Mozilla has announced that it’s dropping a program everyone but Mozilla seemed to realize was a bad idea from the start. In a blog posting on Friday, the organization’s vice president of content services, Darren Herman, wrote that Mozilla has “made the decision to stop advertising in Firefox through the Tiles experiment in order to focus on content discovery.” The much disliked sponsored tiles won’t immediately disappear from users’ browsers, however. “Naturally, we will fulfill our current commitments as we wind down this experiment over the next few months.”
Posts published in “Browsers”
Way back when, before Google got into the software biz with stuff like Android and Chrome, Firefox cut a deal with the ad-agency-masquerading-as-a-search-engine which probably made Mozilla’s browser the most well funded open source project outside of Linux. The deal — simply to make Google the default search engine in Firefox — was a no brainer, not only for Google and Mozilla but also for the browser’s user base, as most users would most likely choose Google anyway, since Google then, like today, was overwhelmingly the most used search engine in the solar system.
The deal created a river of money flowing into Mozilla’s coffers — $138 million in 2011 alone — allowing rapid development of Firefox, proper maintenance of Thunderbird and Bugzilla, and the creation of Firefox OS. Although there was a bit of grumbling from some FOSSers who would’ve preferred a default search engine that was more respectful of user privacy rights, the deal was generally seen as a good thing for the free and open source community.
FOSS Week in Review
While Larry’s on the West Coast, where it’s never too hot nor too cold, on a brief educational sabbatical, burning the midnight oil while cramming to increase his Linux skills, I’m in North Carolina where it’s not often too cold — at least in my part of the state — but where in summer heat and humidity conspire to make life miserable for homo sapiens. Thankfully, September has arrived, so we’re hopeful that the temps and moisture will soon drop to tolerable levels.
Meanwhile, in the world of free tech…
Elementary OS steps up: Not quite four months after the release of version 0.3.0 Freya, the folks at elementary have announced the release of 0.3.1. Although this is officially a minor point release, it does come packed with changes that should make it a must-install for elementary users. Included in the update: Version 14.04.3 of Ubuntu’s Hardware Enablement stack, improvements to the interface in Files, and the latest and greatest version 0.5.11 of the Midori browser.
FOSS Week in Review
Well, as they say, TGIF: Thank God it’s FOSS. As folks get settled in this weekend in beautiful downtown Orem, Utah, at OpenWest — the expo formerly known at one time as the Utah Open Source Conference — here’s a look at some of the things that transpired during the course of the week.
Hello, Rafaela: According to a Softpedia article, Linux Mint announced this week that it will release its next version of Linux Mint 17 — 17.2, which was given the release name Rafaela. Not much else was released in the way of information, other than the release candidate would be available next month, as well as lead developer Clement Lefebvre saying that Linux Mint 18 will be available sometime next year.
FOSS Week in Review
Unfortunately, Larry’s a little under the weather today, so here I am…
Put that on your Chromebook and run it
We hear from Softpedia that Chromixium is just about ready for prime time. Well, that may be jumping the gun a little bit. What we really hear is that the distro has now gone from beta to release candidate, and that a honest-to-goodness 1.0 stable version is virtually just around the corner. Trouble is: we’re not sure yet just how far away we are from that corner. Shouldn’t be too far, however. The beta version was only released in February, so these developers aren’t wasting time.
Linux Questions — the place you go where you really need a Linux or FOSS question answered because, well, most of the smart FOSS folks are there answering them — released the results of its Members Choice Awards for 2015.
So when the membership of LQ speaks — or at least votes on FOSS programs — you should probably listen. Don’t take my word for it: Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols thinks so, too.
There were some expected results: For example, LibreOffice wins the Office Suite category by a ton, garnering 86 percent of the vote. To break this down, that’s nearly 9 in 10 folks favoring LibreOffice to the second-place finisher, Apache OpenOffice, and the others.
Same with categories like Browser of the Year — Firefox, need we say more? — with the blazing vulpini taking 57 percent in a crowded field. Same for Android, the Mobile Distribution of the Year which finished 40 percentage points ahead of the second-place finisher. Even vim, at 30 percent in a crowded field, heads up the Text Editor category with three times the votes of Emacs.
The Best of Ken Starks
We were fortunate enough to have a donated space in the expo hall at Texas Linux Fest this year. Carolyn Hulsey, who is one of our directors, manned the Reglue booth for us on Friday. She jokingly asked if I wanted her to be our “booth babe” this year. She was, indeed, all of that.
What was truly humbling was the number of people who recognized us without introduction. When someone approached, I stood and extended my hand in greeting. More often than I would have thought, the person shook my hand and told me, “I know who you are.”
Wow…just wow.
It was one of these people who later pursued a three day email discussion with me on free-as-in-beer software. And yeah…we all know the benefits. But what of the negatives?
His take on Linux distributions?
“Anyone paying for a Linux distribution is putting their money down the drain. What they should be doing is putting that money into the hands of a free distro developer so (s)he can make their distribution better.”
Editor’s note: As Ken Starks takes time to heal from his surgery, FOSS Force will run “The Best of Ken Starks” on Tuesday’s in his absence. These will feature some of the best articles from his Blog of HeliOS.
FOSS Week in Review
Most of you know already that my fellow FOSS Force correspondent — and my good friend — Ken Starks went under the surgical knife this week, as fellow FOSS Forcer Christine Hall reported yesterday. The short version of this story is that Ken’s surgery was successful — as successful as having your larynx and lymph nodes removed can be — and he is resting well in the intensive care unit.
My appeal is this: After reading Ken’s missives above, for those who are well-versed in text-to-speech software, I hope you can provide insights for options for Ken going forward. Go ahead and leave them in the comments below.
And Ken: Get well, soon. The Astros are making some moves in the free-agent market, and if you’re well enough in mid-May, the two-game Giants-Astros series at Minute Maid is on me.
Folks who follow news about FOSS, OSS and Linux who also watch the “talking heads” shows the TV networks serve up on Sunday mornings might be excused for not noting that David Boies, the lawyer speaking for Sony on this week’s “Meet the Press,” has on several occasions been involved in news stories affecting Linux. Over the years, he’s played the role of both friend and foe, but it’s been a while since his and the FOSS world’s paths have crossed.
Photograph by Doc Searls
There have been rumblings for some time now about Google’s search contract with Mozilla coming to an end this year. For ten years, the search giant has been the default go-to when it comes to search on Firefox, a deal which has supplied more than 80 percent of the browser’s funding. There’s been talk that Google or Mozilla wasn’t interested in renewing the deal, either because Firefox competes directly with Google’s Chrome browser or because the folks at Mozilla are unhappy with Google’s open web policies, depending on who’s doing the talking.
A week ago, in an attempt to make up for this projected loss of revenue, Mozilla began displaying advertising tiles in new tab pages on Firefox in newer versions of the browser. The first two sponsors, according to a Mozilla blog post, are CVS Health and Booking.com. Then yesterday, in another blog post, the organization announced that it’s signed a five year deal with Yahoo to make the once uber popular, still somewhat popular web portal the default for searches in Firefox.