People who adopt Firefox as a replacement for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer think they are turning aside a monopolist in favor of a more secure and open browsing alternative. It may not be as open as we think.

I missed a little bit of semantic nuance back in May, when Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler commented on my speculation that Mozilla could be pressured via Google by a company like Verizon. As Asa commented, and I’ve emphasized in bold:

Can Google (or any one, for that matter) effectively pressure Mozilla to change course on a Mozilla Labs project that they’re not directly involved with? Absolutely not.

Now look at the context Soghoian brings to the Mozilla and Google topic, and how Dotzler’s choice of words appear to fit five months later.

"The close relationship between Google and Mozilla leads to a number of serious conflicts of interest. The end result is that users’ online privacy and security take a backseat to the protection of Google’s revenue streams," Soghoian wrote at CNet.

One conflict of interest comes in the form of ad blocking, the other in phishing toolbars. Soghoian wondered why Firefox’s developers haven’t integrated two of the most popular add-ons for the browser, AdBlock Plus (and the Filterset G Updater), and CustomizeGoogle.

"Even if Mozilla were contractually free to include anti-Google-tracking features, it would not be a wise move, business-wise. After all, it is not too smart to anger the company that provides more than 85 percent of your financing," said Soghoian.

His phishing assessment shows an even greater concern for Firefox users. A documented flaw in gmodules.com, as found by well-known security researcher RSnake, has been dismissed by Google as a feature, not a bug.

It’s funny when Jimmy Neutron calls his robotic dog Goddard’s ability to explode a feature instead of a bug. On the Internet, the joke isn’t quite as laugh-inducing.

Soghoian charged, based on RSnake’s experience and findings, that no anti-phishing product will enter the market with a Google domain on a blacklist. Google domains won’t be placed in the blacklist it maintains for Firefox, either.

The problem comes not just from the revenue stream Google provides to Firefox, most recently $56 million in 2006. Soghoian noted how Googlers spend a lot of time building Firefox, including lead developer Ben Goodger, a Google software engineer. (UPDATE: Asa Dotzler said in an email neither Goodger nor other Google staffers have been major contributors in some time.)

Google contributes time, people, and money, the three essential parts of any project. Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker has claimed Mozilla can quit Google any time it wants.

If they really want to keep the trust of Firefox users, it may be time for a divorce. It won’t be as easy as driving through a quickie divorce shop in Reno, but for the long term good of the project it may be necessary.

Unless, of course, they really can’t leave $56 million and scads of talented Googler developer time on the table.

Firefox Causes AdSense Woes

The Mozilla Foundation released version 2.0.0.5 of Firefox to correct an input handler problem. This update proved troublesome for a number AdSense publishers.

Google’s Rajiv Sud said on the AdSense blog Firefox users were unable to log in to their accounts. Some publishers would see a sign-up form instead of their normal login page.

Blame for the problem fell upon a widely-used Firefox plugin, according to Sud:

After a little digging and some testing, we’ve found that Adblock Plus, an add-on that sometimes gets installed with Firefox, can prevent you from accessing your account on the AdSense homepage. Our recommendation is to clear your cache and cookies and turn off the Adblock software before trying to log in at www.google.com/adsense.

Adblock Plus allows its users to shut off ads that appear on web pages. We find it amusing to note that people who earn money through AdSense ads also employ Adblock Plus to keep from seeing ads on websites.

Text advertising still gets attention, as evidenced by ClickZ’s reference to a Nielsen Norman Group study on the topic. (Nielsen as in usability guru Jakob Nielsen, not the ratings service Google has on schedule to crush in the future.) Graphical ads haven’t been noticed nearly as well.

Google’s twelve-digit market capitalization may have been a hint too. Or the popularity of the Adblock extension in Firefox. Or Opera’s new content blocker.

Internet users have been focusing more on the content and less on the ads, if at all. Banner ads get no love from those users. ClickZ cited Nielsen Norman Group research director Kara Pernice Coyne, who said text and contrasting colors in a graphical ad kept simple is less likely to be disregarded.

The Internet Advertising Bureau dismissed the study out of hand:

Stuart also cited the cost effectiveness of online advertising. He didn’t mention another aspect of it that give online ads an edge over their big media commercial counterparts; online advertising can be measured to see just how effective it is for the marketer.

—
Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Although the Gmail Chat functionality has not been rolled out yet to all of Gmail’s users, some who browse with Firefox and employ the AdBlock extension have evidently been experiencing difficulties. Google added an entry to its Gmail help that addressed the problem.

Google said in its online help topics that it is working on the problem, but for now recommends disabling AdBlock and clearing the browser’s cache. Should that not resolve the matter, Google advises another course of action:

AdBlock acts as a utility that halts the very service that has made Google a rich company – contextual advertising. Users who take the step of entering Google’s ad URLs to AdBlock never see those ads, which means no clicks and no revenue.

In testing, AdBlock in conjunction with the AdBlock Filterset.G Updater URL list works very well at making ads from a vast assortment of providers disappear from pages.

—

Drag this to your Bookmarks.

Add to | DiggThis | Yahoo My Web

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

While, at first glance, the tags Steve points to (crapware, nhw: bad crapware, nhw: bad and nhw: dangerous) seem just crap spam, I’m inclined to agree with YSearchBlog’s assertion that this is not spam, but a bit of an accident, and Steve seems to confirm as such.

As explained by one comment, all of these pages have been tagged by one Carlo Zottman, and the contents are strikingly similar to the AGNIS Adblock list. Steve says later in a comment:

Thanks all. I see your point but I wish Yahoo would provide a way for users to ensure that they don’t see certain links posted by users they don’t trust when they’re viewing the community cloud.

On a related note, I heard from the person who posted all of these links that he is tinkering with MyWeb2.0 and by accident imported all his browser bookmarks into the larger community. Still, it does expose a big hole in all of these tagging sites.

So, what we’ve got here is an example of how a single person can overwhelm a new tagging site. Yahoo says that there have been 37,231 saved pages tagged with 14,098 tags. Conceivably, I could tag three hundred pages with “Nathan Weinberg is the coolest” and that would become one of the most popular tags. Good thing this should dissapear if My Web becomes a lot more popular.

You know, if I were an evil company, I’d realize I could kill this Yahoo service by having one employee tag all day with completely irrelevant pages. I’d have to start immediately, however.

Steve Rubel’s Post
Yahoo’s Response

Reader Comments…

Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

Visit the InsideGoogle blog.