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?
People keep giving Mozilla shit for taking money from Google, yet they see an ad for a different company and lose their shit.
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.
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.
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!
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”.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can not make the home button go to a custom URL in Firefox Android… I already explained it.
???
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!
Funny how others knew it was Android but you couldn’t figure it out, hmmmmm
You can set it to custom and to my knowledge that’s always been true.
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What a nice person
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
And Brave has significantly lower costs, given they don’t develop an own engine, but rather just put lipstick onto Chromium.
Or, ya know, literally any other browser that’s not a fork of Firefox.
I bailed on brave when I learned more about the shenanigans that one dude pulled.
See ads, “how dare they” Sees paid version, “how dare they” Development costs time and money, pick your poison.
I was okay with the sponsored links, but now this is affecting the functionality of the app. My phone is shit and I have a hard time sliding to the next page.
but now this is affecting the functionality of the app
This shit irks me so much, because it keeps happening!
There’s this feature that makes your address bar randomly auto complete sponsored URLs instead of your actual history. Pretty fucking annoying to type
nand have Netflix pop up, even though I don’t use it.When you disable this “feature”, it still breaks your autocomplete! Now instead of suggesting Netflix, it just sometimes doesn’t suggest anything before I continue typing.
If you must add these anti-features to pay for your CEO, at least don’t break the app when it’s disabled!
I think you can make it only autocomplete your bookmarks in the settings.
You can disable sponsored shortcuts on the homepage settings, if that’s what it’s referring to
Everyone is too busy being angry to click the little gear icon.
Eh, the criticism isn’t invalid - those are still ads being added on the front page. What does irk me is people talking about how something breaks their workflow, yet they don’t even try to fix the issue.
@UltraGiGaGigantic @lemmylurkaround Actually, I would gladly pay for a browser that is just doing its job.
I need one for macOS and iOS, preferrably one solution for both.
Could you point me in the right direction, please?Pay how much and how often?
$20 a month? $50 a month.
I’m not really sure what you’re getting at?
I understand that my circumstances are unusual but I would absolutely pay $20 a month without a moment’s hesitation.
I would pay $50, but I’d really have to believe in the project.
It’s worth noting that presently mozilla earns $0 from my not using google, and not seeing sponsored tabs.
It’s worth noting that presently mozilla earns $0 from my not using google, and not seeing sponsored tabs.
I thought Google pays (or paid?) Mozilla just to be the default engine out the box, regardless of whether you change it or not.
Another point is that it’s so easy to turn those things off (the sponsored shortcuts too) that I wonder if it would be worth the cost of launching an alternate version behind a paywall while making sure it works only for people who pay (which could be seen as DRM anyway, with potentially massive backslash). So I imagine the end result would not be that profitable (whether they decide to paywall it properly or not). Those who wanna donate and have no ads can do that already, those who want a cleaned up version of Firefox can have that and from neutral and independent third parties which I’d argue is better than if it were Mozilla who did it (and you can donate to Mozilla while using those too)… so I’m not sure it would make sense.
But it would make sense to have a donation pool specifically to fund Firefox development. That would be something interesting, considering Mozilla does other things besides Firefox. But I expect they don’t do that because they probably fear all donations will move there and they don’t want to lose funds for other things. We might need to create a separate organization if we want an independent fund for Firefox-based browsers.
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.
Name an internet browser that costs money
Name an internet browser that’s not rigged to show you adds, or one that doesn’t havest your data.
Y’all can use LibreWolf or BestHomePageEver if it really bugs somebody. I do get being annoyed by shortcut ads though.
I wouldn’t recommend LibreWolf to the average user as they’ll unfoubtedly stretch their attack surface thin.
It’s not gonna make them more exposed than vanilla Firefox
