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Comment by a5aAqU | Hacker News Reader

> My new tab window should have no advertisements in it, because you are a nonprofit.

"Non-profit" doesn't mean that money magically appears out of nothing.

> pushed me ever closer to just giving up and going to Chrome, where at least they exploit me in predictable ways.

Chrome is worse, and the ways are much more intrusive. They aren't even predictable. If people keep attacking Firefox like that, there won't be any choice but Chromium/Google, and then it will get even worse.

In Firefox you can usually turn off the things you don't like. Just turn it off.

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> > pushed me ever closer to just giving up and going to Chrome, where at least they exploit me in predictable ways.

> Chrome is worse, and the ways are much more intrusive. They aren't even predictable. If people keep attacking Firefox like that, there won't be any choice but Chromium/Google, and then it will get even worse.

I understand where they're coming from: With Chrome I don't see those ads. They are probably exploiting my data, but I don't see ads that come from the browser. Firefox on the other hand shoves the ads right under my nose.

> shoves the ads right under my nose

You can turn them off.

You can't really turn off the ads with Google. Chrome is designed to send you to Google Search where you are encouraged to click on ads and visit other Google sites instead of the URL you intended to visit. That's why they turned the URL bar into a search bar. At least in Firefox you can split search into a separate box.

I'd normally agree with you, but Firefox has so many knobs in the about:config and they change often enough (and e.g new ones appear) that it's a game of constant surprise, thinking you turned off all of x, only to find something very similar popped up somewhere else and you didn't know about it because it's a buried about:config preference

Mozilla hasn't always made the best decisions in the past few years, but there are better ways to communicate things to them than lashing out and threatening to on quit every update. People regularly do that even for things that are easily turned off in the normal settings. If Firefox disappears, it's going to result in a far worse outcome.

> "Non-profit" doesn't mean that money magically appears out of nothing.

It appears already from Google's pockets. First why dont they try to be lean instead of shoving ads to users all year long? How many millionaire execs do you need to run a non-profit?

Because Google could cut funding from them at any moment. I literally use Firefox in order to not be dependent on Google's whims, so I think it makes sense for Mozilla to move towards a position where they too are not dependent on Google's whims.

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