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Comment by freediver | Hacker News Reader

I mean this:

Having to see mentions of Nazi camps on my home page or seeing a notification for Facebook containers although I don't use Facebook. All that bloat being enabled by default is troublesome and goes against very principles Mozilla advocates.

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Right, you mean the content Mozilla shoves into new tab. I disabled this the first time I saw it. Not going down in the browser I use. Should it ever be impossible to disable, I'll switch browser in a blink.

It is two clicks to remove that entire "Highlights" section.

I think you missed the point of “behavior enabled by design”. Of course I can remove it, as can someone who just stepped into a pile of poo clean their shoes. We’d just prefer that the pile of poo didn’t exist by default.

No "principle Mozilla advocates" says that the start page should default to blank.

It should not default to ads, at least.

Very little of the content on the default start page is ever paid advertising. AFAIK it's a few of the Highlights, sometimes.

So they look like ads, which erode trust from users, and they don't even get paid for them. That just makes it more stupid.

They're mostly thumbnails of Web sites people have recently visited or visited frequently, i.e. they look familiar. I don't think they look like ads to most people, and I certainly wouldn't conclude they do without actual data.

So... disable it?

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