It may sounds strange, but this is really our honest goal. We want to change the ad industry.

The ad industry in its current state is built on foundations we think don't make sense. For instance, the whole idea of abusing cookies, a useful technology, to track where users go around the internet so that the data can be traded, so that others can make guesses about what ads to show... sounds a bit in need of a change.

We know for a fact that many of the players in the business, the ones that matter, don't really care about intruding on people's privacy. For them, it is what they need to do to achieve their goals.

We have to face it, the internet wouldn't thrive without ad-tech. Not many people are willing or able to pay for content. The digital ad industry is important and is here to stay.

That said, we think we can make a change... for the better. We can think about how to do this from first principles, to be the first customer of our tech.

Frankly, no one will be willing to play the new game with us if we can't prove that it works at least as good as the current way they are doing things: the old tech may be clunky, not that effective and there may be a lot of middlemen, but there are 2 decades of investment in the way its built.

Users are affected. Users care. We know we can make for a web with less annoying ads. They don't need to be nagging, vying for your attention the same way they are now. They don't need to be creepy. And you know what? They may not even be ads as you know them today.

We thought about this a lot, and it's a very touchy topic, one which would cause controversy any way we'd broach it . Why do you think we're not being honest?

So users wouldn't care if most ads would be popups and autoplay sound, right? Oh, they would? Who is being dishonest then?

As far as I can tell, the idea has always been the same: more relevant ads means less ads needed to make the same revenue and cost businesses less in wasted ad budget.

The "old method" was to just make your ads more obnoxious and abundant since you could only compete through volume (both in the sense of "loudness" and "quantity"). Now if I open a shop in my city, I can advertise on Google. I tell Google that I want to pay for X ads and to show them to people in my city (potential customers) who have searched for similar items (more likely customers). This way I can minimize the amount of money I spend showing ads to people in other cities/countries or who aren't likely to be interested. Google can charge more for that space because it's more likely to result in a customer. Google makes more money from fewer/less obnoxious ads (no popups, flashy shit, etc). And as a web user, I don't see ads for diapers or restaurants in Wyoming because Google's algorithms have determined that I live in an east coast US city and have never searched for baby stuff.

Honestly the only real issue I have with their "big data" is that it might be captured by another organization (business, "hacker", or government) and used in less benign ways than tweaking the ads in my sidebar.

They most certainly do when there are national security letters involved.

You may argue that this was not Google's fault - it is uncertain how much choice they had with regards to providing access for PRISM, and they're welcome to the tiny compensation they received. The point is that they had the data at all, thus allowing it to be copied y others, regardless of google's intentions

"Firefox with ads" lets one turn off the ads. The control offered is the same when you're allowed to download a fork. I don't see why a fork would hurt Fx so much if it just turns a feature off by default -- a feature that Firefox lets you turn off anyway.

Let's take a look at two contrasting open source projects: Ruby and the V8 Javascript interpreter. Ruby is dog slow in comparison to V8. They both languages are extremely dynamic and present similar optimization challenges. Why? Because Google has enough cash to hire world-class experts to make V8 fing fast. One of the guys behind V8 has 20 years of experience with writing JITs for dynamic languages. The guy practically invited JITs for dynamic languages, and was also one of the main contributors of the Hotspot JVM JIT.

In contrast, Ruby does not. I met up with a panel of Ruby core developers a couple of months ago. It became extremely clear that Ruby is underfunded. Ruby has maybe 2 full time paid developers. They are skilled, but are nowhere near as skilled as the V8 guy when it comes to optimizing dynamic languages. They also lack funding for infrastructure projects.

Web browsers are one of the most complex pieces of software in human history. Mozilla literally spends millions per year on developing Firefox. Sure, a browser might exist in a completely free, lowly-funded FOSS form. But at what expense? Just look at Ruby vs V8. You can't just hand-wave away the importance of money.