“looks like Firefox quietly added ads into the address bar” | Hacker News Reader

“looks like Firefox quietly added ads into the address bar”

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I would guess a lot of Firefox's core users (the ones who evangelize it, install it for relatives, file bug reports, write plugins, etc.) stick around because this browser has been a hedge against uncomfortable trends in big tech, many of which were spawned from ad tech. Going the way of ads seems like a dangerous line to tinker with if Mozilla wants to maintain the trust of these users.

Maybe there is a way to do ads well that isn't intrusive and that adds value to the UX. Or maybe it will annoy people and damage the brand by de-differentiating Firefox from Chrome and Brave. I like to give Mozilla the benefit of the doubt, because it's important that they innovate, but getting into the ad business feels like it could be a deal with the devil. Maybe you make more money---but if you lose your soul then you're just another browser ready to be replaced by the next shiny thing.

Yep. It's way beyond anything I consider acceptable. I'm disgusted, really.

It's still pretty fresh, so it's possible my opinion softens later, but right now I'm thinking it's appropriate to consider Chrome and Firefox pretty much equivalent on 'ethical' (or whatever you want to call it) grounds.

Google is far more of a concern than Mozilla, but at this point it feels like Chrome is out to get you less than Firefox is.

I nearly acted on my impulse to start switching everything over to Chrome. The only thing that saved Firefox here is the memory of some concerns about adblocking on Chrome in the future. I haven't looked into it much, so I don't know how significant of a concern that is. But functionally no adblock is worse than being forced to turn off user-hostile options, so, here I remain. I guess. For now.

Yea, I can't even imagine the furor if Chrome were to do this and make it opt-out. Very unexpected from Mozilla, even with my lowered standards of the last half decade.

> Yea, I can't even imagine the furor if Chrome were to do this

But... Chrome does do this. They're just not labeled as ads.

Type the letter "K" (or any other single letter) into your Chrome search bar on a fresh profile and tell me what you see. Because I see an awful lot of "contextual suggestions" that are not really any different from ads.

https://imgur.com/a/baXZDrN

Welp. I guess that's my daily dose of 'oh god everything is actually worse than I thought and I don't know why I'm surprised again.'

There's no way that's a decent no-history guess for what is intended.

Not saying I ditrust you, but do we know for sure that those are paids ads not unpaid sugesstions?

I don't honestly think it matters. They're effectively ads in practice regardless of whether they're paid or not.

But I do get the feeling that "Kahoot", a mobile game I've literally never heard of, isn't an organic result.

I get zero suggestions for that within Google Chrome.

https://i.imgur.com/2uREs6u.png

I think it may be your own history popping up there.

I think there's some weird A/B test shenanigans going on with this one. I have a machine where some letters or whole words will get google search results and ads with images in the first few entries of the dropdown, but on my main machine it's just google searches and then history/bookmarks at the bottom.

It's not my own history because I have no history, I use Chrome exclusively for things that are completely broken on Firefox, which is mostly just 1 or 2 google websites.

Yeah, I think it might be A/B testing as well. I don't get any suggestions from typing K. Everything that popped up is from my history.

Also, not really related, but from my experience, Kahoot is really popular in education. I bet at least 80% of my classmates in college have used it at least once. I am a bit surprised you never heard about it.

I don't think I understand your point. Are those ads, or just entity search? Or are you saying you don't think that the distinction between paid autocomplete results and rich autocomplete results are meaningful?

Mostly the latter, but I also don't think these results (especially the first one) are organic.

Surely you'd agree that most people _do_ recognize this distinction though? And that's what relevant to whether the would be a furor, not your personal view on what makes ads harmful, which is rather idiosyncratic (regardless of whether it's more defensible/correct).

I'm switching to Nyxt browser on Linux and keep only Safari on Apple devices. Mozilla indeed developed a brilliant way to lose last 5% of market share.

Browser vendors know they need to change this gradually as a sudden impact would spawn a fork with a slight chance that it might catch on. Mozilla is certainly trying to boil some water here, but I think Google is worse in the long run.

Mozilla is still dependent on Google for funding, so the situation is already bad.

>Maybe there is a way to do ads well that isn't intrusive and that adds value to the UX.

There isn't.

Okay, I'll bite.

I believe ads can exist if I consent to being shown them BEFOREHAND and alternatives, such as paying to opt-out completely are offered. The world is vast and changing with increasing velocity. I cannot keep up with all the possible tech products and services coming out even if I had a theoretically perfect RSS feed combined with other follows/subscriptions to content feeds. If a product is commercially successful to the point where they can afford to throw dollars at a probability of acquiring a new user, there's no fundamental reason why that behavior is necessarily bad/unwelcome. If I visit a news website, I want to be presented (before assaulted with ads) with a notice that provides me the option of paying for the content or seeing ads. Off the top of my head, spiegel.de follows this paradigm. A level further, and within reason for a downloaded/heavily-used/customizable software such as web browser is the opportunity to see ads that are relevant to my interests by affording me the option of indicating my interests to the platform before ads are shown and the ability to easily discriminate arbitrarily against a specific ad or categories related to any ad I don't like for any reason. If I don't like the ads a company shows me, even on the free version, they should not be repeated. If I don't want any category of ads that must be fine, but they company may opt to place a generic request for support of their corporation a-la-wikipedia funding request-- I am using their software for free, after all...

But to say there isn't exploring the full range of UX that can be afforded by modern software systems.

I say this as someone who is deeply disturbed by this latest update and will stop recommending FF as an alternative to chrome with superior privacy settings. Your reply just struck me as horribly defeatist. Ads are not leaving the web, but they _can_ be served with far better motives than they are currently.

AFAIK, YouTube actually losing money by offering paid ads opt-out.

Really? I've heard from YouTubers they make drastically more money from Premium viewers ( those who pay for no ads) and "regular", ad-paid viewers.

I have no source to back up this claim but I think SergeAx is referring to YouTube themselves making less money.

I think you are right in saying that YouTubers make more money, but YouTube themselves might lose more by not showing ads.

Advertising is, by definition, both intrusive and poor UX.

Look there's just people who don't make purchasing decisions based off ads.

> Maybe there is a way to do ads well...

At the very least, they should have made it opt-in rather than opt-out. I don't like them quietly sneaking a pre-enabled advertising option into the configuration options.

And they know it's a potential privacy issue, since all the address bar suggestion options are already under the "Privacy & Security" settings.

If they were opt in, would they even make back the investment it took to build the feature to begin with?

There's the simple “we're sponsored by Twarfle this month”. But I guess it's less valuable to the advertiser. As for adding to the UX, still no.

I must ask those who are still sticking with Firefox over Chromium-based browsers, especially those who do so soley for the purpose of staying off a Google web monopoly, to what end? When and how do you think Mozilla will ever do anything to help the web? They integrate all of Google's non-standards just as quickly as Google does, take Google money, and then do adamantly anti-user stunts like this and the Pocket and the incessant VPN shilling. And it's significantly harder to make a good version of Firefox, you have to mess with userscripts or profiles or LibreWolf or cross your fingers and hope some nebulous omnipotent distro maintainers just take care of it. With chromium there are several builds with the spy and suck stripped out readily available because most of it is blobs or API keys, very easy to just exclude at build time. See https://chromium.woolyss.com. I make this comment partially because this is one of the more egregious things Mozilla has done recently but also because I've recently switched to Chromium myself and the whole experience is much faster and smoother so I recommend everyone do it. Happy to be debunked.

For me it's just a WAY better browser. It's faster in the newer versions and scales better (keeps FAR more tabs than Chrome). I have chrome running too for docs and Google properties but FF is my main browser.

My favorite is the address bar which is on a completely different level to chrome. I just type a vague memory and it finds what I'm looking for in my history. Amazing. As others said ad blocking is better, facebook container etc. Also removing anything related to google is a big plus especially after stuff like this: https://dev.to/codenameone/google-play-kafkaesque-experience...

Notice that in code we use CEF since there's no real alternative. I'm purely talking about the experience as a user.

Could I switch to _a_ Chromium based browser in the future? Sure.

But if I look at the candidates?

Chrome - Privacy issues with Google, e.g. linking browser sign ins to web page sign ins, FLOC, etc., no ublock on mobile, manifest v3 limits to adblocking

Vivaldi - Closed Source

Brave - I disapprove of their past actions regarding cryptocurrency, misleading users by holding donations in escrow, or the privacy implications of inserting their own referral codes

Opera - Their new owners have a poor track record.

Edge - Microsoft's actions with Windows 10 and pushing for sign ins and the Windows Store don't leave me trusting them much either.

ungoogled-chromium - Lacks features like browser sync, no android equivalent, etc., are they going to fork it to the extent of keeping the older adblocking APIs or stick close to upstream?

So like, if Vivaldi went open source, I'd be open to trying it, but until then, Firefox it is

This is a good list of concerns to be aware of, but I think they need deeper inspection and should be balanced by comparison with the list of concerns about Firefox and Mozilla from bejelentkezni who you replied to. I think what it really comes down to is that every single one of them, including Firefox, has it's issues and you just have to pick your poison.

For Chrome, you can disable linking browser sign ins to web page sign ins and you can disable FLOC. For mobile - If you don't trust Google, you should probably be on an iPhone IMO. There I use Adguard with Safari and that works just as well as uBlock Origin and better than Firefox on iOS.

I use Chrome all day on desktop systems, but I don't sign in at all and because of that, I just don't do syncing. If I really wanted to do basic bookmark syncing though, I could do that with an extension like xBrowserSync, EverSync, etc. (or even my own). Of course those probably wouldn't sync to iPhone/Safari with some hackey procedure. I don't know if Manifest v3 will stop uBlock Origin because the maintainers have been steadily working on ways to implement the extension with it.

I don't entirely distrust Brave since they've been quick to apologize, explain and/or revert their mistaken behavior. I think they deserve some consideration for the level of innovation they're trying to achieve. For now, Brave is my backup plan for desktop at least, if Manifest v3 breaks everything completely.

Good for me that I pack lightly and I can move to another browser easily or use a mix of them if I wish to.

> For mobile - If you don't trust Google, you should probably be on an iPhone IMO

I'm sympathetic to that argument, but ultimately until Apple supports sideloading more generally, (which is likely never), that lack of control of my device outweighs my concerns with Google's privacy practices.

So you might as well be using Chrome then. They already got all of your data from your phone.

I've yet to see evidence of them siphoning off DNS queries for tracking or MITMing my queries to DDG to find out what I'm searching, but for Chrome everything you type in the address bar gets sent to google search for search suggestions.

If they did start doing so, I could switch to LineageOS or even Plasma Mobile, as my phone supports changing the OS without having to exploit a security vulnerability.

Which to be fair, the default in Firefox is the address bar gets sent to the search engine provider of your choice for search suggestions, but you can change the search engine and/or disable that in Firefox for Android, unlike Android Chrome. And on desktop you can separate the search and address bars still.

Yeah, I was just thinking about every other app that you might use on the phone.

If you only use a web browser then that's perfect for you. I am a fairly minimalist user and I generally prefer the browser over phone apps but I still use too many apps to list here easily.

The Vivaldi UI is only source-obfuscated to the extent you can't easily unpack a webpack of a react UI. There are tools to mod it considerably at every level if that is what you are after.

"Run some minified JS through a deobfuscator" is not something that cuts it as a replacement for open source for me. In particular it would mean other users can't legally distribute a version with potential future antifeatures removed

> They integrate all of Google's non-standards just as quickly as Google does

They don't. They are still publicly opposed to the most egregious Google "standards." See https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

One particular concern that always comes to mind for me, because I use Web Components at work, is that we would have gotten a much worse version of Web Components if not for Mozilla's opposition. That sort of opposition isn't possible from the vendor of a Chromium-fork.

> When and how do you think Mozilla will ever do anything to help the web?

Firefox helps the web. MDN helps the web. Mozilla SSL Configuration Generator helps the web. Mozilla has helped the web and continues to do so in so many ways. I think they'd be on the short list of who has helped the web the most.

LetsEncrypt was bootstrapped by Mozilla. Mozilla research contributed large amounts of research and development of Vorbis, Opus and AV1.

Dav1d, Wasmtime, Wgpu, Asm.js which later turned into WebAssembly. "rr", the reverse debugger. Rust, obviously. The list continues.

Exactly. We're just seeing Rust spun out of the Servo effort, does anyone really doubt that Rust can and will be used to write code that will benefit the web? Most importantly Mozilla helps the web just by keeping FF going.

Conversely Mozilla if you see this, this change is dispiriting. Including ads in Windows is literally the MS move that caused me to leave Windows for Linux a few years back. It's not the ads themselves or how they are presented that is the issue. It's the inevitable tracking that will follow on to increase the ads value.

I'm not going to leave FF immediately over this change, but I am going to investigate what tracking comes with it and ultimately I'm determined to not let my computer and it's software be turned into a device for surveilling me rather than a tool for my use.

Almost all of my favourite browser extensions come to Chrome years later (or not at all), Firefox handles extremely high tab counts very well, it provides more access to "here be dragons" configuration options, session restoration is much more reliable.

Probably loads more reasons I can't think of off the top of my head. Firefox is just by far a better user experience for me.

That's a fair question, in practical terms I don't think it's doing much. I'm worried we'll end up in a state where only one browser engine is able to access the web, so google will have absolute control over web standards like microsoft did in the IE6/7 days. That's kind of already the case and seems inevitable, but using firefox feels like a small thing I can do to register my dislike for a browser monoculture.

Also what others said about the better addons (adblockers and tree style tabs). Firefox may be more annoying to get into a good state but at least it's still possible.

Personally, I stick to Firefox because of multi-account containers, which Chrome doesn’t have (no, profiles don’t count). It’s a really sticky feature.

one of the main reasons i do is for the MUCH better adblockers you get in firefox, the chrome/ium ones just aren't nearly as good

The biggest thing for me is engine diversity. There is Gecko (Firefox), Blink (Chrome, Edge, Brave, etc) and WebKit (Safari). Since Safari is only available on Apple products it only leaves an engine controlled by Google and Firefox. I don't like the idea of Google basically controlling the path of every browser so I use Firefox. I know there are some alternatives like KHTML, but almost nobody uses them.

Tell me of a Chromium-based browser that has something like Firefox Multi-Account Containers and is as kind on my Mac's battery as Firefox and I'm out

I don't think Pocket is bad. I think browsers do need an external footprint on the web, or integrated features that make it more than just a window to run sites on. Google Docs, Office 365, Pocket, Brave Rewards/Search/Talk/News, Vivaldi's integrated notes app, mail/rss features. It's just the reality nowadays.

This essay puts forth good arguments, I think: http://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2021_09_06.ht...

The VPN service is a bit iffy as said in the essay, in that it derives its value from other actors being shitty rather than providing value by itself, but Pocket is genuinely the sort of stuff a browser maker should have. It makes the web browsing experience better and helps combat link rot by giving you hard copies of things you come across.

Of course, most vocal Firefox users don't want it, they seem to want a utopian FOSS browser ran purely on donations, but the amounts of money probably just aren't there.

One of the main reasons is tree style tabbing[0]. I don't know how people live with an endless row of little peaks that are barely clickable...

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

All features and principles aside, it's a different code base. A mono culture is dangerous for the system, remember heartbleed?

> When and how do you think Mozilla will ever do anything to help the web?

Personally, it's not that Mozilla is so great, it's that they're the lesser of the available evils.

Google removed a feature I was using daily and replaced it with a different method that was 100% incompatible with my use case. Firefox works how I want with this, so I use Firefox.

What's the deal with Google removing features, without warning, from their products that a part of their userbase still uses? They own the largest analytics platform on the planet, why go against the experience most users are used to?

They are a business company.

I've been using Firefox for like over 10 years I guess.

It's just the best browser for me, I can hack the browser UI, freely arrange the buttons and bars, and I keep 10s of plugins installed to comfortably browse, learn and work.

I've been a Firefox user since the days when it was still called Firebird. So far, none of the changes Mozilla made to Firefox has annoyed me enough to look for alternatives.

This time might be different, though.

Too long didnt read.

Install firefox, enable permanent private mode, turn off all the suggestions, set new tab to blank page, set duckduckgo as default search, install ublock origin and https everywhere.

Done and it stays like that.

The ad blocking still works properly, instead of having been deliberately crippled as in Blink.

I'll consider chrome when they have container tabs and userChrome.css

Multi-account containers

i hate google

Similarly, I simply do not trust them to not do the absolute most malicious and evil things possible. If they one day start secretly keylogging people and then get hacked revealing keylogs for millions of people, I frankly wouldn't be surprised at this point.

Oh frak, not again.

Mozilla, please, allow us to donate money in a way that we can be sure it will be used for *developing Firefox* and not for some nonsensical Mozilla Foundation project.

Mozilla doesn’t need donations. The $450 million it gets from Google each year is enough for a browser.

It’s enough to the point that the CEO is having their seven figure salary doubled in the last five years.

Any money you want to give to Mozilla is just going to be a waste: there are plenty of other open source projects worth supporting instead.

I'd rather have them distance themselves from Google and ads revenue entirely.

> Mozilla doesn’t need donations. The $450 million it gets from Google each year is enough for a browser.

It really isn’t when you factor in Gecko and SpiderMonkey.

cue the armchair quarterbacks who think you can do all of this with 20 people

$450 million is 2,250 people on $200,000 salaries.

The pay rise the CEO took over the last five years is equal to an additional 12 engineers receiving the above salary.

That’s a gross oversimplification of an org’s budgetary needs, even by back-of-the-napkin standards.

No, it’s not a gross oversimplification at all. Let’s stop pretending that the company needs more money.

I specifically picked 2,250 engineers because that appears to be more than double what Mozilla currently has. The entire Mozilla payroll is about $280 million with the remaining $170 million (!!) being spent on miscellaneous junk.

Let’s stop apologising for mismanagement and thinking throwing more money at Mozilla is going to fix its problems.

A better estimate of fully loaded cost is $350K. That's still a boatload of people if you take your simple estimate, but companies don't spend 100% of revenue on people.

Mozilla foundation has about 650 people which gives it a revenue per employee of around 600K, which is less than most SV companies.

The overall corporate spending looks very reasonable. You can look at their non-profit report: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201...

From their report, their fully loaded cost is around $280K/FTE which is reasonable for anywhere in SF/SV.

Oh come on, let’s not pretend that the only expenses a software company has are developer salaries. Especially for something like a browser that has significant security requirements.

Do you have any idea how many tests are run across all platforms for every commit? [1]

The CI bill alone is huge.

[1] https://treeherder.Mozilla.org

If they can develop a decent VPN product or password manager, I would also pay for that.

Please no. No more Mozilla junk. There are plenty of VPN products and equally as many Password Managers. It’s focusing on junk like Lockwise instead of Firefox that is causing Mozilla to consistently get worse.

Half of the critics always complain that Mozilla is too reliant on Google, the other half complain that they spend any time whatsoever on profitable side projects that give them independent sources of revenue.

How else do you propose they fund the development of their browser?

I'd pay for Firefox Relay to have unlimited aliases.

The support page about it shows that they don't send any information about users to the advertisers: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/navigate-web-faster-fir...

Also, I have it turned on but I can't seem to actually get it to show me an ad. Has anyone seen an ad in their suggestions?

It says that they're partnered with adMarketplace: https://www.admarketplace.com/

Their site uses the word "privacy" a lot but

But they did basically give a third party marketing company a key logger on your address bar.

I can see how this could be true, and I can see how it might not... who serves the ads, for example?

If it's anything like Pocket ads, all of the processing is done on-device.

It's nothing like pocket ads. They send everything you type and the item you click on. Take a look at the "What data is shared if you enable contextual suggestions?" section.

This is the section:

>To help you find information faster, Firefox Suggest uses a service provided by us to offer relevant suggestions to the text you are typing. When contextual suggestions are enabled, Mozilla receives your search queries. When you see or click on a Firefox Suggest result, Mozilla collects and sends your search queries and the result you click on to our partners through a Mozilla-owned proxy service. The data we share with partners does not include personally identifying information and is only shared when you see or click on a suggestion.

I don't think it reads the way your comment implies.

You may be right, but it's very unclear. I came to my conclusion because Firefox calls every result a "Firefox Suggest" result (see the title at the top of the results).

From https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2021/09/15/data-and-firefox-su..., it looks like Firefox (currently) matches your search terms against a local list before forwarding them. So not everything is sent, but anything including a term specified by the advertising agency.

It's unclear if it includes the entire search query or just the single word. That same blog post seems to indicate that mozilla "may" send the entire query. It also appears that Mozilla is sending city level location data.

Of course, that same blog post implies that the feature is opt-in (which it definitely isn't).

Another of their pages uses "vans" as an example, and I do see a "sponsored" suggestion when I type that. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/fi... (search the page for "vans")

Ok, thanks. Yep, when I type "vans" in the URL field I see a link to eBay marked with a "sponsored" flag.

I'm glad it's clearly marked, at least.

The sponsored eBay URL I'm given has these parameters: _nkw=vans mkevt=1 mkcid=2 mkrid=711-4011-10148-0 keyword=conducive crlp=318361097US282021100618 MT_ID=562786 geo_id=10232 device=computers cmpgn=216223

I'm not sure what each value means.

The crlp looks like it has a timestamp and geo_id appears to be a zip code. The rest is non-trivial to decode.

Seems an automatic update has led to a downgrade in functionality (newly on-by-default ads), and doesn't seem like a win for users.

Is there a truly open source browser, meaning the project collaborates with the community, and is driven by / accepts pull request contributions? A browser developed completely in the open without a corporation whose primary income is derived from said browser?

Chrome is advertising based and is not very interested in external contributions, so we'll ignore that.

Firefox is developed completely in the open and accepts external contributions, but it's deliberately focussed on end-users, not contributors.

WebKit is not a browser, but you can build a browser on top of it, and many people have. I don't think Apple is very interested in individual contributions, but I believe that (for example) the GTK+ port is part of the official source tree and that's not Apple code. Of course, it'd be very difficult to change anything about the core code in a way that Apple didn't like.

Then you've got the True Open Source web browsers - things like NetSurf, Dillo, elinks, w3m, lynx. Completely open-source, open to contributions, and generally only work on static documentation pages, not everyday browsing. That seems to be as good as it gets without the financial backing of a multinational corporation.

> Firefox is developed completely in the open and accepts external contributions

This is overstating the reality. For much of these controversial changes, supporting documentation in Bugzilla links to sources like Google docs, JIRA and Figma, which are private to Mozilla employees. Similarly it was discussed that much of the development discussion moved from Mozilla IRC (now Matrix) to the private Slack instance.

Falkon fits those criteria.

https://invent.kde.org/network/falkon

Falkon uses QtWebEngine which uses Chromium under the hood if I"m reading this right. I believe this disqualifies it from what the author's looking for or is there more to it than that?

QtWebEngine uses code from the Chromium project but doesn’t just copy it.

https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine

The browser is developed in the open, accepts community contributions, and doesn’t have any potential financial conflicts that could work against users. It could benefit a lot from more contributions, especially to the Windows and Mac versions, and there are no mobile versions yet. It’s a very capable browser as it is, but if more people joined the project, it could be the best.

Would it be necessary to remove any Chromium code to stay fully open? I wouldn’t say so, but some might disagree.

Updates are few and very far between.

Oh for fuck's sake.

When will Mozilla stop making boneheaded decisions like this?

Probably an unpopular opinion: Never. Mozilla is a hollowed out shell, destroyed by monetary needs. Clearly, today's Firefox, let alone Mozilla, is no longer a bastion of the free web, but an example of how late stage capitalism can destroy such wonderful projects.

They spend money on social causes, advocacy, and not purely on engineering. It has a product in a niche the overwhelming majority of people don’t want to pay for.

As free-to-play games have demonstrated, you don't need an overwhelming majority of people to pay. There are even ways to find out if it is going to work, such as say a crowd source campaign to pay for n years of browser maintenance and development with various levels of branded merchandise so people can signal their allegiance at conferences. So far I've just seen a donation link for the foundation, which gets a lot of hate because it funds all the stuff lots of potential donors want Mozilla to stop doing.

>As free-to-play games have demonstrated, you don't need an overwhelming majority of people to pay.

Are free-to-play games really the best example here?

Also, a lot of those are funded by ads...

Mozilla, how about trying something novel instead? Like, I don't know, maybe allowing your users to give you money?

I think Mozilla would make some dough if they did periodic fundraising campaigns similar to how Wikipedia does it. A simple banner on the new tab page with a heartfelt message on the state of funding with a link to their donation page would probably be much more simple to implement than this search suggestion thing.

Good news, you can! https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/

This is a donation to Mozilla which as they clearly don't give a fuck about Firefox's success has a snowballs chance in hell at funding Firefox development.

> Contributions go to the Mozilla Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization based in San Francisco, California, to be used in its discretion for its charitable purposes. They are tax-deductible in the U.S. to the fullest extent permitted by law.

Under US tax law, they cannot legally spend tax-exempt donated funds on the development of a for-profit product.

Yes, but that does not prevent them from spending it on some other 'priority', pet project, administration or whatever else might cross their mind other than Firefox Development.

IDK what are their actual intentions, and they might be 100% focused on FF dev, but nothing in the tax law keeps them on that focus.

Can workers in a building (or cloud, as things currently are) really be so clearly binned?

Note, that's Mozilla Foundation which is not the entity that develops Firefox. Money donated via this form would be "used in its discretion for its charitable purposes".

It is somewhat hard to find out what exactly this means, but US form 990 provides an overview (PDF): https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-2019-fo... , see page 3 and 9

$926K "Agenda Setting" -- published a report

$4,853K "Movement Building" -- urged Facebook, Snapchat, Apple and others to address issues

$10,387K "Leadeship Development" -- Fellowships and awards for technologists and researchers

$1,374K "Compensation of Officers" etc..

There is no way to donate to fund Firefox development. Here's where your donation to Mozilla goes towards:

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-do/

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/

In addition to what other commenters have said, I also don't think that they do a good job at promoting the fact that it's possible to donate.

If there were the option to donate directly to the Firefox program, and that they placed a "donate now" button here or there within Firefox and on their website, I'd happily donate as I have with Signal.

there's an ad on the incognito new tab page too

https://imgur.com/E9vHjaW

pretty obnoxious in dark mode

edit: you can get rid of this in about:config by clearing the value of browser.privatebrowsing.vpnpromourl

Soon we'll go full circle back to the days of banner ads at the top like in Opera 8.

The worst part about that ad is that it even shows up when the product isn't available in your region!

I have the latest version of Firefox (93.0) but don't have this option. Was this an A/B test or was it removed in the latest version? (the OP said they were using version 92)

Probably an A/B triggered in installations that allow Firefox studies. That's the feature used to conditionnally deploy these.

Per one of the followup tweets, that's unlikely:

https://twitter.com/ladyaeva/status/1445919761901129728

> I have "install and run studies" disabled.

This feature is a strong do not want.

Firefox seems to be following the same path of aging products like Cable TV and newspapers. It is loading the product with ad monetization until only the people who don't care about it are left. I have a hard time sympathizing when they have been paid hundreds of millions of dollars a year for over a decade. Yes, they want to diversify away from Google's payments but I don't believe it takes that much money to make a web browser, even if they are massively complicated. I also believe only a tiny fraction of that money goes towards Firefox development.

A lot of people defend Mozilla here but we have needed a decent alternative since Firefox added Pocket integration. I have used Firefox since release many years ago, and this is the last straw.

Firefox is still "lesser of the evils" when it comes to "modern" (as defined by Google, who essentially controls the Web now) browsers, but it's sad to see its decline.

I wish more web developers would stick with basic HTML and CSS so that their content could be accessible with the various other minority browsers out there. Instead we have the constant churn of an immensely complex ecosystem of frameworks and "standards" controlled by a single megacorp whose ultimate goal is to make everyone use --- and remain eternally dependent on --- none other than its spyware-infused browser. In other words, to fight Google's monopoly, we must first refuse its desire for continual change, and that is unfortunately difficult for many.

Wish the same thing as an webdev, but modern browser is almost a small vm these days..

Looks like you can set browser.urlbar.suggest.quicksuggest.sponsored to false to remove sponsored suggestions. Searching about:config for "sponsor" brings up a few items.

The point being made by the OP and the comments here is that shouldn't be necessary. When every update includes new obnoxious shit that you don't want and have to figure out how to revert, it's no longer an improvement. Fighting the software you use is a horrible position to be in.

The future for web browsers looks pretty dark

Can we have two firefox, pro without the ads and pocker for $5 a month?

"Enabled for US users only" because they'd go bankrupt due to GDPR violations otherwise.

I had disabled search suggestions because I didn't want a key logger in my address bar and Mozilla most certainly did not get my consent or notify me of any changes to the privacy policy before they helpfully enabled this "feature" for me.

Looks like a nothing here. Mozilla is within their right to add features to monetize their product and provide clear opt-outs for users who prefer “how it used to be”.

As a Firefox user, I am very disappointed at this change.

Is this maybe not rolled out to every user? I have version 93.0 installed and I do not find this option in my settings.

Found my answer on their page about Firefox Suggest[0]:

"Note: Firefox Suggest is currently available for a limited number of users in the U.S. only."

[0]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/navigate-web-faster-fir...

can I dedicate a song to certain Mrs?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ye18aMVD7Q

Calling this an ad is a bit of a stretch.

This looks like an ad: https://i.imgur.com/yCZ7UgY.png

Nvm you're right, that is an ad

Strong disagree. Ads vary wildly, including "native advertising" where companies pay news outlets to report some development on the company and pretend it's some sort of real journalism. It's still an ad.

Is HN the orange website she's talking about when she says: "also whoever posted my tweet to the orange website, fuck you" ?

Why?

Because it’s cool to hate things. Some people form identities through the things they dislike rather than the things they do like.

Because, quite frankly, this website and some of its users, suck

I'm surprised Twitter sucks less than HN, but I guess Twitter at least allows disabling comments.

This is the second Twitter user I've seen that openly hates people posting his tweets here. Both are non-traditional genders, maybe that's a relevant factor.

Edit: for a second I thought the tweet referred to Ubuntu.com :P

And one of the replies to that tweet: "yes, ywhiteguys.com is terrible." Guess where that redirects to...

Because nobody outside HN likes HN or its regulars.

A decent chunk of HN hates its regulars too, based on the comments.

Maybe the initial response here wasn't good and that's what they saw?

FWIW: I believe the original tweet and this is seriously problematic to me.

as much as i hate ads, i'm OK w/ this if it keeps firefox going. i personally can't stand chrome -- i don't know why, it just doesn't 'feel' right to me.

I'd much rather they put some big intrusive banner soliciting for donations a-la Wikipedia

The only one chance Mozilla had is to finish Firefox conversion to Rust, a complete conversion. That would have made development and updates easier. Apparently, by firing most of the team they put a writing on the wall. It's just a question of time.

Lol, what. No.

The only chance Mozilla had was for Congress and the FTC to wake up 5 years ago instead of 5 months ago.

As someone who made a couple of contributions to the Servo project, semi-followed the development and compiled and ran it every so often, all of the parts which were production ready and had a clear path to being merged into Firefox (apart from maybe Pathfinder) are already merged into Firefox. It was a research project, some parts of the research were spectacularly successful, and these were adopted and merged into Firefox. Other parts of it were less successful.

The HTML engine was nowhere even remotely close to production-grade and the interaction with SpiderMonkey was incredibly complex and flaky. Even simple sites like google.com were frequently broken. There was a rewrite [0] underway when the team was let go because various parts of the architecture were incompatible with a fully compliant implementation.

Even setting aside that half of the Firefox code is tied to engine internals such as XUL, it would have taken a few more years to get it into a production ready state. I still wish that the project hadn't been dropped, it's a real shame. But it wouldn't have "saved' them.

[0] https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Layout-2020

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