The amount of stuff you need to disable on a fresh Firefox install now is getting ridiculous. In settings you need to uncheck:<p>1. Recommend extensions as you browse<p>2. Recommend features as you browse<p>3. Sponsored Shortcuts<p>4. Recommended stories/Sponsored stories<p>5. Show trending search suggestions<p>6. Suggestions from Firefox<p>7. Suggestions from sponsors<p>8. Allow Firefox to install and run studies<p>9. Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement
10. Everything AI related in Firefox Labs
Speaking only for myself: I don't really mind sponsored content as long as there is no tracking and it is not causing FF to be considerably less performant/more resource-hungry. The Mozilla Foundation needs money to keep the lights on, after all.<p>I might also just pay Mozilla for a premium subscription that completely disables sponsored content if they offered one (at a reasonable price).
- <i>"This is the 5th time Mozilla opted me into something like this w/o asking - existing about:config changes didn't apply; they add new ones (15 results for 'sponsor')"</i><p>Do I understand right, that you can't disable it normally in about:preferences (i.e. the user-friendly configuration page)? You have to dig into about:config (the hidden debug page for advanced, unsafe stuff) to turn it off?<p>Does the "sponsored shortcuts" toggle on about:preferences#home, the one that's always been there, not disable whatever this thing is showing for some users?
How do you get money to develop a browser?<p>1) sell it. You’re competing with Google. Not gonna fly.<p>2) embed ads. You can now get Google to pay you. Sounds nice, except Google’s own browser doesn’t do that.<p>3) donations and grants. This could work with a government with enough foresight to ensure viable browser competition, which isn’t even a theoretical problem. Getting enough money to pay for anything but coffee and electricity may be a problem, though.<p>4) run an ad network and make sure your browser shows those ads ‘better’ than the competition: kinda makes sense, except you don’t need the browser here to make money? Google already makes one, after all. So you need some kind of a long term contract between the ad network and the browser development branch to make sure the browser part keeps doing the browser.
OP is weird, their second post says that they 'exclusively use Chromium for web dev now as Firefox simply cannot keep up' - who knows what Google Chrome does with your data, you don't even get to opt out.
Tangentially related thread: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41441501">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41441501</a>