"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."
"That voice will respect the user’s attention while surfacing contextually relevant and timely information tailored to their individual needs and choices."
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 just installed Firefox on a new machine today. The number of switches I had to manually turn off to make it not collect data from me and not show me ads was surprisingly large. And even though I turned off all the ones I saw, I don't know if it was a complete solution.
I really don't want to use Chrome. Please stop with the enshittification, Firefox.
When I read "... Somewhere in all of these companies exists the belligerent ** ...", I couldn't help but think of the Bill Burr bit on "chain restaurants":
(cut out some of background to focus on where he gets to similar patter)
In any case, fully agree. There are always these environmental pressures and "agents" (to evoke / use a sort of game theory modeling context) that lead to this sort of nonsense. Depending on the incentives, scope of power of people making decisions, training (esp., MBAs - simply being trained to look at "numbers in spreadsheets", essentially), etc., it's all too easy, these days, to end up with this kind of B$.
> orders the subordinates to inject inappropriate profit-seeking changes into the product
Sometimes it's a person, sure, but I think often it's the broad system of reviews and promotions. Above a certain size, it's impossible for higher-ups in an organization to know what everyone below them is doing, and the organization has to rely on metrics. Things that are easy to measure get prioritized.
> 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.
It’s ironic (and extremely sad) how they say that but staunchly refuse to add ad-blocking to iOS Firefox. And the code is already right there, in Firefox Focus.
I’ve pushed everyone in my circle to Brave and told them to disable / ignore the crypto bits.
Safety first, and unfortunately Mozilla does not care about iOS users their safety.
I think the way the dialog is designed says enough. There's "Get Mozilla VPN" and "not now".
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.
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.
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.
I've been using Brave for awhile and I'm pretty happy with it. There is the shady crypto thing, and the shady VPN thing, and the dubious Tor thing, and I don't really trust them, but I can't really say any of that affects the browsing experience.
Mozilla has pulled a lot of dumb crap over the years, but this crossed a hard red line.
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.
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 timing code. "Oops, you were supposed to see that after 20 minutes inactivity" doesn't cut it.
Mozilla has lost it, and I'm done defending them and evangelizing for them.
Agreed. There have been many defenders of Firefox on HN. I’m not sure why after all the crap they have pulled over the years.
Unrelated mini rants.
1. They fill the default new tab page with garbage content. They have amazing reach with viewers. It’s a shame they can’t fill it with quality stuff. I understand you have to pay the bills, but at least find some balance.
2. Firefox 47.x was the greatest release. I’ve never been able to keep hundreds of tabs open with Firefox. Eventually Firefox eats up so much RAM and eventually crashes. Chromium based browsers can have multiple windows with hundreds of tabs each and not crash even after being open for days/weeks.
I've been downvoted here many times for voicing this same opinion for a long time. Consider switching to Orion (a fork of Safari WebKit, Mac only, still beta though) - https://browser.kagi.com/ - or PaleMoon (a hard fork of Firefox) - http://www.palemoon.org/, as they are the only browsers that respect your zero-telemetry wish, when you toggle the right settings. Tor Browser (stripped of Tor) - https://www.torproject.org/download/ - is also a very good privacy-hardened Firefox soft fork (though it is yet to fix a bug that still phones Mozilla) but using it generates a lot of Captchas from CloudFlare, and to a lesser extent Google, both seem to hate this browser with a vengeance. Vivaldi browser (a Chromium fork with better privacy options) is another a good option but a distant second because it insists on phoning home every time you use the browser, and Vivaldi has publicly said they will not turn that off as turning off those analytics impairs their monetizing options. (A good application firewall can block those though, and Vivaldi is a decent company).
Let me put first and foremost that this is shitty.
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.
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.
Firefox is supposed to hold itself to a higher standard than Google. It's why it exists, it's why I evangelized it all these years. It's supposed to be the browser that respects its users as human beings, not as conversion numbers.
If Mozilla becomes as bad as Google, then there's no reason to choose them over the larger and more stable platform. That's why we hold them to a higher standard—if they can't meet that standard they have no reason to exist at all.
> What irks me about these comment threads is that people hold Mozilla to a standard that nobody holds Google to.
We have already accepted Google as the “bad guy”. “Good guys” are held to a different standard. If Mozilla want to be a “bad guy” too, they will lose to Google who has the better product.
>What irks me about these comment threads is that people hold Mozilla to a standard that nobody holds Google to.
Yes, because FF’s only advantage left is that they’ll actually respect your privacy and control of your machine. They have nothing else! If you want a browser that’s the fastest, or has full featured addons, or is mostly like to work on sites where you need it, sorry, Chrome has them hopelessly, irrevocably beaten.
Privacy is the one area where they could actually claim to be better and yet every so often they’ve shown willingness to abandon that advantage for the slimmest of upsides.
Interesting that you talk about standards because I think the alt browsers are not judged to the same standards as chrome. Brave injected affiliate links. Microsoft edge injected ads on random third party sites, now it’s Mozilla. You won’t see google doing these type of (shady) things. You won’t get explicit stuff from google injected into properties they don’t own without explicit permission from the site owners.
Imagine if google injected random stuff without permission in a site like ycombinator, people would go absolutely nuts and google would be considered diabolic, yet for some reason all other browsers have done similar stuff and they somehow get a pass?
If Firefox is not achieving a better standard than Google, then what is the reason for using it over the better resourced Google Chrome? Being better than Google is the bar it needs to meet to overcome the inertia of Chrome's market share
> At the same time, I would also not mind an unmozillad firefox, perhaps in exchange for a certain donation amount per year.
LibreWolf (https://librewolf.net/) is essentially this: Firefox, with the telemetry and Mozilla adware disabled. And you can use homebrew or other package managers to handle updates (instead of getting spammed by update dialogs every day or two in the browser itself).
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.
I bet that more than a few users were "turning red" --- with anger --- when they saw that shit. "Did I get infected with something?" No, it's just Firefox itself being the adware.
One of the related tickets [1] seems to give some hints on the root cause - which in a way almost makes it worse IMO.
Basically, what they wanted 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.
Unfortunately (or maybe not) the detection logic had a bug, which caused the message to pop up right away sometimes, spoiling the whole thing.
> what they wanted 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
This unnecessary bullshit is how you introduce security bugs into software. Mozilla can preach all they want about security and privacy but this shows that it's all rotten to the core.
> 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.
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.
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.
We are running a/b tests on a VPN spotlight modal in Firefox. Here's a link to the project info: Google doc
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.
Also,
"Add vpn spotlight targeting" [1]
Targeting to support https://mozilla-hub.atlassian.net/browse/OMC-419 - 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
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.
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.
It’s like Google and Mozilla just don’t want me to leave Apple’s phone OS and its browser, respectively.
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.
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.
Someone at Mozilla has to be especially dumb to have done this.
[+] [-] CrimsonCape|2 years ago|reply
https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/components/n...
"Messaging System"
"Vision"
"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."
"That voice will respect the user’s attention while surfacing contextually relevant and timely information tailored to their individual needs and choices."
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.
[+] [-] ReadCarlBarks|2 years ago|reply
Related: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/mozilla-now-only-...
[+] [-] dreamcompiler|2 years ago|reply
I really don't want to use Chrome. Please stop with the enshittification, Firefox.
[+] [-] wsc981|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SheinhardtWigCo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiffanyg|2 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/QWCINJ8uvIc?t=1m8s
(cut out some of background to focus on where he gets to similar patter)
In any case, fully agree. There are always these environmental pressures and "agents" (to evoke / use a sort of game theory modeling context) that lead to this sort of nonsense. Depending on the incentives, scope of power of people making decisions, training (esp., MBAs - simply being trained to look at "numbers in spreadsheets", essentially), etc., it's all too easy, these days, to end up with this kind of B$.
[+] [-] oconnor663|2 years ago|reply
Sometimes it's a person, sure, but I think often it's the broad system of reviews and promotions. Above a certain size, it's impossible for higher-ups in an organization to know what everyone below them is doing, and the organization has to rely on metrics. Things that are easy to measure get prioritized.
[+] [-] jorvi|2 years ago|reply
It’s ironic (and extremely sad) how they say that but staunchly refuse to add ad-blocking to iOS Firefox. And the code is already right there, in Firefox Focus.
I’ve pushed everyone in my circle to Brave and told them to disable / ignore the crypto bits.
Safety first, and unfortunately Mozilla does not care about iOS users their safety.
[+] [-] jeroenhd|2 years ago|reply
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] pierat|2 years ago|reply
Wasn't there a campaign that "no means no", and explicitly not "no means keep asking until you get the answer you were hoping for out of fatigue"?
Oh right. #metoo
[+] [-] skykooler|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeremyjh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lolinder|2 years ago|reply
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.
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 timing code. "Oops, you were supposed to see that after 20 minutes inactivity" doesn't cut it.
Mozilla has lost it, and I'm done defending them and evangelizing for them.
[+] [-] iJohnDoe|2 years ago|reply
Unrelated mini rants.
1. They fill the default new tab page with garbage content. They have amazing reach with viewers. It’s a shame they can’t fill it with quality stuff. I understand you have to pay the bills, but at least find some balance.
2. Firefox 47.x was the greatest release. I’ve never been able to keep hundreds of tabs open with Firefox. Eventually Firefox eats up so much RAM and eventually crashes. Chromium based browsers can have multiple windows with hundreds of tabs each and not crash even after being open for days/weeks.
[+] [-] justinclift|2 years ago|reply
https://librewolf.net
Not a fantastic situation, but at least it seems to work.
[+] [-] jcul|2 years ago|reply
Saying that, I haven't personally experienced any pop-ups or ads like this.
[+] [-] webmobdev|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucb1e|2 years ago|reply
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.
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.
[+] [-] lolinder|2 years ago|reply
If Mozilla becomes as bad as Google, then there's no reason to choose them over the larger and more stable platform. That's why we hold them to a higher standard—if they can't meet that standard they have no reason to exist at all.
[+] [-] celsoazevedo|2 years ago|reply
Money donated to Mozilla isn't used to develop Firefox: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/
I'd be fine paying or donating to help Firefox development, but I can't.
[+] [-] worrycue|2 years ago|reply
We have already accepted Google as the “bad guy”. “Good guys” are held to a different standard. If Mozilla want to be a “bad guy” too, they will lose to Google who has the better product.
[+] [-] SilasX|2 years ago|reply
Yes, because FF’s only advantage left is that they’ll actually respect your privacy and control of your machine. They have nothing else! If you want a browser that’s the fastest, or has full featured addons, or is mostly like to work on sites where you need it, sorry, Chrome has them hopelessly, irrevocably beaten.
Privacy is the one area where they could actually claim to be better and yet every so often they’ve shown willingness to abandon that advantage for the slimmest of upsides.
[+] [-] rafark|2 years ago|reply
Imagine if google injected random stuff without permission in a site like ycombinator, people would go absolutely nuts and google would be considered diabolic, yet for some reason all other browsers have done similar stuff and they somehow get a pass?
[+] [-] Macha|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vanilla_nut|2 years ago|reply
LibreWolf (https://librewolf.net/) is essentially this: Firefox, with the telemetry and Mozilla adware disabled. And you can use homebrew or other package managers to handle updates (instead of getting spammed by update dialogs every day or two in the browser itself).
[+] [-] dizhn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtmail|2 years ago|reply
Screenshot https://web.archive.org/web/20220308222503/https://www.mozil...
HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30608022
[+] [-] rrdharan|2 years ago|reply
They pull this crap all the time and never learn their lessons.
[+] [-] Aeolun|2 years ago|reply
When they start popping it up all over the place is when I draw the line.
[+] [-] userbinator|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] xg15|2 years ago|reply
Basically, what they wanted 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.
Unfortunately (or maybe not) the detection logic had a bug, which caused the message to pop up right away sometimes, spoiling the whole thing.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1835175
[+] [-] housemusicfan|2 years ago|reply
This unnecessary bullshit is how you introduce security bugs into software. Mozilla can preach all they want about security and privacy but this shows that it's all rotten to the core.
[+] [-] isaacremuant|2 years ago|reply
Really hate Firefox doing this kind of thing. It's supposed to be a browser that cares about the user.
[+] [-] lamontcg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] esprehn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhhaskin|2 years ago|reply
If you want to advertise, have a newsletter that people can opt into.
If you need money, allow people to pay for just Firefox.
[+] [-] imnotjames|2 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] jmuguy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ReadCarlBarks|2 years ago|reply
To disable this, users need to set browser.vpn_promo.enabled to false on the about:config page.
[+] [-] userbinator|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] scoutt|2 years ago|reply
"Firefox VPN Spotlight modal test content" [0]
We are running a/b tests on a VPN spotlight modal in Firefox. Here's a link to the project info: Google doc
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.
Also,
"Add vpn spotlight targeting" [1]
Targeting to support https://mozilla-hub.atlassian.net/browse/OMC-419 - 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
[0] https://github.com/mozilla-l10n/nimbus-l10n/issues/5
[1] https://github.com/mozilla/experimenter/pull/8853
[+] [-] sleepytimetea|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cookiengineer|2 years ago|reply
I guess I have to go back to ungoogled chromium as my main browser again and start working again on RetroKit.
Good bye Mozilla, thanks for now being the corporation hell hole that you initially fought against.
I guess that's what happens if you fire the people that actually cared for the project.
[+] [-] leroy-is-here|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ants_everywhere|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tedunangst|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gazby|2 years ago|reply
I love you Mozilla, but you've gotta do better. Please.
[+] [-] crossroadsguy|2 years ago|reply
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.
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.
Someone at Mozilla has to be especially dumb to have done this.
[+] [-] blibble|2 years ago|reply
it's becoming more and more user hostile with every upgrade
pocket everywhere, telemetry, vpn ads, disney ads, amazon ads etc
(and despite the constant UI changes it still feels like something out of 1997)