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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

The dark pattern in one image:

https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/10/07/suggest.jpg

I and I think many others chose "Customize in settings" -- but the actual opt-out is that hard-to-see, third button in small print. We didn't "get opted-in automatically" -- it's this dialog we "opted in" with.

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I would choose that button particularly because the "not now" button sounds like it would prompt us again in the future. It really doesn't sound like an opt-out.

Geez, why doesn't Mozilla simply ask for donations if it needs money for development. Imagine if all free open source projects operated this way. Advertising on computers is a virus. Just when you think you have it eliminated or under control, someone starts spreading it again.

It might make the majority of people lose trust in them, even if they were doing it for the right reasons and were actually going to use the money for the right purposes. People just associate that kind of behavior with scams and poorly run organizations.

So what happens when you press customize? From looking at a relevant changeset[1], it seems that only Allow enables the ads (setting suggest.quicksuggest.sponsored), while Customize does not (and the comments specifically says the user remains opted out). The related bug is marked as confidential[2].

Incidentally, here[3] is an interesting list of settings relating to the address bar that may or may not be documented elsewhere.

[1] https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-beta/rev/6348c24c98c...

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693126 I may be remembering this wrong, but most bugs on bugzilla are open to the public, this one isn't, presumably because they weren't interested in public discussion

[2] https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/d3de5eaaaa15

I don’t even remember seeing this image. It was enabled on three separate machines.

Oh my, that is absolutely fiendish. I had to check the image a couple times before I found 'not now' in the corner.

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