Alert HN: Mozilla puts advertising into Firefox AGAIN

[throwaway81523]

See: How to customize Firefox Suggest settings, https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-suggest

They have added a new option to Firefox privacy settings, enabled by default of course, to allow "suggestions from sponsors" to "occasional"ly appear in the navigation bar dropdown, as if they were bookmarks. I noticed this by seeing a link to Office Depot in the pulldown, wondering what Office Depot page I had bookmarked or in my history, and discovering that it was an in-browser "sponsored suggestion". It appears to work by sending all your navigation bar typeahead to Mozilla so it can match you with a sponsor (oops about that privacy, lol). I'm not sure how recent this "feature" is, but I think it is recent, and I only noticed it today (I'm on LTS Firefox but installed an update a few days ago). Maybe the less stable releases have had it for longer.

Turning the sponsored suggestions off is not that difficult (see the url above for instructions), but Mozilla's unceasing obsession with inveigling advertising into the browser is... disturbing. Another day in the enshittification of the web.

[xyzal]

Don't put ads in -- show a "support Firefox development" button instead

[Rastonbury]

They will always let you turn it off, the way I see it is necessary evil for the greater good. The less reliance on daddy Google the better

[wkat4242]

Just let us pay for it directly then.

Instead of this roundabout thing with the "Mozilla Foundation".

I donate monthly to KDE and yearly to FreeBSD and I would pay for Firefox too if I could, but I want to pay for Firefox and not for all the other stuff they do.

Amd when I pay I want none of that ad stuff in it of course. Time for a Firefox Premium paid version.

[dotcoma]

Luckily, there’s a solution…

https://librewolf.net/

[no_time]

It does indeed look superior. But getting the 2nd most important software on my PC from a group of randos with not even full names and God knows what level of opsec is just too scary even for me.

I've been toying with the idea of setting up a build enviroment for LibreWolf myself but that would still require auditing the patches and their changes as they come in every day.

[Alifatisk]

I would switch to Librewolf but I can't find it on iOS. I like that Firefox is able sync with my other devices.

[RGBCube]

Does it support Firefox accounts? It's too useful to not have

[drakz]

And here we go again, Mozilla pissing its users, just few weeks ago after they pushed their VPN ads into Firefox.

[solarkraft]

I've been thinking about starting an "un-Mozillaed" distribution of Firefox for a long time. Maybe the IceWeasel brand is now free?

[archerx]

Ironically Firefox was the "un-Mozillaed" version of the Mozilla browser back in the day and Firefox was released as the lean, unbloated, very fast version of the Mozilla browser and now we have come full circle.

I have stopped using Firefox after using it daily for years because I was just so sick of their updates making things progressively worse.

[JHonaker]

It’s called IceCat, and it already exists.

[pawelduda]

I missed tree tab extension in Firefox the most, now I'm using Brave and they just added vertical tab bar, which does the job for me. Strongly recommend it. Also they don't revamp the top bar every update with cool new color themes.

[ShamelessC]

You "missed" it? Tree Style Tab in Firefox still exists and works better than ever for me.

[gary_0]

I stopped updating Firefox on version 89.0 because I got tired of having to unfuck it after every update.

[veave]

What I did when I used firefox was using the ESR version. It also comes with ads but you can disable them and you know they won't reenable them. And at least you get security patches.

[sha-3]

How long would they send security patches if we stop updating?

[PurpleRamen]

Seems to be there since October 2021[1], and US-only. As so far there was no big rage in the last 2 years about this, I would think this is not such a big deal for most remaining users.

[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/firefox-now-s...

[its-summertime]

> We are in the process of rolling out a new offering to improve the Firefox Suggest experience. This feature requires access to new data and is only available to a small number of users via an *opt-in* prompt. Mozilla collects the following information to power Firefox Suggest when users have opted in to the improved experience.

I would assume anything outside of that is inferred from local data, much like firefox's new tab page does

[aswerty]

Looks to be only in the US the advertising is being run (for now) according to the link you shared.

> Note: Firefox Suggest is currently available in the United States. For users outside of the US, only local results (browsing history, bookmarks and open tab suggestions) are provided.

[MaxikCZ]

My homepage showing most visited sites got started showing ads, masking themselves as sites I visit the most (needles to say I never visited them before) just 2 days after I arrived in Dominican Republic from Europe. As soon as I noticed the ads I just uninstalled the browser, which is basically the strongest signal I can send.

[MaxikCZ]

I got ads in my "Most visited sites" picker homepage to amazon and adidas. Uninstalled the browser right that minute.

[lock-the-spock]

But every other browser is worse...

[ChrisLTD]

I think we may be using the term “enshittification” a bit too freely. But I suppose there’s no stopping it.

[smoldesu]

> but Mozilla's unceasing obsession with inveigling advertising into the browser is... disturbing.

Why? It's Open Source.

[zorrolovsky]

Because Mozilla misleads users with corporate-speak bs, telling them that they respect their privacy when in reality they have a history of doing anti-user nasty stuff.

Today, the public is well aware that G, Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc... spy them and monetize their data to sell ads. So most people using products from those organizations know what to expect.

What Mozilla does is worse than FAANG. They release anti-user and spyware features but they have the nerve to preach in their site, docs, UX, etc about how they "lead a revolution to save the web" and "deeply care for user's rights". Perverse and disgusting.

[activiation]

Yeah I guess the few people still using it can modify the source code and compile it...