I think it's worth remembering that this move is not about ad-blocking, just third-party-cookie blocking. Mozilla is not going to ship AdBlock by default or anything. A site can show whatever ads they want, 1st-party or 3rd-party. They can also store 1st-party cookies. What will no longer work by default is 3rd-party cookies, because they are used to track people around the 'net as they browse between different sites, which lets companies build centralized dossiers of people's browsing habits. Those are used for multiple things, and ad-targeting is only one of them. Some of the companies also act as data brokers and outright sell the collected profiles, without anonymizing the data.
Re:fud (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with this is that changing something that big will invariably break plenty of websites. And the only ones to suffer from this will be Mozilla as people will quickly learn to go through other browsers because "Mozilla is b0rked".
This option exists right now, but isn't the default. Many Firefox users set this option right now and don't have any issues.
If you need a third-party cookie for your website to function correctly, you're doing it wrong.