From the link:<p><a href="https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/components/newtab/content-src/asrouter/docs/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/components/n...</a><p>"Messaging System"<p>"Vision"<p>"Firefox must be an opinionated user agent that keeps folks safe, informed and effective while browsing the Web. In order to have an opinion, Firefox must have a voice."<p>"That voice will respect the user’s attention while surfacing contextually relevant and timely information tailored to their individual needs and choices."<p>Somewhere in all of these companies exists the belligerent ** who orders the subordinates to inject inappropriate profit-seeking changes into the product. And then cajole/order/encourage another subordinate to write a florid virtuous editorial justifying their belligerent idea.
I think the way the dialog is designed says enough. There's "Get Mozilla VPN" and "not now".<p>No "stop showing me ads", "disable recommendations", "show privacy settings", instead, just "not now". This illusion of choice is a very common dark pattern that helps people feel like postponing ads was their choice (and their idea) rather than making them feel upset that ads have snuck into their browser in the first place. Websites run by trash marketeers like Reddit and Twitter do the same thing.<p>I wonder how long it'll take before I will just switch to some Chrome fork. This whole "privacy first" shtick is nice but if I need to turn off as many settings in Firefox to make my browser pleasant to use as I do privacy settings in Chrome, I don't see the advantage.<p>Last time I checked brave they were still pushing their shady crypto stuff and the UI was kind of meh. I wonder if I should reevaluate it with the ongoing erosion of Firefox as a browser.
Mozilla has pulled a lot of dumb crap over the years, but this crossed a hard red line.<p>I defended them with Pocket, with promotions in the new tab screen, with dumb wastes of time like Colorways. I've continued to evangelize Firefox in spite of the fact that I knew the company had lost touch with reality because I want there to be an alternative to chromium-based browsers.<p>Today I'm done. I can shrug off promos in the new tab page, in the settings, whatever. But there are no second chances for full-page pop-up ads, especially when the "oops" is in the <i>timing</i> code. "Oops, you were supposed to see that after 20 minutes inactivity" doesn't cut it.<p>Mozilla has lost it, and I'm done defending them and evangelizing for them.
Let me put first and foremost that this is shitty.<p>What irks me about these comment threads is that people hold Mozilla to a standard that nobody holds Google to. The negativity spiral, deserved as it may be, seems to then tip a lot of people (self-proclaimed) towards going with Chrome when that is still the worse option. Looking at Firefox' market share, I feel bad for the shit it gets and what it has to pull to try and stay relevant (.: to pay the devs). At the same time, I would also not mind an unmozillad firefox, perhaps in exchange for a certain donation amount per year.<p>I currently don't donate much to Mozilla because they keep making the experience worse time and again (I'm still salty on a daily basis because the new mouse gestures "extension" is crap compared to the "add-on"-based one from before Firefox 57), because donating adds your email address to their spam list, and because I can't tell them to spend it on useful things like Thunderbird and Firefox rather than developing yet another VPN frontend or buying Pocket. Having a Firefox subscription that gets rid of their ads would not limit what they can spend it on, but it would send a clear message of what it is that I'm wanting to pay for. Wouldn't solve all problems but I wonder if this might help.
Last year Firefox displayed a Disney ad (for the movie 'Turning Red') on the whats-new tab, the tab gets diplayed by default after you upgrade to a new Firefox version I think. US users only.<p>Screenshot <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220308222503/https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/98.0/whatsnew/?oldversion=97.0.1" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20220308222503/https://www.mozil...</a><p>HN discussion <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30608022" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30608022</a>
One of the related tickets [1] seems to give some hints on the root cause - which in a way almost makes it worse IMO.<p>Basically, what they <i>wanted</i> to do was to build a background process that detects when you're away from the PC and then pops up the message, so it's the first thing you see what you get back.<p>Unfortunately (or maybe not) the detection logic had a bug, which caused the message to pop up right away sometimes, spoiling the whole thing.<p>[1] <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1835175" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1835175</a>
This is unacceptable. Mozilla has shown they are incapable of not abusing Firefox. There shouldn't be an advertising channel/system in the browser.<p>If you want to advertise, have a newsletter that people can opt into.<p>If you need money, allow people to pay for just Firefox.
Per <a href="https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1414266#answer-1582507" rel="nofollow">https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1414266#answer-1...</a><p>> Thank you for reaching out with your concern. Firefox is committed to creating an online experience that puts people first, as such we quickly stopped running the ad experience, and are reviewing internally.
What’s stupid about this is the only people still using Firefox are the people they have to know are going to hate this shit the most. I’d prefer they just charge for the software instead of doing this over and over again, and saying “oops we’re sorry, won’t happen again” every single time.
Many users on Mozilla support communities and Reddit are reporting that their browsing sessions were suddenly interrupted by an overlay ad for Mozilla VPN today.<p>To disable this, users need to set browser.vpn_promo.enabled to false on the about:config page.
What in the bloody hell!?!? Why does everything around the "web ecosystem" seem to grow paternalising adware/spyware-infested user-hostile "features" over time (I have observed this with other software, but browsers in particular seem to be the worst)? This is disturbingly close to Microsoft's tactics with Edge.<p>A browser doesn't need popups, a "messaging system", "telemetry", or anything other than to show me the content of URLs that I tell it to visit.
Maybe relevant:<p>"Firefox VPN Spotlight modal test content" [0]<p><i>We are running a/b tests on a VPN spotlight modal in Firefox. Here's a link to the project info: Google doc<p>There are two versions of content, identical except for the inclusion of a promotional code in one of them. Where the tests also differ is in the imagery used, which you can see in the Figma file linked in this ticket.</i><p>Also,<p>"Add vpn spotlight targeting" [1]<p><i>Targeting to support <a href="https://mozilla-hub.atlassian.net/browse/OMC-419" rel="nofollow">https://mozilla-hub.atlassian.net/browse/OMC-419</a> - Existing users with a profile >28 days old, at least 1 day of use in the last 28 days, on Windows 10+, no VPN or Enterprise policy</i><p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/mozilla-l10n/nimbus-l10n/issues/5">https://github.com/mozilla-l10n/nimbus-l10n/issues/5</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/mozilla/experimenter/pull/8853">https://github.com/mozilla/experimenter/pull/8853</a>
Apparently the "fix" is to fix the bug in the idle time calculation.<p>They marked it Resolved but the popup will still happen after 20 mins of idle time after the fix, if I read the Bug details correctly.
Happened to me too, even though I thought all ads were disabled in my modified libre/wolf profile.<p>I guess I have to go back to ungoogled chromium as my main browser again and start working again on RetroKit.<p>Good bye Mozilla, thanks for now being the corporation hell hole that you initially fought against.<p>I guess that's what happens if you fire the people that actually cared for the project.
Firefox shows literal advertisements in the “new tab” window. I recently started using Firefox again because I was told I was being “ridiculous” when I said Firefox shows me literal advertisements. And then I get this pop-up on a window which hadn’t been refreshed in several hours.
I've been using IceCat recently as part of a video project I'm doing. I started using Guix just for fun and IceCat happens to be the version of Firefox they have available by default. It has some quirks but it's overall pretty usable and strips Mozilla branding.<p>It's a shame because I pay for Mozilla features, including Mozilla VPN. But I find this behavior (1) kind of gross, and (2) a clear signal of either desperation or indifference to their mission.
I've had the Mozilla VPN website open for a few days with an intent to purchase when I get around to it. Not anymore.<p>I love you Mozilla, but you've gotta do better. Please.
It’s like Google and Mozilla just don’t want me to leave Apple’s phone OS and its browser, respectively.<p>At least in Google’s case it makes good business sense - as in, it already works for them and their target audience already has been using the OS with all that, and doesn’t care about it, ads and tracking; besides there aren’t too many phone OS options.<p>But in the case of Mozilla? Heck the target audience cares very much about these things and not liking shit like this was a reason they were in Firefox for. Now a lot have already dumped it for Safari, Brave etc. Then they keep doing such tricks.<p>Someone at Mozilla has to be especially dumb to have done this.
firefox is an extremely hard product to recommend to friends/family<p>it's becoming more and more user hostile with every upgrade<p>pocket everywhere, telemetry, vpn ads, disney ads, amazon ads etc<p>(and despite the constant UI changes it still feels like something out of 1997)
I ironically got the same popup while sitting on the HackerNews homepage.<p>The top article on the homepage was this one, visible through the dark-ish tint behind the ad.<p>Lol.
I switched to LibreWolf (A fork of Firefox with privacy enhancements and ublock preinstalled) and haven't had to deal with anything like this since.
I've often said that Firefox is the most user-hostile piece of free & open source software I've used. It is much worse than a lot of paid, proprietary software.
Mozilla. They must have some really great and well meaning employees. Otherwise a good product like Firefox (or Thunderbird) would never come out of such a garbage company. Imagine if they were actually a good company with a tech focus.
reposted, since they are trying to silence and confuse:<p><a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1835182" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1835182</a>
Firefox has been going downhill for a while now, so it's not surprising.<p>That said, if you don't want to use Chrome, a fairly good alternative would be Vivaldi [0] - a surprisingly neat browser created by the ex-founder of Opera. It's based on the Chromium engine, so no weird rendering shenanigans, but at the same time is quite technically capable, with ad blocking, mouse gestures, email client, etc.<p>[0] <a href="https://vivaldi.com/" rel="nofollow">https://vivaldi.com/</a>
Can someone recommend how to disable the firefox update popup on osx latest ? I have already disabled the updates checking background service.<p>(disclaimer: i agree to security issues and stuff due to not updating, i manage my firwalls and adblocks to prevent getting hacked, and take full responsibility in case i get hacked, thank you).
I had this happen... I didn't and still don't understand what was going on.<p>Edit: as noted in the linked ticket, there are some discussions going on about this in <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/</a> .
I have no idea how I consistently miss all of the random advertisements Mozilla apparently does in Firefox. Then again, I have a heavily customized Firefox and I'm used to every 5 or so versions breaking something in my userChrome.css or hiding a button I didn't ask for.
From the screenshots it looks like the popup greyed out the entire browser window, including the window controls. Did this make the window controls non-interactive? If so I will add this to the long list of reasons why application developers cannot be trusted with client-side window decorations.
Mozilla deserves to fail. This is absolutely unacceptable, it makes me irrationally angry. I've been using Firefox since 2004, I'm tired of these tactics. We're now playing whack a mole with their settings with things like advertising on the new tab page, user studies (which seems to randomly get re-enabled on updates), and now I need to add an opt out for this specific advertisement in my about:config? How many future advertisements am I going to need to opt out of on an individual basis as they come up? It's akin to what Microsoft is doing with their many toggles required to change the default browser settings.<p>Even if there were a setting to opt out of everything it would be unacceptable. Might as well use Chromium if they are going to pull this shit. I'm just done with this, Mozilla deserves to fail.
Why the bug is closed, is this wontfix? Sorry for not trying hard enough to figure out what's up with this bug, all I can see is<p>" Opened 8 hours ago Closed 6 hours ago "
Probably this whole story comes down to "there's 'Allow Firefox to make personalized extension recommendations setting' and it is on by default".
IDK if they’re ready for the limelight, but if you’re an internet enthusiast and on the market for a non-Mozilla non-FAANG browser, you should check out The Browser Company’s Arc.<p>No affiliation, just a happy user for the last year or so. After being a long, long time FF supporter, even through all this tragic disintegration.
Maybe it's time to focus more on servo, a browser engine written in rust, originally created, but later abandoned by Mozilla. Seems like it starts rolling again. <a href="https://servo.org/" rel="nofollow">https://servo.org/</a>
Developing a browser is almost as close to an effort as writing an OS. Read the Flexbox specs alone. It's complicated and then there are hundreds of such specs. And then it is a moving target, constantly.<p>Alternatives to Firefox are free. If this software has to survive than enough people will have to pay either directly or indirectly as in case of ads.<p>What are other ways that an open source software can survive that cannot have "Open core" or "On premise" options available to it?