Firefox app on android. Never seen this before until today. But Firefox is now putting ads in the app?
you can literally turn it off. firefox is one of the last good browsers out there.
They’ve been doing it on desktop Firefox for ages
Wow. Wtf… Thats absolutely ridiculous.
Edit: oh its the tab page. Never used it…
There are more shitfox
Explain? I use ironfox and its great.
WaterFox and LibreWolf are decent alternatives if you get tired of needing to opt out of Mozilla nonsense.
Fennec!
Use Fennec on FDroid. While you can, lol.
They’ve always done that afaik?
Oh fuck that.
I always wonder how these links even work. Who would even click on them except by accident?
Former employee here. Firefox has been adding sponsored content to the new tab page since Firefox 60 in 2018. Their support article gives a good amount of detail on how it works, but perhaps more importantly for you, how to disable it.
Now? That’s one reason I stopped using it 10 years ago
And what do you use now?
As has always been the case, you can turn off Sponsored Shortcuts and Sponsored Stories.
Yeah… Never knew that setting existed because this is the first time I’m even seeing a sponsor.
If it was something besides some big Corpo I’d probably not have minded…
Mozilla’s #1 sponsor is Google, which is why you’ll see two Google logos on a fresh install of FF (after you click through their initial setup screens)
You expect them to work for free?
They get donations. Lots of them. And it is open source. I don’t expect ads in firefox, no
So you donate, do you? Or are you working for free in general?
I contribute to a major Bionicle fan project. Yes, for free. I’ve been offered a reward for my work on said fan project. I refused it.
Oh, so you do free work on a project that doesn’t do anything good for the internet, the internet users, internet freedom, and so forth - and that makes it okay to demand that you are provided with free software, that competes against multi-billion-dollar companies?
They get some small donations from some users… and Google.
It being open source means nothing. Open source developers still need to eat. It just means that you could remove all the things you don’t like.
I don’t get ads in Blender 3D.
Or Krita.
Or OBS.
You are severely underestimating the development burden of a modern web engine.
You’re severely underestimating the development burden of an industry standard 3D modelling program, much less the Swiss army knife that Blender 3D is.
If The Blender Foundation can operate with donations from big corporations like NVIDIA and AMD without selling out, then Mozilla has no excuse.
They’re both mature software packages with a ton of features. There are two gigantic obligations that a browser & especially web engine have that creative software don’t: massive security exposure and constantly changing web standards. Both create development burdens that are both non-trivial and time-sensitive. Many FOSS projects update at their own pace, which is simply not an option for a modern, feature-complete web engine.
Mozilla gets fucking loads. Way more than it can spend on Firefox. Like a certain online encyclopdia.
Ads are greedy, unwanted, and symptomatic of the culture there. They can fuck right off imo. And most open source software manages to avoid ads, why do you think that is?
Mozilla gets fucking loads
From Google. And if that deal disappeared, Mozilla would probably go bankrupt or rely on a worse deal from another provider. Neither would be good for Firefox development.
It makes sense that Mozilla wants to branch out, diversify. It just sucks that they’re terrible at doing it. Would have been cool if Mozilla operated like Proton or any other privacy-orientated service provider.
most open source software manages to avoid ads, why do you think that is
Because they have scruples and usually have financial issues as a result.
Firefox would be better off without Mozilla at this stage. The donations mozilla receives from individuals supporting firefox would pay for a large dev team easily. Google is a total red-herring and this money is spraffed on exec pay afaict, and they should be ending this today, as has been said by many other people
If that was true, then why don’t we have a fork of Firefox being developed by the community that is better than Firefox?
The only thing we have now are forks of Firefox. Sure, some are better, but all still rely on Mozilla’s upstream contributions. If Mozilla stopped supporting Firefox, these forks would be dead. They just add some features and UI changes. They are not working on web standards, fixing implementations of those standards, or security fixes.
And freeloading is the reason why we have an ad-based economy… Do you donate? Do you work for free?
I have worked for free on OS projects, I have donated to OS projects. None of this changes my opinion that Firefox should not have ads
settings > shortcuts > uncheck ‘sponsored shortcuts’
Opt-out is still toxic
Yeah but Firefox doesn’t get their income like google does
They will never compete with Google by adding ads to the browser. I pay for Kagi, I would pay for Firefox too, but I guess most people wont.
Yeah but it doesn’t change that it’s sh*t. It’s no justification
How do you mean its not justificatin? If noone is paying you would you still go to work?
If we want firefox to be good again we need to pay for it, or rather give some symbolic amount that will be huge for them because there are tousent of people using firefox.
Even thou they are losing users for years and now hawe only a relativly small procent of world populacion. Which is bad because people dont understand that firefox is open source and chrome is proprietery.
And dont even understand what open source means… Thats why we are in situacion like this where google is controling everything…
I turn everything off in Firefox’s new page except search! I always found the news stuff distracting too.
that’s typically what i do but on desktop i turn off search too since a) i use the awesomebar primarily and b) my ntp is a background and i’d rather see that for a cleaner look :)
You should be able to turn off “web search” too if you go to the page mentioned in the parent comment.
(Note the Edit icon in the corner of the homepage does not give you all the options. It used to let you turn off sponsored content, but Mozilla removed that a couple versions ago.)
I think people need to appreciate that Mozilla is probably the only company in the world that will allow you to turn off ads like this, for free.
Ah hahahaha no. That’s not even close to true. Do we seriously need to mention the dozens of alternative web browsers out there?
There are not dozens of alternative browsers. There is Chromium, Safari, and Firefox, with a few niche options that aren’t really production ready yet and may never be. The “variety” you speak of is just Chromium in lots of disguises.
And here, my friend, you forgot what OP was posting about. Let me refresh your memory. Built in advertising. They don’t like it. So … even if we ignore the dozens of non-Chromium non-Firefox based browsers on the market, like you did for no good reason, OP could still solve their problem by using one of these derivatives.
Facts and logic, together!
So condescending for no good reason…
Anyway, I didn’t forget. I just pointed out that we have an illusion of choice, and that a lot of people who use Firefox do so, at least in part, to fight the Google monoculture.
As for your claim that there are dozens of alternative browser engines on the market, you’re going to have to provide some evidence for me to take that seriously. And remember I was limiting the scope to browsers that could feasibly be used as a daily driver for the modern web, not some pet project that crashes when you try to load DoorDash.
Low friggin’ bar.
Low bar, but that’s how far our options have sunk.
Yet one so many competitors fail to clear.
Thankies…you solved a problem I didn’t know I had
