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Comment by leroy-is-here | Hacker News Reader

Firefox shows literal advertisements in the “new tab” window. I recently started using Firefox again because I was told I was being “ridiculous” when I said Firefox shows me literal advertisements. And then I get this pop-up on a window which hadn’t been refreshed in several hours.

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Every time I open Firefox it presents me with some message instead of content I want. Usually in the form of a new tab. Sometimes, it's a pop-under new window (I think this is some weird interaction with its restoration of previous sessions). Every now and then, it's one of those plus some call-out bubble message or a pop-up window.

Safari practically never does that shit, which is one of the reasons I prefer it on platforms where it's available. IDK why modern Firefox is so damn eager to interrupt me. Just open a window with my last session or my default tab and shut up. I don't care if you just updated. I don't care if you're weirdly-enthusiastic about introducing me to a feature that hasn't been novel in a browser in at least a couple decades (color themes—LOL, that was just embarrassing). I certainly don't want an actual advertisement. And for god's sake, no, I still don't care about Pocket, and I never will.

For less-technical users, this stuff isn't just annoying, it can disrupt their entire browsing session. "Wait... where's my email? Is it gone? Is this the right program?" Firefox (and other teams that do crap like this, in their products) should knock it off. It is not OK.

Just set new tab to blank page. the benefits from using something like firefox and ublock origin outweigh the cons of, well I don't even know what the cons are considering my firefox is just a pure web browser as configured. One thing that's proved true over my years in tech is that there isn't any tool that works perfectly out of the box as I expect without at least some configuration and settings fiddling.

You can disable them in less than a minute.

I haven’t seen a single ad since the moment I installed Firefox and clicked “don’t suggest stuff”.

The reason people are upset isn't because you can't disable it. The frustration comes from the fact you need to be able to trust your web browser. And mistakes like this, mistakes that are so egregious, and demonstrate such bad judgement, that it makes it harder to trust something that you need to be able to trust.

Yeah they were weird to see until I turned them off immediately. I don't like the direction they've taken Pocket in with so much focus on "editorial" content. Instapaper's better at getting out of the way (even if it feels neglected).

I have. Every time it updates it opens a new tab to spam about their VPN (or whatever the flavour of the month is).

Where's the "don't suggest stuff" box? That seems much easier than the multiple about:config changes I'd have to do to turn off all of the new avenues for advertising

Ads by default are still not acceptable to me.

Yes, I am willing to pay say 100$/year for web browser if money would entirely go to development. Maybe something to support staff like CEO. But not over 5 000 000 per year ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary... )

And if such browser would be actually user-first, without ads for VPN and Disney movies (especially without ads pretending to not be ads).

I did—I saw this one. I can't keep opting out of every new abusive system Mozilla puts in. I'm done.

I disabled suggestions on installation some time ago.

Then it appears they recently added an additional sponsored option, and defaulted it to enabled, in an update, even for users like myself who had every other sponsored option disabled.

They're hardly the only organization that does this, but it is extremely disappointing. Were Firefox not the only major browser with very useful extensions, I'd certainly switch to something else.

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