A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox
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?
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.
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.
People keep giving Mozilla shit for taking money from Google, yet they see an ad for a different company and lose their shit.
I think the downvoters can’t hold these two thoughts in their mind at the same time:
Firefox is the best browser
It's only real competitors, in my eyes, are Firefox forks.
Agreed. I love Firefox and don't really like Mozilla.
No it's the complaint about one of the few transparent revenue flows Mozilla managed to pull off.
It's disabled one step deep on the settings
There is a shitload of stuff going wrong with the Mozilla foundation and this doesn't even make the top 10.
That's the reason for my down vote: it's nothing I want this community to focus on. It's basically engagement bait with the topic "ads bad".
This has been the case for several years. Super easy to turn them off
See ads, "how dare they" Sees paid version, "how dare they" Development costs time and money, pick your poison.
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:
.
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.
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.
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.
Skill issue 
The browser itself is free, and they have to make money somehow to keep the company running (if the CEO didn't keep most of it for themself). If you don't like it, you can turn it off or download an ad-free fork.
Better than the unlabeled sponsorship behind the default search engine.
If they make some money from harmless icons, I mean, I can live with it
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.
Can't you remove those?
Yup, you can turn it off.
It's not overly difficult to get to the setting either.
There's literally a settings button on that new tab page to take you right to the correct setting.
You should see brave lol
Or, ya know, literally any other browser that's not a fork of Firefox.
And Brave has significantly lower costs, given they don't develop an own engine, but rather just put lipstick onto Chromium.
If we want software to be FOSS we have to stop bitching so much about developers trying to make the math work.
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?
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.
Either that or they go bankrupt. Design your own browser and give it out for free if you don't like it
Personaly those shortcuts are a feature I literally never use so much so I don't even register their existence anymore.
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.
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.
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 is why I torrent firefox pro using Limewire.
