Mozilla sending political ads via Firefox push notification | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla sending political ads via Firefox push notification

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99 pointspaulcarroty49 comments

Had to click through a few links to get to the campaign page that explains what this is about.

Noticed the '... American values...' in the campaign page title and facepalmed. I got the ad and am European.

They did not think this through to catch that... I doubt they thought about consiquances of politicising the browser.

Here's the #StopHateForProfit campaign: https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/zuck/?utm_source=leanplum-p...

Mozilla, please get your shit together. We like you. We want you to succeed. I don‘t get how you don’t get us. I thought you are basically us.

I half-seriously suggest fireing everyone, who was not a developer at some point. If people who‘s background suggests they truly get your importance actually come up with stuff like this, I have no hope. Everyone grab your kids and run! We were doomed all along!

Yeah, Cliqz, Mr Robot, Pocket, Fenix having no extensions in the original roadmap, this, there's just a continuous trend of poor judgement from Mozilla. I wish there wasn't.

I don't really care about their political stance or what they support (as many people claiming themselves to be slightly right of center seem to be so offended by) but using push notifications to shove that to my face is one step too far. They should just have stuck to their blog and social media.

Reminder this is the same company who have partnered with proprietary service companies to put on first-party functionality on their browsers (hi Pocket) and also used undocumented functionality to push ads on people before (the Black Mirror promo fiasco).

> Reminder this is the same company who have partnered with proprietary service companies to put on first-party functionality on their browsers (hi Pocket)

They didn't partner with Pocket, they own Pocket.

This came later [0] as originally Mozilla had partened with Pocket while they were still an independent entity as early as 2015 [1]

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/27/14752590/mozilla-acquires...

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1172126

...how does this kind of crap get approved? i use Firefox to avoid advertising and harassment from big companies.

Moz://a has joined the moral authority camp for a long time now, consequently "this kind of crap" are considered by Moz://a as a moral obligation hence perfectly normal.

[0]: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-digitized-cul...

Considering how IT is increasingly used to make people's life miserable (part accidentally, part intentionally) I actually find this is a good thing they take a moral stance.

Everyone is free to take a moral stance. Just don't push it in my face. I'll look at it myself if I'm interested.

Although a user of Firefox on PC and mobile, I have not received that notification. So maybe there was an opt-in/out somewhere to which we answered differently.

As just about every editor of a free (as in beer) product, maybe the Mozilla foundation is also expecting something from you? That would not be your data, but you spreading awareness in your circle.

Apparently it's tied to the product tips opt out from the reddit thread.

The actual title is "Why did I just receive an ad for Mozilla's blog via push notification?"

Edit: The blog post in question is actually about Facebook.

It's a bit ironic, considering a vanilla installation of Firefox has Facebook as one of the default "Top Sites"

Money does not stink after all

They tweeted out in May a list of video call apps that they had curated, when everyone was stuck indoors. Usual suspects at the top (Facebook), with trusted apps (Signal) near the bottom. It made me rethink my browser choice.

their moral stance ends in their wallet

Today I learned that Mozilla was pro-censorship, and using their install base to promote this message.

We're living in an intesting time.

Asking platforms to not host and promote violent and racist content is hardly censorship.

What's wrong with violence? Do you propose to remove accounts of violent protests from Facebook now?

People promoting violence usually means targeted violence. Proposing violence against a specific person or group of people. A protest that happens to have people in that become violent and then those some people posting online is a completely different situation than a bunch of Nazis saying we need to exterminate the Jewish people.

Aka let's ban promoting bad violence. Who decides bad or good?

Maybe I'm making my point poorly.

Allowing violent people to post online is fine. Allowing them to post violent content is bad. I don't care who the person is. I care what they post. As long as they're not advocating harm to a specific person or group of people it's fine.

I'm okay with people saying racist things from a free speech perspective (it's still despicable). I'm not okay with them saying people should go burn down the synagogue in downtown Seattle.

TBH, this point is poor. Violence and therefore promotion of violence are simply necessary in some situations. The former is even ingrained in the U.S. constitution.

Plenty of comedic and satirical shows have been censored for racism. Plenty of violent forms of entertainment have been censored. This campaign is also calling for the censorship of anti-vaccination and climate denialist views.

I've done a bit of volunteer work as a censor (moderator) and I'm not opposed to censorship. A flippant/morally self-righteous attitude towards censorship is a red flag though.

When they remotely installed add-ons for an ad deal and it blew up in their face, they promised "we've changed". I don't think they have.

I did not receive the notification despite using Firefox on mobile, but a friend did. Maybe because he uses Facebook, and I don't. But that's unthinkable, a Browser claiming to be pro-privacy sniffing around in your web-history to target you for political ads. But then again, you'd also not expect a Browser to send you push notifications for their latest blog post.

Previous submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23946568

Is being anti-violence/hate a political stance now? Fuck.

For me the political part isn't the issue - the push notification itself is. I can't stand browser desktop notifications and similar useless distractions and have blocked every kind of ad and popup in Firefox. Now the browser itself circumventing this to push some stupid blog article to me that I never asked for is unacceptable to me. Would you be fine with your image viewer, video player or file browser to push messages and suggest blog articles to you without asking? Then why should a website viewer do it?

I just want web browsers to display content I requested, block ads and otherwise just don't try to do anything clever. Which worked pretty nicely in Firefox so far.

The campaign espouses it's "American Values", they specifically talk about US electoral interference, they specifically want to remove exemptions for politicians from censorship rules, and they also want to ban groups of anti-vaccers and "climate denialists" however those are defined from their platform.

You're badly representing what's actually going on here in an effort to sound pithy.

It's not a random ad, it's Mozilla's own campaign: https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/zuck/

> Facebook is still a place where it’s too easy to find hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and calls to violence.

What a fucked-up politics we have this is not a neutral stance, but a polarizing "political view".

What you quote is not a stance, merely an observation. One can agree there's lots of socially undesirable speech (call it whatever you want) on Facebook, yet at the same time disagree Facebook ought to take their desired actions [0].

Besides, why my browser should send me a push notification for this particular campaign is beyond me. Even if I agree with the political contents this time, should I expect more push notifications of this kind in the future?

[0] https://www.stophateforprofit.org/productrecommendations

They've got to stop pulling this kind of crap again and again. They should not use their position to promote their political agenda.

Mozilla is using their Firefox browser to support their political censorship message.

What's next? Are we sure in the future that Firefox won't decide that certain sites espouse dangerous opinions and block these sites.

Mozilla's actions go against all their rhetoric about supporting the open web. They have no commitment to free speech nor any qualms about using Firefox to advance their political goals.

This pushed me to give Edge a try and I was very pleasantly surprised so I'm going to be sticking with that.

Using their privileged position of being able to push any message they want to millions of people to promote a pro-censorship message. Classy.

I've lost all respect for Mozilla by now. They're still vital for the web ecosystem as a whole. But they turned into a polititcal party and I don't like.

> Facebook is still a place where it’s too easy to find hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and calls to violence.

What an odd claim, coming from Mozilla - it's ultimately Firefox that displays all that hate and racism. If they think it should be censored, they can add a filter to the browser itself. Why leave censorship to Facebook, when clearly Mozilla is the more moral corporation, and knows better which content their users should be allowed to see?

It's the platform-vs-publisher distinction.

Firefox the browser doesn't push you towards or away from any particular content, with maybe a few caveats (default search engine, etc.)

Facebook (employees & algorithms) decide what you will see on their site.

> If they think it should be censored, they can add a filter to the browser itself.

Don't give them ideas

brought to you by company not willing to implement even optional pull down to refresh for 5+ years

one of the reasons why U don't use their buggy slow browser on Android (use outdated Kiwi Browser, since it's only non shady browser with extensions support)

Why hasn't Firefox been forked yet? Not a spin off like Pale Moon or Waterfox but an actual fork of the entire codebase. With only two real browser engines remaining the potential for an independent policitally neutral browser is high. I don't know why people haven't done it yet.

Why do you think that Pale Moon is not an "actual fork" though? They've forked off a rather old version of Firefox and kept updating and maintaining it for quite some time now, barely integrating new things from newer Firefox versions.

People are forking. The project with currently the most traction seems to be LibreWolf: https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/

However the development of such a program takes a massive amount of work (and money), which is something Mozilla still offers and any fork probably doesn't have.

It generally doesn't make sense to do so even with the resources, because you'd be duplicating a lot of work, so the "spin-off"s prefer to keep merging the original code, just excluding changes they don't like.

Free means free. It doesn't mean free only to a certain groups of people.

I can see that people feel bothered by push messages they didn't ask for, but... "political ads"?

Anyone who feels offended by "stop hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and calls to violence" needs to urgently figure out where their emotions come from.

I preferred when Mozilla made browsers

Secure ones, too.

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