A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox
Almost all the links in my front homepage are sponsored now. What's next, a few ads in the bookmark bar? How about when I enter a URL, I then have to type "McDonald's" before I can actually navigate there?
The browser itself is free, and they have to make money somehow to keep the company running (if the CEO didn't keep most of it for themself). If you don't like it, you can turn it off or download an ad-free fork.
These can be turned off. Not great that they’re on by default, but you gotta pay the bills somehow right?
Yeah, this is basically the least offensive thing possible that ensures the lights stay on.
Remember when most sites had simple banner ads, and there was no widespread outcry about how much they sucked and we needed ad blocking software? Then they started flashing, then the popups and pop-unders came, then vids started autoplaying, and now here we are.
If advertisers hadn't gotten greedier than banners on the sides of sites, maybe no one would've gotten around to blocking all their shit.
Pop-under ads were obnoxious. As were the popups that were like 1 pixel large but it still had the windows bordering around it.
People keep giving Mozilla shit for taking money from Google, yet they see an ad for a different company and lose their shit.
I say let them cook a little, they arent drowning in donations and still do a tone of things for foss communities.
Let's remember that the de fuckto market (ie pleb) alternative is overwhelmingly Chrome.
We dont need such projects just so we as individuals can have privacy focused experiences but also for how that influences markets and society. And to have any influence you need certain power of masses.
The perplexing thing is that unlike Thunderbird, I have never seen them ask for donations
Be that as it may we are old enough to know foss needs support.
I myself rarely click on some campaign for donations, I prefer the coffee button or whatever they have on their page or bithub.
They had a very successful donations drive a while back. They might still be good.
Can't you remove those?
Yup, you can turn it off.
It's not overly difficult to get to the setting either.
There's literally a settings button on that new tab page to take you right to the correct setting.
Yeah but you can literally just turn this off with no fuss.
1.Firefox for Android.
2.Tap the menu button.
3.Tap. Settings.
4.Tap Homepage.
5.Deselect Sponsored shortcuts under Shortcuts.
This has been the case for several years. Super easy to turn them off
I think the downvoters can’t hold these two thoughts in their mind at the same time:
Firefox is the best browser
It's only real competitors, in my eyes, are Firefox forks.
No it's the complaint about one of the few transparent revenue flows Mozilla managed to pull off.
It's disabled one step deep on the settings
There is a shitload of stuff going wrong with the Mozilla foundation and this doesn't even make the top 10.
That's the reason for my down vote: it's nothing I want this community to focus on. It's basically engagement bait with the topic "ads bad".
Agreed. I love Firefox and don't really like Mozilla.
If we want software to be FOSS we have to stop bitching so much about developers trying to make the math work.
One could posit an ideal public sector development studio that takes grants from the state/federal government to produce useful Open Source software. Think public radio or public broadcasting, but for apps.
Hell, it isn't even wild in the current moment. Modern day AWS and Azure subsidize much of its small/new user client base with the massive public sector clientele. OpenAI and DeepSeek are both the product of giant state-sponsored initiatives to develop AI that is free at point of service. Plenty of the original internet architecture was the product of public investment and grants, as was the university-centric ARPNET that would eventually be commoditizated into the commercial World Wide Web.
Look up the history of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the pioneering of Mosaic, the first widely available GUI-based web browser. It was the foundation for both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, which licensed the original design for the tiniest fraction of what it would ultimately generate in future revenues.
See ads, "how dare they" Sees paid version, "how dare they" Development costs time and money, pick your poison.
If they make some money from harmless icons, I mean, I can live with it
Better than the unlabeled sponsorship behind the default search engine.
Personaly those shortcuts are a feature I literally never use so much so I don't even register their existence anymore.
Skill issue 
Just turn it off. If they don't have income they don't exist.
Mozilla already has Scrooge McDuck amounts of money. It doesn’t need any more to maintain a browser and an email client.
From jwz, who founded Mozilla & Firefox:
.
Mozilla had a duty to preserve the open web.
Instead they cosplayed as a startup, chasing product dreams of "growth hacking", with Google's ad money as their stand-in for a VC-funding firehose, with absolutely predictable and tragic results.
And those dreams of growth and market penetration failed catastrophically anyway.
(Except for the C-suite, who made out quite well. And Google, who got exactly what they paid for: a decade of antitrust-prosecution insurance. It was never about ad revenue. The on-paper existence of Firefox as a hypothetical competitor kept the Federal wolves at bay, and that's all Google cared about.)
Now hear me out, but What If...? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?
As I have said many times:
In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
- Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
- Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
- There is no 3.
Mozilla already has Scrooge McDuck amounts of money
no. they don't.
the google money that they rely too heavily on, may not always be there. they need more diverse funding. these paid placements, which can be turned off, are one way to do that.
turn off and delete the sponsored stuff at install, never see 'em again. it's not like they're microsoft or something, constantly turning that kind of shit back on with every-other-update.
So how exactly were you planning on them making money if they don’t take money from Google to be the default search engine and they don’t take money to place advertisements on the default home page?
You should see brave lol
Or, ya know, literally any other browser that's not a fork of Firefox.
This is why I torrent firefox pro using Limewire.
Ads are one thing, but this seems excessive and probably unintentional. Looks like someone just filed this bug, which is another sign that it might be an unintentional problem: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1944704
The best thing about this is that you can turn it off
@UltraGiGaGigantic Sorry about that, not quite what is expected to happen. I understand that it has been looked into and has now been resolved.
someone on lemmy has a bit of a hateboner for mozilla.
