The idea that 'you are being sold' is not fair either.
You choose what to use, for how much, and the resulting product.
So if you want to pay $ a month AND have ads. Well, then do that. If not - don't.
If Mozilla wants to have an 'add free non-profit' they can do that.
But they can't because for whatever reasons - people won't pay.
Some people won't pay because they simply don't want to - and are willing to live with the alternative choice of 'having a sideload now and then'.
Other people use insufferable intellectualizations about all of it.
But mostly it's kind of greedy and irrational.
We get immense value out of web browsers. A $1 a month fee would enable Mozilla to forge ahead being the best browser, free for those who can't afford it - and ad free.
But we can't have that because we are not as intelligently organized as we need to be.
For the same reason Mozilla exists today as 'kind of a non-profit' in the first place without tons of ads.
For the same reason that Wikipedia has no ads.
I'm not 'admonishing' anyone so much as pointing out we can't seem to grasp that nothing is going to happen for free.
The only path to 'ad free' is for someone to pay for it - and that's going to have to be users - or in the very rare case -a 'Big Corp' who sees the strategic value in it.
And yes - I do agree that 'most corps' would try to stick in ads.
Heck - even 'non-profits' like Mozilla - are sticking in ads!
But given what Mozilla is today, if they had the resources necessary, I suggest they would not be pushing ads. It's the last thing they want to do.
Finally - there are tons of services that people pay for that are not full of ads.
I don't get ads when I buy MP3s, and none of my paid apps have ads.
Do you think there are ads for t-shirts in my Salesforce app? Or SAP? Of course not.
Likely because the 'profit maximizing' option for Salesforce is to not put ads there in the first place.
So 'big corp' incentives can definitely align with user needs if things are right.