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?
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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.
The only thing really offensive about it, judging from the post, is that they’re positioned before the user’s pins, not after.
I was okay with it before for that reason, but they went to far (as all eventually do).
Settings -> Homepage:
Uncheck everything “sponsored”.
Done.
People keep giving Mozilla shit for taking money from Google, yet they see an ad for a different company and lose their shit.
I don’t mind as those are easy to switch off.
This has been the case for several years. Super easy to turn them off
Cool. Willing to say how or is that a secret?
It’s a secret reserved for smart people
it’s a secret only those who dare venture into the scary “settings menu” can learn about it. most don’t come back alive.
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/sbp/sbp/1990/00000018/00000002/art00014
Oh noooo. Sounds like you’re about to off yourself. What a huuuuge* loss. Anyway.
Edit because I didn’t write enough mourning u’s.
I think the downvoters can’t hold these two thoughts in their mind at the same time:
- Firefox is the best browser.
- Firefox has serious problems because Mozilla is a terrible steward of it.
Firefox is the best browser
It’s only real competitors, in my eyes, are Firefox forks.
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”.
Let the people downvote. These points don’t matter. I turned off the visibility of points. I am immune, my morale is unbreakable. The downvoters have no power here!
Agreed. I love Firefox and don’t really like Mozilla.
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.
Wow, that’s levels of commercial removed that I did not think possible, given how much FF sell themselves as being against this sort of thing.
Seems fine to me, they need to make money somehow.
There are some more privacy friendly forks of “Firefox for Android”, which have sponsored shortcuts disabled or minimized by default. For example:
Feel free to give them a try :)
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.
The perplexing thing is that unlike Thunderbird, I have never seen them ask for donations
Be that as it may we are old enough to know foss needs support.
I myself rarely click on some campaign for donations, I prefer the coffee button or whatever they have on their page or bithub.
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?
Don’t give them new ideas, Sony might jump in and patent that too.
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Was trying to reference this
Maybe I should have added a paragraph somewhere in there. I was typing fast because I only get so much time on my break at work.
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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?
Open source projects shouldn’t have “making money” on their priority list. I would donate to Mozilla if I had some guarantee that my money would actually fund Firefox development
But why does (some) people want every software to be open source if making money can’t be an objective? /genq
You should see brave lol
I bailed on brave when I learned more about the shenanigans that one dude pulled.
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.
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:
- 2020: This is a pretty dire assessment of Mozilla
- 2023: Remember when Mozilla made a web browser?
- 2024: Mozilla is an advertising company now
- 2024: Mozilla’s Original Sin
.
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.
It’s a real shame what’s happened to Mozilla. Maybe Trump will add browser software to the list of sanctions on China and we’ll end up with a Deepfox in a year or two.
And it will be running on Deepin also
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.
It’s amazing what you can pull off with free labour and CIA funding. I also find it funny how that donation banner still shows up every year when they’ve already accumulated so much capital.
Serving Wikipedia is a different order of magnitude vs building a web browser
Okay but you mean which is harder?? Both projects rely on a bunch of salaried professionals supervising an army of volunteers. Firefox is a web browser, i.e. notoriously the space shuttle of software. But the Wikipedia is doing some surprisingly innovative and cutting-edge stuff with its own codebase too, as I understand it. Whichever is costlier, I’m not sure we’re talking about an order of magnitude of difference.
I’m not an expert on either codebase but I believe the main driver of complexity with developing a browser engine is the sheer number of standards and how fast they change and multiply. Wikipedia has to update articles and maintain the server backend, which is no small task with such a global and comprehensive website, but Firefox has to do similar things on top of vastly more complex code with much more churn. There’s a reason Mozilla developed Rust as well.
Wikipedia has to update articles and maintain the server backend
Firstly, updating the articles is the one thing Wikipedia doesn’t do, the army of unpaid volunteers does that.
But as for “just maintaining the backend”, the Wikimedia Foundation does far more than that. It created and maintains and constantly iterates a huge pile of ever-complexifying frontend code - the wiki itself, discussion software, media tools etc - not just for Wikipedia but for a whole bunch of peer sites. Much of it is pretty cutting-edge, it’s used daily by many thousands of editors and there’s also the accessibility requirement. I know from personal experience that there’s nothing harder than front-end when you have to tick the accessibility box. No doubt Firefox’s technical challenge is greater but really the difference is not night and day.
Also, not being able to set the home button to a custom URL is fucking crazy. I want the home button to take me to my selfhosted dashboard that has all my services and links on it. I don’t want the home button to take me to the dumbass firefox page and have to click another link to get to it.
Been using Kiwi instead for this sole reason but now Kiwi is dead. I’m not willing to concede this workflow and make an extra click because Mozilla is braindead and can’t implement a functional home button like every single browser since the beginning of time.
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What part of it doesn’t work? Rather than resorting to name calling I would instead say what the problem is. You will get way more help when you aren’t being a jerk.
Are you talking about Firefox based browsers or is my link broken? Firefox allows pinning a web page to start and setting a home page.
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You can set it to custom and to my knowledge that’s always been true.
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What a nice person
???
I think they mean on mobile as opposed to PC. I can’t find any option besides the dashboard-style homepage offered by default. I can customize it, but I can’t make it a specific URL.
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Well first of all, rude! Second, where was that stated? Oh it wasn’t? You just felt like being a little bitch on the Internet for no reason? Honestly, relatable.
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As is mine. But the post and discussion itself are about sponsored links on the home page which are present and look exactly the same across platforms. You’re the only one talking about the android app. Despite making zero clarifying statements in your original post, you still have the audacity to lie like anyone else is with you on this, and call me names when all I’ve done is go out of my way to try and help you. Well, suck my whole ass, dick!
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