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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Your rant is outdated. This is what "download firefox" looks like now:

http://i.imgur.com/dG7wONC.png

There are still lot of Google ads on download sites that are extremely misleading and look like download buttons. http://blog.malwarebytes.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Ad8....

As I wrote in another comment, even YCombinator invested in a bundleware company and PG defended it, so I guess the problem is deep rooted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9283176

A good illustration of how difficult it can be to download software if you're not well trained to spot ads: https://i.imgur.com/0vPdDYU.png

For you.

It looks more like the OP's version to me, including 'softonic' as the third linked one. The top two are mozilla's (and I use an ad blocker so I don't see the ad).

On Chrome the first 6 links are mozilla's then the 'download sites' start.

I don't use an adblocker and I get the same results as you (top two are Mozilla, followed by softonic), no ads present.

I personally have adblock disabled on google.com because I want to support them and I see this: https://i.imgur.com/dEnFy15.png

The ads are not gone.

I just tried it. 2nd and 3rd links install ad injectors

http://imgur.com/AChAmGp

You can't take a single search as evidence that things have changed. Ads won't always show for the search terms for various reasons (geography, language, platform, lack of ad budget etc).

With uMatrix in Chrome I see "firefox.safe-downloading.com/‎" as the top result, with the Mozilla Foundation banner below it.

My 2nd link on google when searching for "firefox" is an ad-injected installer on firefox.safe-downloading.com (appreciate the irony of the domain name).

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