Hi. Do you have any more info on that? A screenshot maybe? And ideally the URL that's being called. Will help us find the bad ad (if there is indeed one).
Heya. I'm the editor of Ars Technica UK, where this story was originally published.
It's not native advertising. The author just really likes the 911. Ars doesn't do native advertising/advertorial. We do some sponsored stuff, but those posts are clearly marked.
Is there somewhere on Ars' website where I can read the "Ars doesn't do native advertising/advertorial" policy?
As a jaded, cynical reader, the trap I fall into is that if content clearly marks itself as an advertorial, I know what I'm dealing with and can take it with the appropriate grains of salt. On the other hand, if content that seems advertorial comes from a site I normally trust, but with no markings at all, I'm left wondering if it's a benign "I just really love this thing and wanted to write about it", or if it's a really clever native ad invading another space that used to be on the other side of the wall.
What I'd love to see from Ars and other responsible journalistic outlets is a) a policy about native advertising that's easy to find and b) at the editor's discretion, if there's an article that may seem particularly advertorial-ish, a pre-emptive disclaimer that says "Hey, even if this seems like native advertising, it isn't. Here's a link to our general advertorial policy, and here's a link to the author personally gushing about how much he or she loves the Porsche 911 and talking about why they wrote this article."
And yes, I know that it sucks that you guys, as responsible journalists, have to bear the negative externality of irresponsible journalists publishing "18 insane things you wouldn't think the Toyota Tacoma could do...#7 will blow your mind".
Yeah, I don't think we have such a public statement at the moment - and maybe that's something we should rectify. All I can tell you is that native content/advertorial would be very, very clearly labelled. We would never try to sneak anything through.
In general, Ars is _very_ above board. Our reputation and authority are everything. That's why we're one of the very few publications that doesn't do native advertising - we're just not sure how you can do that, and still somehow expect the reader to trust what you write.
But yeah, I appreciate that just saying "trust us!" is a bit difficult on the Internet today :)
I'm an equal-opportunities OS user. I have two Linux boxes (Slackware!), two Windows boxes, and an OS X laptop within arm's reach of my desk. I was just poking fun at the Year of Desktop Linux thing -- it's a bit of a meme/running joke in tech blogger circles.
nope, pws=0 turns of personalization, but yeah from the ipad i get the screwed results (even after cookie clean), from the desktop the ok ones. probably some faulty debice targeting from google (and its new, wasnt like this yesterday)
Might also check page 2 where it says, "...focus on two of the tools that made up the Mozilla Suite: Firefox and Thunderbird."
Neither Fx nor Tb were part of the app suite--they were both offshoots that, at the time, really violated what the project was aiming for. The story of how Firefox came to be and roguish it was seen within the organization at the time is interesting.
Yea, I actually played with that sentence a few times. I thought about making it clear that Firefox and Thunderbird weren't called Firefox and Thunderbird when they were part of Mozilla Suite... but the codebases are the same, I think. Sometimes you have to know where to draw the line, to keep things clear :)
Nice addition, although as a marginal Mozilla contributor at the time (and frequent IRC lurker), I remember a few other principals being involved -- notably Ben Goodger and and Matthew "mpt" Thomas, who seemed to me to be Blake Ross's primary co-conspirators. For a while it was just this skunkworks project called "m/b" (for "mozilla/browser", I believe), and there was a lot of implied frustration/drama related to AOL/NS-internal development process (the pinnacle of which was the doomed Netscape 6.)
I would love to read a real oral history of Firefox someday.
re: 6 -- there were very few performance tweaks in FF6. Mostly CSS3 and HTML5 additions. FF7 is the 'performance' build (Azure, first round of start-up, smaller memory footprint). FF8 seems to have some performance bits -- and presumably it will have some feature additions, too (but I need to investigate).
