> I don’t trust the Mozilla Corporation. Putting ads on my home page a few weeks ago was the last straw.

I have my Firefox homepage set to a blank page and see nothing of the sort.

Because of your comment, I temporarily set my homepage back to "Firefox Home," but didn't see any ads. Just a a few recommended news articles.

You can deactivate the featured by pockets and the highlights sections. => about:preferences#home

>> But if Google does this, that’ll be almost worse.

Yes, google never shows you ads.

I agree that ads aren't a great solution, but the entire reason Mozilla is doing things like that is to avoid having all their revenue (and thus their existence) dependent on Google. How else do you think they should make money?

It's also worth pointing out that the included ads are targeted locally on your computer, and none of your browsing data gets sent to Mozilla (https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab-reco...).

And it's also really easy to turn them off (preferences > home > "sponsored stories").