Firefox shows ads for Booking.com in New Tab page

Honestly I don&#x27;t care how harsh this sounds but they should fire their entire marketing department. Or the people who are approving the bullshit we&#x27;ve been seeing for the past what, 2~3 years?<p>They&#x27;re either completely clueless, don&#x27;t care about damaging the brand or are just malicious. And in the process, accordingly to themselves, they aren&#x27;t even making money just partners and good feels, right?<p>We can&#x27;t afford to lose Mozilla and Firefox.

This is deeply upsetting to me because I have continually pushed Firefox to friends and family as the only alternative to Google&#x27;s strongarm dominance of our virtual lives.<p>I have no other alternative to recommend my social circle and feel, daily, increasingly helpless to do anything about a future determined to shake down the miracle of humanity for pocket change.<p>Mozilla Corp--the for-profit business arm of nonprofit Mozilla Foundation--has sold out its users before in a partnership with German ad company Cliqz and again in a marketing blitz for Mr. Robot. No amount of outrage from its users has changed their behavior. Perhaps because we are locked into a browser duopoly, Mozilla Corp feels privileged to continue to abuse user trust.<p>How do we take back user privacy when the world&#x27;s computing window becomes poisoned by those impassioned for money? It is deplorable behavior.

What I don&#x27;t get is how they <i>keep</i> doing those &quot;it might look like an ad except we don&#x27;t even get paid&quot; stunts. Honestly, to me this seems even worse than actually inserting genuine ads. That would be horrible as well, but at least I knew they are a way to support Mozilla.<p>Those &quot;partnerships&quot; on the other hand seem all about showing that Mozilla is willing to sacrifice any kind of UI integrity or user control in order to advertise their user base as capital - without even gaining them anything.<p>What is going on there?<p>...or are some people in charge at Mozilla <i>really</i> delusional enough to believe the &quot;this is our thank you to our users&quot; line?

Response from Mozilla:<p>&quot;This snippet was an experiment to provide more value to Firefox users through offers provided by a partner. It was not a paid placement or advertisement. We are continually looking for more ways to say thanks for using Firefox. In a similar vein, earlier this month we offered Firefox users a free opportunity to enjoy a live concert from Phosphorescent.&quot;<p>Well, maybe it&#x27;s just me but it seems every single time Mozilla fucks up they respond with a excuse like &quot;yeah, but it was just a experiment&quot;.<p>If they keep going on like this, thousands of former Firefox users will switch to Brave - which due to its latest codebase is basically technologically Chrome but designed from bottom to top with privacy and security in mind. And former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, who - politics aside - seemingly DOES know how to run a company focusing on PEOPLE using the web and building a browser with PEOPLE using the web in mind will be there and happily welcoming them to the Brave community.<p>And it&#x27;s not like these idiots EVEN need the money because it is an open secret the likes of Google are giving Mozilla $300+ million dollars on a year-to-year basis to keep them afloat and &quot;competing&quot; with Chrome anyway!

Don&#x27;t actually have a problem with this, even though I have an ad blocker installed, since in Mozilla&#x27;s statement they said they don&#x27;t share any data to display the ad, and I have far more trust in Mozilla than other organisations. As long as there is a way to switch it off, it&#x27;s all good with me.

I&#x27;ve never been a big fan of start pages, even (or especially?) those with supposedly personalized content. Bookmarks are fine, but tiles showing most frequently visited sites seems like a pushy way of forcing the user use bookmarks, and I&#x27;m not really into that kind of user manipulation. Like this case, these personalized start pages always seem like they&#x27;re designed to give the browser creator access to the user&#x27;s attention (impeding the use of the browser as the metaphorical dumb pipe). It always seemed that, as in this case, these pages would be the first place for the browser maker to sell access to the user&#x27;s attention.<p>On new Firefox setups I&#x27;ll specifically turn off all the splash page widgets and&#x2F;or set the homepage to about:blank. The search bar in the middle of the front page is just a shortcut for the super bar anyways.

I don’t get how people can defend Mozilla over this yet blast chrome for simply being a Google product. Yeah there’s concern over what Google tracks but I’d be using their search and services in Firefox anyways.

The more they pull stunts like these, the more i realize it&#x27;s time to fork FF and get rid of all their garbage. Make Pocket optional, remove the (paid?) list of URLs that&#x27;s apparently preloaded, remove all of the phone home shit.

A big dilemma for them. They need money, but they cannot demand it from their users, nor will they get enough (I guess?) by asking. Not sure what they should do. Perhaps dismantle the corporation, stick with the non-profit. I know I would pay them a monthly sub if it was just the non-profit.<p>Or perhaps just go for Apple and Safari, whose bottom line depends on respecting privacy.

Someone has to pay their programmers. It&#x27;s through ads via partnership with Google or other ads.

the language they used surrounding this is pretty gross:<p>it &quot;was an experiment to provide more value to Firefox users through offers provided by a partner&quot; and &quot;not a paid placement or advertisement&quot;.<p>I think its concerning that Mozilla is that deep into the marketing double-think.

Is Mozilla that lacking in money that they have to do this?

Wikipedia&#x27;s campaign worked well enough that I now donate monthly. I&#x27;d rather Mozilla bugged me in-browser about setting up a monthly donation rather than paying marketing people to craft statements to explain these kind of bs decisions.

C&#x27;mon Firefox... you can do better than this

An unpaid ad is still an ad.

I am sure all the people complaining here regularly donate to Mozilla.

It’s okay though because it’s Mozilla and we trust Mozilla.

I can see how upsetting this is but let’s go on a hyperbole and compare it with Chrome. The fact that <i>we</i> have a say about the future of Firefox is a feature that no other (proprietary) browser has.<p>Beware of your negativity bias.

Unfortunately that&#x27;s inevitable given that the public expects a browser to be a free product. The money to pay software developers for keeping the product up-to-date has to come from somewhere: so it&#x27;s either selling the users&#x27; data, or having a paid subscription, or something similar to what Wikipedia does.