Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage
bleepingcomputer.com
bleepingcomputer.com
Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unrelated page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077360 - May 2023 (328 comments)
This is the first time where I got a visceral feeling that maybe this isn't the browser I knew and loved anymore. It's not like I'm uninstalling and switching to something else, but I do feel bummed out.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15941302
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144
I feel similarly to you...long-time user, bummed out by stuff like this. Sometimes it feels like Firefox would be a lot better off without Mozilla occasionally making deals like this.
Maybe that arrangement led to the stagnation of Firefox, without malicious intent from any party. Hanlon's razor, yadda yadda
Once you get into corporate politics it's the exact opposite.
God help you if you ever get into the nuts and bolts of governmental, or gasp intergovernmental politics.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
Edge is available on Windows, Linux and macOS, so it would probably do. But that would allow one of Google's biggest competitors to drop an under-performing product and lobby for antitrust against Google. Unlikely to happen, but a risk Google might not want to take.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
Firefox is the only "credible" competitor, although Firefox's only profitable customer is Google itself.
There's such a marginal difference between the quality of the two browsers, and Chrome is held back in what it can be by the necessity of furthering Google's commercial interests. The only limit Firefox has had is that they can't abuse the trust of their users. Firefox had to voluntarily (and often aggressively) inflict a huge amount of reputational and functional damage on itself to reduce its market share to the place that it has.
edit: it's important to say that they didn't really backslide technically; it's user-hostile (management) decisions that have hurt the browser, not anything to do with the skill of Firefox developers.
It is questionable, and being declared a search engine monopoly would be far worse for Google than Chrome being a browser monopoly. They only make Chrome to push their search/ad network.
So they spend all of Mozilla’s money on various BS like Pocket and now VPN to try to make more money so they can further increase their already high salaries, instead of reinvesting into Firefox - hence the anti-user intrusive ads, the reduction of head count while paying themselves millions of dollars.
IIRC, didn't Mozilla lay off some R&D team that was doing some promising work on modernizing and improving its browser engine?
Mozilla were stupid enough to try and sneak this Roboto stuff in, probably as part of the requirements or intentions of the ad campaign, rather than be transparent about it. Stupidity rather than malice.
The VPN ad is a targeted decision comingffrom within the non-profit. I sort of get it, Mozilla is desperate for income because Google is keeping them afloat, barely anyone who donates cares about anything but the browser, and the for-profit ventures aren't gaining much success.
They've made it clear they don't believe their own language about privacy and user choice. They've compromised one product to advertise another. And perhaps worse, they doubled-down about it in Bugzilla with corporate doublespeak, which to me is the tell that they'll absolutely do it again.
It's amazing how apt the trust-thermocline analogy is.
I'm not sure I agree. The Mr. Robot "promotional easter egg" was done by installing an add-on via the Shield Study system. This system is enabled by default, and it is intended to allow the Firefox devs to run A/B tests with browser features.[1] This sort of system already makes some non-trivial minority of users bristle. For Mozilla to co-opt it specifically for an advertising campaign perfectly validates the concerns of that group of people. So then we get a thread on HN[2] in which several Firefox devs post about how badly they and their colleagues felt about the whole debacle, and how it would undoubtedly lead to many internal conversations. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that happened, and apparently[1] Shield Studies now require some level of scientific rigor behind them before they are deployed. But unfortunately, the marketing department still seems to be willing to sacrifice the ever-diminishing good will their remaining users seem to place in Mozilla as the steward of Firefox the browser. It doesn't feel to me like they fully appreciated the lessons of 2017.
If you mean would it be better or worse if they did a more traditional pop-up ad promotion for Mr. Robot like they did for their VPN service...I dunno, unfortunately I've grown to expect new Firefox releases to have found excuses for promoting Mozilla services, even though I've done a fair amount of work to try to disable all that nonsense.
At the end of the day, it's all pretty gross really. What I'd really like is a way to pay Mozilla actual money in a way that ensured it was directed solely at development of Firefox in exchange for not doing any of this stuff to me. But for some reason this doesn't seem possible.
I mean if it wasn't an add-on at all. If it was a piece of javascript or even C++ contained directly inside the program, that triggered on the same about:config setting. A traditional easter egg.
I'm inching closer to using the Duck browser full-time. If you haven't tried it, give it a shot to see if it works for you.
It's not as customizable as Chrome or Firefox, but it gets the job done if you don't do a lot of heavy lifting with your browser.
Right now, I'm 60% Safari, 10% Firefox, and 30% Duck. And I use Firefox less and less lately.
This is includes settings for removing or disabling all the integration with Mozilla services and their ads.
See for example: https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js
I don't want my browser to be a vector from which you push your blogs, Mozilla. I want a browser that isn't Chrome
But as a Firefox user from the very beginning, I still keep tabs on it, hoping that it will improve enough for me to return to it. Things like this, however, strongly indicate to me that Firefox is just lost and will never find its way back.
I do want to like Brave, as it is Firefox II in spirit, but the combo of web3 crap, Chromium and the fact that it still pings outbound (with it all 'off') puts me off entirely.
Maybe it's time for me to fork KHTML and do what needs to be done.
The writing was on the wall as KDE moved to first QtWebkit and then the Blink based QtWebEngine.
At least it was a small scale experiment and not something that rolled out to the whole install base, I use Firefox on a couple of computers and didn't see it myself. But should you really need user feedback to know that inserting an overlay that looks like in-page ad content is a bad idea?
But Firefox is an ad supported browser and has been for nearly 2 decades.
That they want to take ownership of the advertising is no surprise. Who knows when google will turn off the faucet.
But this is definitely not the right way
An apology needs three parts: admission that you did wrong, expressing regret for your wrongdoing, and a change in your behavior so that you don't do it again.
Mozilla's tendency to just do the first two and skip the third means that, in my view, those weren't real apologies.
Introduced by a bunch of gaslighting that it isn't actually happening or isn't anything different that what was always happened, then interleaved with accusations of bullying and entitlement directed at its userbase.
Two reasons: clueless management who chases short term returns, and a rabid fanbase that will constantly make excuses for them no matter how much they decline, because "at least they're not Google/Microsoft"
To their defense, that ought to be more about the rate of decline that Google/MS goes compared to Mozilla. It is usually supported out of necessity, not ideology. But I'm not sure for how long this will actually work.
For me it's been downhill since they removed "Compact" UI density, and I'd just as soon not jump through a bunch of custom CSS hoops to have sidebar tabs when nearly all the other browsers (outside of Chrome/Safari) are building them in natively. The main thing going for Firefox is being the independent rendering engine, for customization and power user features it's nothing special anymore.
They are completely out of their depth and not fit for their job.
Trust me, they're politically aware of what they are doing, and are only gauging outrage now. Give it some time and they'll figure out how to leverage the outrage, as they did before.
Never let a good crisis go to waste, and all that.
Mozilla got rid of their founder, Brendan Eich, for donating to a California initiative against gay marriage. Now we see what that costs us.
Also, I know this is the internet, but disapproving of one person doesn't mean that you're promoting another random person that wasn't even part of the conversation. If you want to bring Bezos in, at a minimum you're required to find a single person, living or dead, who thinks that Bezos's donations were fine but Eich's were terrible.
I know no one is promoting Bezos. I'm just saying it's ridiculous how Bezos gets to white-wash incidents like this while causing untold harm to society, while Eich legitimately was furthering good causes in good ways and a single personal superficial detail prevented him from continuing to do that.
Having the best pool of workers in the world aren't going to make a difference[1] if they are working for power-mongers who use outrage to achieve a coup.
The reverse is not true - having fewer skilled workers to choose from can be irrelevant when they are working for someone who is focused on goals that are aligned to the user.
IOW, there's no point in having the absolute best and the brightest people employed by self-serving schemers who wanted to use firefox as a vehicle for their political/virtuous ambitions.
There might be, however, a point in having "only" the 90% best people employed towards making firefox better.
[1] And, it looks like it didn't make a difference.
Short answer: Well, compared to FF and the fine article that we are commenting on ... yes, it's certainly a model that FF could adopt!
Long answer: I don't see ads in Brave. I don't recall even installing any third parties to block ads. As far as the adtech space goes, Brave is indeed more ethical than FF (or Chrome, or Edge).
Now if you are of the view that, ethically, blocking ads is a bad thing, then I'm afraid we cannot actually discuss this any further, because there are very few arguments that will get me to change my mind about blocking advertisements, not least of which is the ad under discussion, i.e. "FULL-SCREEN-IN-YOUR-FACE-COVER-EVERYTHING-AND-STOP-THE-USER-FROM-DOING-ANYTHING-UNTIL-THE-AD-IS-DISMISSED" type of ad.
It's concerning that someone at Mozilla designed this and didn't see any problem with foisting these dark patterns on their users. This is the kind of user-hostile design I expected from Microsoft Edge not Firefox, which I thought was trying to be a user-respecting alternative.
Oh actually they do have their source available: https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle
In 2021, Mozilla CEO received $5M in compensation. I don't really consider them a non-profit.
Mozilla's primary sources of revenue are for setting the default search engine. $500 Million.
What absolute lies. All they would have to do is a quick search on HN and boom - enough user input to last quite some time. In my country (perhaps others), the best way to "continuously work[ing] to understand the best ways to communicate with people who use Firefox." would be to actually communicate with people... "Ultimately, we accomplished the exact opposite of what we intended in this experiment" No, you got called out for trying to cheat people.
Typical Mozilla. At this point I don’t know why they even allow bug submissions from the public at all.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1835158
Nothing to see here, folks!
(until marketing comes up with its next blunder)
Seems to me that businesses operate within an incentive structure that will always encourage them to take maximum advantage of users and do anti-user things no matter what their original goals were. The non-corporate part is key imo (see Canonical, Mozilla now etc.)
On Gnome, "Web".
On macOS, Safari may not pass your "non-corporate" requirement, but it's spiritually non-corporate, and functionally "just a browser". It's also wicked fast and extremely light on your resources.
On many platforms, "ungoogled-chromium" may satisfy your needs. It's under the name "eloston-chromium" in many repos. https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
https://html5test.com/results/desktop.html
Looks like its the worst. Unless you have something proving otherwise. Till then I'll assume all your facts are bullshit.
I'm trying to ungoogle and switched to Vivaldi without enough research. Its a really nice browser and I really like the community around it (like their Mastodon service), but I basically jumped from one corporation's browser to another.
Self-plug but my indie conferences [0] promote software that respect the user's quality of experience. One of my favorite presentations that we've featured is SerenityOS (including their open-source browser) which made headlines at the time. [1]
It's as if someone there is determined to undermine this browser's reputation.
They are completely pathetic and dysfunctional as an organization.
Its not just and overlay but code added to the webpage?
I'm awe struck at the stupidity of this idea.
Put another way, when you allow ublock or whatever you're using permission to intercept requests for ALL pages, that includes the "page" that mozilla is using to serve this ad.
Further evidence in favour of this hypothesis is that the ad can temporarily disable the rest of the firefox UI until you deal with it, which normal pages certainly can't do.
My main browser has been Waterfox which I update manually, which doubly insulated me from this. But don't misunderstand...I hate pretty much all browsers now, too.
Webassembly engine is one of the simpler things to implement in a browser. It's essentially a giant switch statement in a loop.
> let alone the rest?
But who said a new browser has to implement everything from scratch? Why couldn't a browser use well established libraries for things like image decoding, webasm, JavaScript, font rendering, webrtc, http, etc?
https://www.techspot.com/news/98811-windows-365-boot-paid-su...
https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/24/windows_365_boot_prev...
The browser does a lot of my computing now, and I'm not surprised the "General Purpose Browser" is disappearing, replaced by an appliance with user-hostile behavior that might, maybe, sometimes ... give you some internet browsing. Remember AOL Online?
The solution isn't very complicated. Copyleft [1] uses copyright to preserve user freedom, instead of restricting it -- so the company that wants to monetize the software can't block the user from making copies of the source code.
Let's skip the quibbling over Affero GPL, that's boring. How about inventing a license, where the license restricts the valid activites of the software?
A browser restricted to only make network requests authorized by the user. An OS restricted from spying on the user. A computer that is personal again.
Like, I can understand maximising profit, but you don’t have to enrage your user base to achieve your goals
Here Mozilla decided to place a nice target on their backs asking for money.
Cui Bono as they say.
This is entirely driven by a simple fact that in ad-supported businesses users are not the same as the customers.
I advocated several times and will do it again - Firefox should completely embrace a freemium browser business model, align incentives with its users, and attempt to have a second golden age (first was 2005-2010).
IMO open source works best as a community implementing small, single-purpose programs, which the users can integrate however they’d like. Web browsers have gotten too monolithic and the internet has gotten too over-complicated for a healthy open source web browser to exist.
Also their address bar behavior was way different than Chrome or FF, and it kept messing me up.
It might be better now, they've had many updates since I last used it. Might give it another go, now that FF is doing this stuff.
With Vivaldi I can be sure that my preference will not be removed in the next version as unnecessary or as not popular enough. And there a LOT of preferences to customize as you want.
So, I personally, love it. Again, its not perfect with performance and bug minor happens, but for me its ok. I prefer the feeling that I decide what browser will do and how it feels. Not some corp.
With that said, after reading the bug reports and comments a sense of indignation did wash over me. But only after reading the comments. I honestly forgot about it right after clicking the button.
The best place to show something like this is probably in an update splash screen. "Hey great news you're updated to v.next, you might want to know about our VPN thing too"
Turns out it does two dozen queries on every start. Mostly to unknown Mozilla services but also a few from Google and others I couldn't identify (IP on either AWS or CloudFlare, likely just more Mozilla). And when it can't resolve those hosts it seems to continually retry every few seconds...
Before the apologists arrive, try it yourself. Disable all your add-ons and set your homepage to blank, close Firefox, start wireshark, start Firefox and watch the avalanche.
Also, has Mozilla VPN also a windows client, or is it more like the Opera Proxies (which were called VPN for some reason)?
I can see ordinary non technical users who want to "buy a VPN service" going with this as a decent option. It seems to be fairly consumer friendly and have a well documented setup process.
I now want this for mullvad too tbh
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/protect-your-container-...
Yes, actually has something for all three major Desktop OSes, iOS and Android. [1]
I also think that while mozilla may handle my finances, mullvad handle the VPN. Mozilla doesn't get the technical details of mullvad and thus don't know what IP I'm on, and I don't think mullvad know my name. Sure it's not quite cash in an envelope, but paranoia comes with a cost too.
> Also, has Mozilla VPN also a windows client, or is it more like the Opera Proxies (which were called VPN for some reason)?
No idea, but it has a linux client and an ios client. It's a nice simple wireguard VPN
I wonder if they showed the ad to Mullvad users?
Also, Mullvad is unique in that it generally doesn't do commissions or special sale prices, etc. The "top rated" VPNs on review sites and YouTube channels are usually the ones paying the most in commission. And it's a reason Mullvad is rarely in the "top rated" lists -- it doesn't pay commissions.
I wonder how that works with Mozilla? Surely Mozilla is getting a commission?
That's very different business arrangement than Mullvad paying commission for customer acquisition.
It mostly caused mild exasperation.
I want FF to survive so this gave me mixed feelings.
First off: they are allowed to try things!
Great they are trying to keep the income incoming.
Bad that they don’t know their users enough that they are attempting this tack. It screams of expensive external consultants building a campaign… Depleting the funds for FF.
That Firefox would fully intend to insert full page unskippable adverts of it's own into unrelated websites is a major accusation and there is evidence this was an accident.
Looks more to me like bleepingcomputer purposefully sensationalized the issue as clickbait.
Also note the weasel language of their statement: "We’re continuously working to understand the best ways to communicate with people who use Firefox. ...".
"Communicate" my *ss. It really makes my blood boil how the Mozilla management hijacked Firefox for their unethical bullshit (because it happens again and again, as soon as the dust has settled over the last 'accident').
But Firefox has all kind of promo things (the latest I saw was adverts on their overview/links page - which you can also disable), so the presence of a config item for this doesn't mean they intended for it to show up where it did.
They did this a couple years ago as well to similar backlash, that time with a plugin that they force-installed for users.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077360
seem to indicate that Mozilla intended for the popup to be shown if the user is AFK for 20 minutes but that timer malfunctioned
The last thing I want is my browser popping something up when I'm AFK.
I don't know exactly what anyone else experienced. What I experienced is: I was away from my computer and noticed that my Syncthing[0] folders were out of date, so I used KDE Connect[1] to make sure Syncthing was running on my PC, which opens a tab connecting to Syncthing on the local machine in the default browser - Firefox in my case. Some time later, I unlocked my PC and found the advertisement on top of my Syncthing admin page.
So yes, it popped something up while I was AFK, though I can't guess whether it would have done so if I hadn't remotely triggered a new tab. Needless to say, I was very surprised to see that behavior from Firefox, and even more surprised that despite posts to reddit and HN complaining, I didn't find a report in Bugzilla.
Wow, that would have been a whole lot worse than what actually happened!