Almost all the links in my front homepage are sponsored now. What’s next, a few ads in the bookmark bar? How about when I enter a URL, I then have to type “McDonald’s” before I can actually navigate there?
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The best thing about this is that you can turn it off
Wow, that’s levels of commercial removed that I did not think possible, given how much FF sell themselves as being against this sort of thing.
Personaly those shortcuts are a feature I literally never use so much so I don’t even register their existence anymore.
I thought you said “What’s next, a few ads in the URL bar?” …because Mozilla has put a few ads in the URL bar.
And even if you disable this, your address bar still randomly breaks, but instead of suggesting an ad it just doesn’t suggest anything.
Fuck you, Mozilla.
Was trying to reference this
Maybe I should have added a paragraph somewhere in there. I was typing fast because I only get so much time on my break at work.
Your writing is better than serviceable, I just had a brain fart while reading it
Ads are one thing, but this seems excessive and probably unintentional. Looks like someone just filed this bug, which is another sign that it might be an unintentional problem: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1944704
This was a bug
And looks like it’s been fixed :)
These can be turned off. Not great that they’re on by default, but you gotta pay the bills somehow right?
Yeah, this is basically the least offensive thing possible that ensures the lights stay on.
I was okay with it before for that reason, but they went to far (as all eventually do).
Settings -> Homepage:
Uncheck everything “sponsored”.
Done.
It’s already done but I appreciate you being helpful. My black heart wiggled one time from the kindness you have shown here today. Peace.
Remember when most sites had simple banner ads, and there was no widespread outcry about how much they sucked and we needed ad blocking software? Then they started flashing, then the popups and pop-unders came, then vids started autoplaying, and now here we are.
If advertisers hadn’t gotten greedier than banners on the sides of sites, maybe no one would’ve gotten around to blocking all their shit.
Pop-under ads were obnoxious. As were the popups that were like 1 pixel large but it still had the windows bordering around it.
Nicely said.
The only thing really offensive about it, judging from the post, is that they’re positioned before the user’s pins, not after.
People keep giving Mozilla shit for taking money from Google, yet they see an ad for a different company and lose their shit.
I say let them cook a little, they arent drowning in donations and still do a tone of things for foss communities.
Let’s remember that the de fuckto market (ie pleb) alternative is overwhelmingly Chrome.
We dont need such projects just so we as individuals can have privacy focused experiences but also for how that influences markets and society. And to have any influence you need certain power of masses.
The perplexing thing is that unlike Thunderbird, I have never seen them ask for donations
They had a very successful donations drive a while back. They might still be good.
Be that as it may we are old enough to know foss needs support.
I myself rarely click on some campaign for donations, I prefer the coffee button or whatever they have on their page or bithub.
Just turn it off. If they don’t have income they don’t exist.
Mozilla already has Scrooge McDuck amounts of money. It doesn’t need any more to maintain a browser and an email client.
From jwz, who founded Mozilla & Firefox:
- 2020: This is a pretty dire assessment of Mozilla
- 2023: Remember when Mozilla made a web browser?
- 2024: Mozilla is an advertising company now
- 2024: Mozilla’s Original Sin
.
Mozilla had a duty to preserve the open web.
Instead they cosplayed as a startup, chasing product dreams of “growth hacking”, with Google’s ad money as their stand-in for a VC-funding firehose, with absolutely predictable and tragic results.
And those dreams of growth and market penetration failed catastrophically anyway.
(Except for the C-suite, who made out quite well. And Google, who got exactly what they paid for: a decade of antitrust-prosecution insurance. It was never about ad revenue. The on-paper existence of Firefox as a hypothetical competitor kept the Federal wolves at bay, and that’s all Google cared about.)
Now hear me out, but What If…? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?
As I have said many times:
In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
- Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
- Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
- There is no 3.
Mozilla already has Scrooge McDuck amounts of money
no. they don’t.
the google money that they rely too heavily on, may not always be there. they need more diverse funding. these paid placements, which can be turned off, are one way to do that.
turn off and delete the sponsored stuff at install, never see 'em again. it’s not like they’re microsoft or something, constantly turning that kind of shit back on with every-other-update.
While this analysis is somewhat convincing, let’s not forget that for now Firefox is all we have. Important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
In my ideal scenario, Mozilla becomes like the Wikimedia Foundation. Which has somehow also accumulated “Scrooge McDuck amounts” of cash but seems to be on a firmer footing and better managed.
It’s amazing what you can pull off with free labour and CIA funding. I also find it funny how that donation banner still shows up every year when they’ve already accumulated so much capital.
Serving Wikipedia is a different order of magnitude vs building a web browser
Okay but you mean which is harder?? Both projects rely on a bunch of salaried professionals supervising an army of volunteers. Firefox is a web browser, i.e. notoriously the space shuttle of software. But the Wikipedia is doing some surprisingly innovative and cutting-edge stuff with its own codebase too, as I understand it. Whichever is costlier, I’m not sure we’re talking about an order of magnitude of difference.
I’m not an expert on either codebase but I believe the main driver of complexity with developing a browser engine is the sheer number of standards and how fast they change and multiply. Wikipedia has to update articles and maintain the server backend, which is no small task with such a global and comprehensive website, but Firefox has to do similar things on top of vastly more complex code with much more churn. There’s a reason Mozilla developed Rust as well.
Wikipedia has to update articles and maintain the server backend
Firstly, updating the articles is the one thing Wikipedia doesn’t do, the army of unpaid volunteers does that.
But as for “just maintaining the backend”, the Wikimedia Foundation does far more than that. It created and maintains and constantly iterates a huge pile of ever-complexifying frontend code - the wiki itself, discussion software, media tools etc - not just for Wikipedia but for a whole bunch of peer sites. Much of it is pretty cutting-edge, it’s used daily by many thousands of editors and there’s also the accessibility requirement. I know from personal experience that there’s nothing harder than front-end when you have to tick the accessibility box. No doubt Firefox’s technical challenge is greater but really the difference is not night and day.
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/mozilla-is-an-advertising-company-now/#comment-249969
Preemptive subtwit.
Let’s say you run a nonprofit animal shelter. And for some reason, some people feel you should be seeing hockey-stick growth, but the donations aren’t covering it.
So you decide to start up a side-line of selling kittens for meat.
Then you will inevitably have someone stroking their chin and saying, 'Yes, yes, but how could they afford to stay open if they weren’t selling kitten deli slices?"
Some might say – maybe you aren’t an animal shelter any more. Some might say.
It’s a real shame what’s happened to Mozilla. Maybe Trump will add browser software to the list of sanctions on China and we’ll end up with a Deepfox in a year or two.
And it will be running on Deepin also
You should see brave lol
I bailed on brave when I learned more about the shenanigans that one dude pulled.
And Brave has significantly lower costs, given they don’t develop an own engine, but rather just put lipstick onto Chromium.
Or, ya know, literally any other browser that’s not a fork of Firefox.
If we want software to be FOSS we have to stop bitching so much about developers trying to make the math work.
One could posit an ideal public sector development studio that takes grants from the state/federal government to produce useful Open Source software. Think public radio or public broadcasting, but for apps.
Hell, it isn’t even wild in the current moment. Modern day AWS and Azure subsidize much of its small/new user client base with the massive public sector clientele. OpenAI and DeepSeek are both the product of giant state-sponsored initiatives to develop AI that is free at point of service. Plenty of the original internet architecture was the product of public investment and grants, as was the university-centric ARPNET that would eventually be commoditizated into the commercial World Wide Web.
Look up the history of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the pioneering of Mosaic, the first widely available GUI-based web browser. It was the foundation for both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, which licensed the original design for the tiniest fraction of what it would ultimately generate in future revenues.
How do you get this? My home page just has some recent links
Depending on where you got Firefox from, default settings are different. Maybe your distro ships with these deactivated.
Yep. I get it from Librewolf. 😁
Fresh install.
on mobile, too, it looks like. on pc, i’ve only ever seen half that many, plus google pops in there if you switch your search default. click-dismiss and they’re gone. toggle a couple settings, done. they don’t come back.
This is the same garbage we condemn Windows for, though. It’s still not okay.
nah in firefox those ads can be disabled by unchecking a checkbox, in windows it’s probably not just an easy to find checkbox and i bet after removing the ads they’ll just come back after an update.
So how exactly were you planning on them making money if they don’t take money from Google to be the default search engine and they don’t take money to place advertisements on the default home page?
Open source projects shouldn’t have “making money” on their priority list. I would donate to Mozilla if I had some guarantee that my money would actually fund Firefox development
But why does (some) people want every software to be open source if making money can’t be an objective? /genq
I’m not one of those people, and to be clear I support for-profit companies open sourcing code. Mozilla is a unique case where donations are a tiny fraction of their income and Firefox development is a tiny fraction of their expenses. I just want to donate directly to the parts I care about (Firefox, MDN).
Yeah but you can literally just turn this off with no fuss.
1.Firefox for Android.
2.Tap the menu button.
3.Tap. Settings.
4.Tap Homepage.
5.Deselect Sponsored shortcuts under Shortcuts.
I think the best viable option for them is to either offer a subscription model. Or increase requests for donations.
what would a subscription even do?
Id say support Firefox development, maybe premium access to some of Mozilla’s services, possibly cosmetics in browser
support ff development: thats called donating
premium access to mozillas services: that’s already a thing but you subscribe to each one, like their vpn, pocket, etc
cosmetics in browser: thats just https://addons.mozilla.org
