15 ms·

Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage

335 points by airhangerf15 3y ago

wlesieutre 3y ago
Makes you wonder how someone thought this was a good idea in a browser that was an early pioneer of popup blockers. Imagine if Firefox in the 2000's had seen popup ads and said "Yeah let's get in on that action!" 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?
- logdap 3y ago
  Mozilla management are malicious snakes. This isn't the first time they've tried something like this and it won't be the last. Each time they issue noncommittally apologies, if you can call them that, but it keeps on happening. They're testing the water for even more ads in Firefox, trying to normalize this until people stop complaining. Keep the heat on them, don't give them an inch or they'll take a mile.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    They might not care anymore or trying to do a Hail Mary, once >99% of browser-share is just Chromium and Webkit/Safari, then popular websites might not even work with FireFox anymore.
  - wodenokoto 3y ago
    I’m not sure what “something like this” you are referring to. 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
    - logdap 3y ago
      [dead]
  - mozman 3y ago
    It's not all management. It's Mitchell Baker. She needs to step down as CEO.
    - ipaddr 3y ago
      [flagged]
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > Each time they issue noncommittally apologies, if you can call them that, but it keeps on happening. 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.
    - Macha 3y ago
      It's hard to say they even do the first two. This one for example is not "sorry we added ads", but a "We're sorry you're concerned or confused".
  - avereveard 3y ago
    To be fair I've notice that apologies for company screwups have gone up in quality significantly afte r the introduction of chatgpt, and I await their with interest to see if the trend holds.
  - roelschroeven 3y ago
    If they keep doing things like this, people will stop complaining. Because they drive users away, and there will be nobody left to complain.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    > Each time they issue noncommittally 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.
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  >Makes you wonder how someone thought this was a good idea in a browser that was an early pioneer of popup blockers. 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"
  - elashri 3y ago
    >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.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
    "Rabid fanbase"? I feel like the majority of us are only begrudging users. Best of the worst available options.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Amongst my friends, I was consider a "rabid firefox user" because I kept using it for a few years after everyone else bailed on it after quantum.
- weinzierl 3y ago
  If something like this happens once it could be a slip, but we've been there again and again. Mozilla is testing how far it can go only backpedaling when there is resistance. I don't trust them a bit and would switch Browser anytime if there was a visble alternative.
  - wlesieutre 3y ago
    Orion (from Kagi) is "planning support for other platforms in the future," if that lands for Windows I'll probably bail on Firefox 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.
- sharess 3y ago
  This ad overlay shows such a fundamental lack of understanding on what Firefox was built on that the people who greenlighted this need to go immediately. They are completely out of their depth and not fit for their job.
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    The people who greenlighted this were the people who ousted those who built Firefox. The current crop of "leaders" have a vision that does not include Firefox being the best browser it can be. 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.
    - Animats 3y ago
      > The people who greenlighted this were the people who ousted those who built Firefox. Mozilla got rid of their founder, Brendan Eich, for donating to a California initiative against gay marriage. Now we see what that costs us.
      - Sunspark 3y ago
        There would have been a cost to keeping him as well. There is a significant percentage of tech workers who are gay or trans, which would have reduced the hiring pool available to Mozilla.
        93po 3y ago
        Jeff Bezos donated more than Eich in 2018 to Cory Gardner, who is anti-equal marriage, anti-LGBT+ discrimination laws, and against same-sex adoption. It's interesting we don't hold the same standard to Bezos, or speculate that Bezos' donation affected his hiring pool.
        pessimizer 3y ago
- MiddleEndian 3y ago
  Microsoft basically got in on this with a lot of their recent Windows stuff. With Windows 7, suddenly you saw people's PCs were no longer full of adware. Then by 8 or 10, Microsoft thought, "Wait, people put up with adware for decades, let's get on that and put it into the OS ourselves."
  - intelVISA 3y ago
    Now now, it's just Good and Proper Business to Milk Your Customer Dry.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  Makes me wonder why so much of Corporate America make decisions based on "What's the outrage threshold for our users and how can we sneak up close to it?"
sandyarmstrong 3y ago
I noticed this yesterday. I've been using Mozilla/Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox as my primary browser for over 20 years. They've made some questionable calls, sure, but most of the recent things that have bothered people (like Pocket integration) haven't really irked me. 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.
- ilikepi 3y ago
  Did you miss the episode in 2017 in which they used an internal control to force the installation of an add-on as part of a promotion for a television show? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15941302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15941302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144 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.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
    I read a conspiracy that Google has paid off Mozilla management to specifically sabotage the browser development. Actions like this make it hard to dispute the moves that frequently seem deliberately anti-user.
    - evv 3y ago
      It's not a conspiracy that Google pays Mozilla for default search engine placement. Maybe that arrangement led to the stagnation of Firefox, without malicious intent from any party. Hanlon's razor, yadda yadda
      - letsdothisagain 3y ago
        Hanlon's razor only makes sense if you're a teenager posting on reddit. Just world theory and all that. 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.
psychphysic 3y ago
Wow if ad blockers can work does that mean Firefox injects this advert? Its not just and overlay but code added to the webpage? I'm awe struck at the stupidity of this idea.
- fabrice_d 3y ago
  No it's not blocked by ad blockers, since this was not injected in pages but part of the browser UI (the "chrome").
  - pleb_nz 3y ago
    I wonder why I have not seen the advert popup then. I run Firefox daily for 8 to 10 hours and I've not seen it once... Something must be blocking it for me.
    - fabrice_d 3y ago
      Looks like that was an experiment targeted to a subset of the user base, and you were just not in the pool.
    - Zak 3y ago
      As far as I can tell, it was run for a few hours and required Firefox to be left open and idle for 20 minutes before it appeared.
- red_admiral 3y ago
  Unlikely. My guess is that the ad code runs in the context of the browser itself or some newly created context, rather than of the page you were reading before, but whatever fetch() or similar call it makes to load the ad goes through a subsystem that is affected by ad blockers. 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.
- deleted 3y ago
dumpsterlid 3y ago
[dead]
slater 3y ago
Someone needs to make a "Firefox Marketing Department Greatest Hits" page; this isn't the first time, by far, they've tried to shoe-horn some absolutely user-hostile garbage into some release, followed by the usual "we will do better" back-pedalling non-apology
- i2cmaster 3y ago
  It's really a wonder Mozilla keeps going. They've absolutely lost it.
  - __turbobrew__ 3y ago
    Free google money so chrome isn’t seen as a monopoly
  - ianlevesque 3y ago
    Does 2.7% market share really count as "going"? Mozilla certainly isn't relevant anymore.
- ilyt 3y ago
  "But freedom and openness!"
- grey_earthling 3y ago
  arewefishyyet.com is available.
- netsharc 3y ago
  Yeah, something similar to "Killed by Google". Maybe we need a template on Github for such sites to catalog bullshit, lord knows there's a lot of categories of bullshit we can catalog... Oh actually they do have their source available: https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle
walrus01 3y ago
The particularly terrible thing about this is that the Mozilla VPN product is actually Mullvad underneath, one of the better and more ethical VPN providers. Then they have to do this popup ad bullshit pushed by the browser and take a dump all over it.
- super256 3y ago
  What is the value proposition of using Mozilla VPN over Mullvad directly, other than adding a layer of USA on top of it (which is a bad thing imo)? Also, has Mozilla VPN also a windows client, or is it more like the Opera Proxies (which were called VPN for some reason)?
  - walrus01 3y ago
    For myself as possible VPN end user I don't see the value proposition, but presumably, Mozilla is treating this as a new source of revenue (they get some percentage of the total monthly recurring or a one time sign up commmission or something from Mullvad?) as a way to be very slightly less dependent on Google for most of their incoming revenue stream. 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.
    - elashri 3y ago
      The only thing that makes me choose it over Mullvad is how well the integration with Multi-Container in Firefox. It is a first class citizen compared with VPN profiles support for others.
      - super256 3y ago
        I looked this up and it looks very cool! Why aren't they advertising this better? I now want this for mullvad too tbh https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/protect-your-container-tabs-mozilla-vpn https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/protect-your-container-...
  - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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ekianjo 3y ago
They always feign being sorry about doing things like that, but come back a few months later with the same bullshit over and over again, like a wife-beater. They are completely pathetic and dysfunctional as an organization.
comice 3y ago
it's a bit unclear what they intended here but I see a lot of people assuming the absolute worst intent. 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.
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  Did you even read the article? There's a screenshot which shows that this "feature" even got its own config items (browser.vpn_promo.*). This hardly looks like an "accident". 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').
  - comice 3y ago
    Firefox's responses are absolutely shit, for sure. 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.
- devmor 3y ago
  This is not the first time Mozilla has injected an ad campaign into the browser chrome. They did this a couple years ago as well to similar backlash, that time with a plugin that they force-installed for users.
  - comice 3y ago
    That sounds pretty bad but what do you mean by "browser chrome"? Isn't the claim here that they injected an ad into an actual page?
pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
> The most recent relevant report on Mozilla’s bug tracking platform received the "RESOLVED WORKSFORME" tag Typical Mozilla. At this point I don’t know why they even allow bug submissions from the public at all.
- slater 3y ago
  Now changed from WORKSFORME to FIXED https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1835158 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1835158 Nothing to see here, folks! (until marketing comes up with its next blunder)
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure "WORKSFORME" was somebody trying to be so aggressively mocking of users who complained that they forgot there was an actual bug in the ad.
- zuprau 3y ago
  This isn’t a bug, so the resolution is expected. What I don’t understand is how Mozilla thought this would work out.
  - mh- 3y ago
    Seems like it should have been WONTFIX, then.
charlieyu1 3y ago
A lot of organisations/entrepreneurs have made decisions that are so out of touch with the user base that people would question why would someone do that. Like, I can understand maximising profit, but you don’t have to enrage your user base to achieve your goals
- mulmen 3y ago
  Depends on your goals. Facebook has done well selling outraged eyeballs.
  - zuprau 3y ago
    The outrage Facebook feasts on is not directed at Facebook. That is just a byproduct. Here Mozilla decided to place a nice target on their backs asking for money.
    - mulmen 3y ago
      Sure. But my tinfoil hat is at the drycleaner so I will let you use your imagination to come up with a scenario where ill will toward Mozilla benefits someone. Cui Bono as they say.
  - john2x 3y ago
    And I guess a lot more people now know about Mozilla VPN. No such thing as bad publicity I guess?
devmor 3y ago
Bring back the browser wars. I'm tired of only having essentially two browsers to choose from, both from unethical companies that use slimy marketing speak to disguise their intentions.
- i2cmaster 3y ago
  [flagged]
- doctor_radium 3y ago
  Hear, hear! The problem is that browser complexity has exploded to the degree that at this point it seems impossible for a small team to reinvent the wheel. Who wants to write a web assembly engine from scratch, let alone the rest? 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.
  - i2cmaster 3y ago
    Meh. Webassembly has polyfills. I think an incremental approach wouldn't be as hard as people make it out to be but someone does have to sit down and do it.
  - guraf 3y ago
    > Who wants to write a web assembly engine from scratch 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?
- sounds 3y ago
  I see it as a larger trend away from general purpose computing and toward appliances: https://www.techspot.com/news/98811-windows-365-boot-paid-subscription-boot-local-pc.html https://www.techspot.com/news/98811-windows-365-boot-paid-su... https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/24/windows_365_boot_preview/ 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. [1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html
bornfreddy 3y ago
I love Firefox but starting to hate Mozilla. How many more tricks like that do they have in store for us? It's as if someone there is determined to undermine this browser's reputation.
- slig 3y ago
  It's not like their main competitor pays them half a billion a year.
jaredandrews 3y ago
Wow, I experienced this yesterday while I was absentmindedly using my computer.... I assumed I had clicked something without realizing it. The idea that it was an intentional pop up didn't even enter my head.
- millzlane 3y ago
  Same here, my first reaction wasn't anger. It was to dismiss it so I could get back to work.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  For me it hit as a double-whammy. I tried opening a new tab, but had to stop what I was doing to restart Firefox instead because of a Snap[1] update, then I got this immediately after Firefox started back up. A really nasty snapshot of where free software is at in 2023. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_(software)
  - zerocrates 3y ago
    I went through the song-and-dance for several versions to remove the Snap firefox and go back to the deb, and now that the deb is gone I just downloaded it directly from mozilla so it can use its own internal autoupdate feature. It works better that way anyway.
deleted 3y ago
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Cyder 3y ago
i gave up on firefox when i couldn't stop it from connecting to Google on a network device i was working on. Removing all the links from the advanced settings made it fail to start. That's when I realized how hypocritical they are. ( arm64 firefox-esr.) Even the latest chromium on arm64 connects to Google almost daily. i use epiphany-browser for that project now. no unwanted internet traffic from epiphany.
- ravenstine 3y ago
  Any issues with DRM content?
- guraf 3y ago
  Yeah when my DNS went sporty I noticed Firefox got very slow to load even local ips and investigated. 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.
  - intelVISA 3y ago
    Unfortunately normal for the mainstream ones, you can even see similar with Brave.
kramerger 3y ago
"The advertisement boosts Mozilla VPN, a paid open-source VPN service that constitutes a crucial revenue source for the not-for-profit company." In 2021, Mozilla CEO received $5M in compensation. I don't really consider them a non-profit.
- djbusby 3y ago
  Wish my non-profit paid like that.
  - zbuf 3y ago
    That's how you don't make a profit
- uo21tp5hoyg 3y ago
  It's intentionally confusing but "not-for-profit" and "non-profit" are two very different things and it seems the article gets them confused.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- sounds 3y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35829283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35829283 Mozilla's primary sources of revenue are for setting the default search engine. $500 Million.
freediver 3y ago
All directly or indirectly ad-supported business models will sooner or later come to the point of breakage in serving user”s best interests, as the fundamental misalignment of incentives between the business and its users creates a force too strong to contain. 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).
- whoisthemachine 3y ago
  Agreed. I can't help but think that giving normal, technical users a great browser, and then catering on bended knee to enterprises for a very controllable, supported, extended version as the source of revenue that supports the normal browser is a sustainable model. Maybe not a model that takes over the world, but one that sustains development of a good open source browser.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    Are there any open source projects run like that? The closest thing I can think of is, like, Chromium but they don’t really make a framework that anyone can customize, they are inextricably tied to Google, right? 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.
    - whoisthemachine 3y ago
      Red Hat?
dang 3y ago
Recent and related: Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unrelated page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077360 - May 2023 (328 comments)
deleted 3y ago
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hiccuphippo 3y ago
Mozilla needs a new wway to make decisions, the current one is obviously not working. New features should have an Enhancement Proposal document that the community can read beforehand and a council that approves it.
Timber-6539 3y ago
If the privacy crowd expected different treatment from a woke tyrannical organization in full control of their choice of browser, they only have themselves to blame.
millzlane 3y ago
I saw this yesterday while I was using the browser at work. At first I really thought nothing of it. It was was strange seeing it out of nowhere and I was indifferent about it. I love the browser and it has saved me time and my sanity by allowing be to block advertisements that infect us all and being reliable as a browser I can always count on to work how I want. 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.
- bentcorner 3y ago
  I saw this too and wasn't too bothered, although I wondered if there was something I did on the page that somehow triggered the "we think you should know about our VPN thing" popup. Which IMO is also a bad thing - users don't know why you're showing them that thing at that particular moment. 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"
AlexandrB 3y ago
I think something not getting enough attention is the design of the popup itself. It is chock-full of dark patterns (different sized click targets, "not now" dismiss action instead of "No") and doesn't include any way to disable similar "messages" in the future. 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.
photonbeam 3y ago
What in the world were they thinking. Are we going to have to run IceWeasel builds again
pleb_nz 3y ago
I never saw the ad and I use Firefox an day, I use ublock, would this have blocked it?
- lolinder 3y ago
  No, this was in the browser chrome itself. It covered the address bar and tabs as well as the page.
jedahan 3y ago
.
InCityDreams 3y ago
[flagged]
whatshisface 3y ago
Well, I'm not going to use Chrome, but I guess WebKit is okay... what browser should we be using now?
- triyambakam 3y ago
  Brave is pretty good.
- _xivi 3y ago
  Arc
  - pixelbath 3y ago
    Ah, yes. The closed-source, single-platform, invite-only browser made by a company nobody's ever heard of outside the startup ecosystem.
tezza 3y ago
Happened to me today. 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.
- john2x 3y ago
  I wouldn't mind seeing Mozilla VPN ads in the Settings menu or the 'new tab' page tbh. But injecting it on top of web pages directly is just scummy.
godshatter 3y ago
I keep hoping some of the laid off devs will fork the project and we can get back to a mostly volunteer model focused on just the browser. I'd much rather donate to something like that than the Mozilla foundation, at least as it currently stands.
- aio2 3y ago
  We have Librewolf fer desktop, and Mull and Fennec for Android. They are forks
tempodox 3y ago
Are the bean counters and ad freaks taking the helm? Maybe time to look for a different browser…
InCityDreams 3y ago
>"We’re continuously working to understand the best ways to communicate with people who use Firefox. Ultimately, we accomplished the exact opposite of what we intended in this experiment and quickly rolled the experience back. 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.
zuprau 3y ago
[flagged]
sinistersnare 3y ago
I think that there needs to be a level of accountability here for the programmers who did this. Tech workers need to stand up against this kind of anti-user hostility. Firefox is an openly-developed project, who wrote the code to allow this kind of attack, and should we ask them to commit to not writing such code again?
- elaus 3y ago
  I'm not sure what this would achieve? I mean, surely it wasn't some random developer who came up with this idea and implemented it. This is a management decision and management decisions are driven by the company culture.
  - eska 3y ago
    If I joined a company like Mozilla as a programmer rather than Google etc my motivation would probably be to create a privacy-protecting browser. If my company asked me to implement user-hostile features I’d just walk out. It’s not like someone like that can’t find a different job somewhere else.
horeszko 3y ago
I suppose now is a good time to ask if there are any good _non-corporate_ open source browsers out there? 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.)
- LeoPanthera 3y ago
  On KDE, Falkon. 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://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
  - vinay_ys 3y ago
    Safari – such a pleasure to use it.
  - postalrat 3y ago
    Safari is the MSIE 6 of this time period.
    - LeoPanthera 3y ago
      That's lazy stereotyping and not even close to being a useful or accurate analogy.
      - postalrat 3y ago
        It's the default browser for many people and also the browser with the most quirks.
    - handsclean 3y ago
      Safari is the fastest browser, the most standards compliant browser, and regularly updated, the only similarity to IE6 is it’s buggy. Chrome, on the other hand, followed IE’s whole playbook: leverage a platform monopoly to push the browser, then leverage browser monopoly to undermine standards, coercing devs into dropping support for the competition.
jp191919 3y ago
I use firefox everyday for several hours and I have never seen this before. In the US.
zeruch 3y ago
This was definitely not one of their best moves.
uguuo_o 3y ago
As a firefox user of a couple of decades, I am now starting to look at alternatives. Anything chromium is a big no, but there are few alternatives. Perhaps it is time to go back to using Lynx.
NickHoff 3y ago
So, what do people think of Vivaldi? I'm a long-time Firefox user but I've been scanning for a new browser for a while now. Even if it weren't for stuff like this, I'll have to change anyway when Firefox dips below ~3% and websites stop supporting Gecko.
- sphars 3y ago
  I used Vivaldi on and off over the past few years, but I've been using FF full time since late last year. Vivaldi eventually starting slowing way down for some reason. Startup took nearly 10 seconds, when it used to be < 3. Not sure what did it. It may be due to the chrome (UI) as it's a very heavy custom CSS solution. 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.
- deely3 3y ago
  I use it as main browser for the last 7 years I believe. And honestly - I love it. It have some gimmicks - sometime its slow a bit, sometime there some bugs that you have to wait for fix in the new version, but amount of customizability is a thing that overcome any issues. 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.
beefnugs 3y ago
[flagged]
Zuiii 3y ago
How do you forcefully eject an ineffective "CEO" of a nonprofit from their position when they have failed their duties and violated their org's charter/mission while giving themself unjustified pay-raises and bonuses? Is there any gov process we can invoke to hold them accountable?
s3p 3y ago
I've never seen this on my machine. Been using FF exclusively for years.

335 points by airhangerf15 3y ago

Makes you wonder how someone thought this was a good idea in a browser that was an early pioneer of popup blockers. Imagine if Firefox in the 2000's had seen popup ads and said "Yeah let's get in on that action!" 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?

logdap 3y ago
Mozilla management are malicious snakes. This isn't the first time they've tried something like this and it won't be the last. Each time they issue noncommittally apologies, if you can call them that, but it keeps on happening. They're testing the water for even more ads in Firefox, trying to normalize this until people stop complaining. Keep the heat on them, don't give them an inch or they'll take a mile.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  They might not care anymore or trying to do a Hail Mary, once >99% of browser-share is just Chromium and Webkit/Safari, then popular websites might not even work with FireFox anymore.
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  I’m not sure what “something like this” you are referring to. 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
  - logdap 3y ago
    [dead]
- mozman 3y ago
  It's not all management. It's Mitchell Baker. She needs to step down as CEO.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    [flagged]
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Each time they issue noncommittally apologies, if you can call them that, but it keeps on happening. 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.
  - Macha 3y ago
    It's hard to say they even do the first two. This one for example is not "sorry we added ads", but a "We're sorry you're concerned or confused".
- avereveard 3y ago
  To be fair I've notice that apologies for company screwups have gone up in quality significantly afte r the introduction of chatgpt, and I await their with interest to see if the trend holds.
- roelschroeven 3y ago
  If they keep doing things like this, people will stop complaining. Because they drive users away, and there will be nobody left to complain.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  > Each time they issue noncommittally 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.
ChuckNorris89 3y ago
>Makes you wonder how someone thought this was a good idea in a browser that was an early pioneer of popup blockers. 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"
- elashri 3y ago
  >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.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
  "Rabid fanbase"? I feel like the majority of us are only begrudging users. Best of the worst available options.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Amongst my friends, I was consider a "rabid firefox user" because I kept using it for a few years after everyone else bailed on it after quantum.
weinzierl 3y ago
If something like this happens once it could be a slip, but we've been there again and again. Mozilla is testing how far it can go only backpedaling when there is resistance. I don't trust them a bit and would switch Browser anytime if there was a visble alternative.
- wlesieutre 3y ago
  Orion (from Kagi) is "planning support for other platforms in the future," if that lands for Windows I'll probably bail on Firefox 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.
sharess 3y ago
This ad overlay shows such a fundamental lack of understanding on what Firefox was built on that the people who greenlighted this need to go immediately. They are completely out of their depth and not fit for their job.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  The people who greenlighted this were the people who ousted those who built Firefox. The current crop of "leaders" have a vision that does not include Firefox being the best browser it can be. 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.
  - Animats 3y ago
    > The people who greenlighted this were the people who ousted those who built Firefox. Mozilla got rid of their founder, Brendan Eich, for donating to a California initiative against gay marriage. Now we see what that costs us.
    - Sunspark 3y ago
      There would have been a cost to keeping him as well. There is a significant percentage of tech workers who are gay or trans, which would have reduced the hiring pool available to Mozilla.
      - 93po 3y ago
        Jeff Bezos donated more than Eich in 2018 to Cory Gardner, who is anti-equal marriage, anti-LGBT+ discrimination laws, and against same-sex adoption. It's interesting we don't hold the same standard to Bezos, or speculate that Bezos' donation affected his hiring pool.
        pessimizer 3y ago
MiddleEndian 3y ago
Microsoft basically got in on this with a lot of their recent Windows stuff. With Windows 7, suddenly you saw people's PCs were no longer full of adware. Then by 8 or 10, Microsoft thought, "Wait, people put up with adware for decades, let's get on that and put it into the OS ourselves."
- intelVISA 3y ago
  Now now, it's just Good and Proper Business to Milk Your Customer Dry.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
Makes me wonder why so much of Corporate America make decisions based on "What's the outrage threshold for our users and how can we sneak up close to it?"

sandyarmstrong 3y ago

I noticed this yesterday. I've been using Mozilla/Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox as my primary browser for over 20 years. They've made some questionable calls, sure, but most of the recent things that have bothered people (like Pocket integration) haven't really irked me. 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.

ilikepi 3y ago
Did you miss the episode in 2017 in which they used an internal control to force the installation of an add-on as part of a promotion for a television show? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15941302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15941302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144 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.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
  I read a conspiracy that Google has paid off Mozilla management to specifically sabotage the browser development. Actions like this make it hard to dispute the moves that frequently seem deliberately anti-user.
  - evv 3y ago
    It's not a conspiracy that Google pays Mozilla for default search engine placement. Maybe that arrangement led to the stagnation of Firefox, without malicious intent from any party. Hanlon's razor, yadda yadda
    - letsdothisagain 3y ago
      Hanlon's razor only makes sense if you're a teenager posting on reddit. Just world theory and all that. 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.

psychphysic 3y ago

Wow if ad blockers can work does that mean Firefox injects this advert? Its not just and overlay but code added to the webpage? I'm awe struck at the stupidity of this idea.

fabrice_d 3y ago
No it's not blocked by ad blockers, since this was not injected in pages but part of the browser UI (the "chrome").
- pleb_nz 3y ago
  I wonder why I have not seen the advert popup then. I run Firefox daily for 8 to 10 hours and I've not seen it once... Something must be blocking it for me.
  - fabrice_d 3y ago
    Looks like that was an experiment targeted to a subset of the user base, and you were just not in the pool.
  - Zak 3y ago
    As far as I can tell, it was run for a few hours and required Firefox to be left open and idle for 20 minutes before it appeared.
red_admiral 3y ago
Unlikely. My guess is that the ad code runs in the context of the browser itself or some newly created context, rather than of the page you were reading before, but whatever fetch() or similar call it makes to load the ad goes through a subsystem that is affected by ad blockers. 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.
deleted 3y ago

dumpsterlid 3y ago

[dead]

slater 3y ago

Someone needs to make a "Firefox Marketing Department Greatest Hits" page; this isn't the first time, by far, they've tried to shoe-horn some absolutely user-hostile garbage into some release, followed by the usual "we will do better" back-pedalling non-apology

i2cmaster 3y ago
It's really a wonder Mozilla keeps going. They've absolutely lost it.
- __turbobrew__ 3y ago
  Free google money so chrome isn’t seen as a monopoly
- ianlevesque 3y ago
  Does 2.7% market share really count as "going"? Mozilla certainly isn't relevant anymore.
ilyt 3y ago
"But freedom and openness!"
grey_earthling 3y ago
arewefishyyet.com is available.
netsharc 3y ago
Yeah, something similar to "Killed by Google". Maybe we need a template on Github for such sites to catalog bullshit, lord knows there's a lot of categories of bullshit we can catalog... Oh actually they do have their source available: https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle

walrus01 3y ago

The particularly terrible thing about this is that the Mozilla VPN product is actually Mullvad underneath, one of the better and more ethical VPN providers. Then they have to do this popup ad bullshit pushed by the browser and take a dump all over it.

super256 3y ago
What is the value proposition of using Mozilla VPN over Mullvad directly, other than adding a layer of USA on top of it (which is a bad thing imo)? Also, has Mozilla VPN also a windows client, or is it more like the Opera Proxies (which were called VPN for some reason)?
- walrus01 3y ago
  For myself as possible VPN end user I don't see the value proposition, but presumably, Mozilla is treating this as a new source of revenue (they get some percentage of the total monthly recurring or a one time sign up commmission or something from Mullvad?) as a way to be very slightly less dependent on Google for most of their incoming revenue stream. 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.
  - elashri 3y ago
    The only thing that makes me choose it over Mullvad is how well the integration with Multi-Container in Firefox. It is a first class citizen compared with VPN profiles support for others.
    - super256 3y ago
      I looked this up and it looks very cool! Why aren't they advertising this better? I now want this for mullvad too tbh https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/protect-your-container-tabs-mozilla-vpn https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/protect-your-container-...
- 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ekianjo 3y ago

They always feign being sorry about doing things like that, but come back a few months later with the same bullshit over and over again, like a wife-beater. They are completely pathetic and dysfunctional as an organization.

comice 3y ago

it's a bit unclear what they intended here but I see a lot of people assuming the absolute worst intent. 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.

flohofwoe 3y ago
Did you even read the article? There's a screenshot which shows that this "feature" even got its own config items (browser.vpn_promo.*). This hardly looks like an "accident". 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').
- comice 3y ago
  Firefox's responses are absolutely shit, for sure. 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.
devmor 3y ago
This is not the first time Mozilla has injected an ad campaign into the browser chrome. They did this a couple years ago as well to similar backlash, that time with a plugin that they force-installed for users.
- comice 3y ago
  That sounds pretty bad but what do you mean by "browser chrome"? Isn't the claim here that they injected an ad into an actual page?

pwdisswordfishc 3y ago

> The most recent relevant report on Mozilla’s bug tracking platform received the "RESOLVED WORKSFORME" tag Typical Mozilla. At this point I don’t know why they even allow bug submissions from the public at all.

slater 3y ago
Now changed from WORKSFORME to FIXED https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1835158 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1835158 Nothing to see here, folks! (until marketing comes up with its next blunder)
- pessimizer 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure "WORKSFORME" was somebody trying to be so aggressively mocking of users who complained that they forgot there was an actual bug in the ad.
zuprau 3y ago
This isn’t a bug, so the resolution is expected. What I don’t understand is how Mozilla thought this would work out.
- mh- 3y ago
  Seems like it should have been WONTFIX, then.

charlieyu1 3y ago

A lot of organisations/entrepreneurs have made decisions that are so out of touch with the user base that people would question why would someone do that. Like, I can understand maximising profit, but you don’t have to enrage your user base to achieve your goals

mulmen 3y ago
Depends on your goals. Facebook has done well selling outraged eyeballs.
- zuprau 3y ago
  The outrage Facebook feasts on is not directed at Facebook. That is just a byproduct. Here Mozilla decided to place a nice target on their backs asking for money.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    Sure. But my tinfoil hat is at the drycleaner so I will let you use your imagination to come up with a scenario where ill will toward Mozilla benefits someone. Cui Bono as they say.
- john2x 3y ago
  And I guess a lot more people now know about Mozilla VPN. No such thing as bad publicity I guess?

devmor 3y ago

Bring back the browser wars. I'm tired of only having essentially two browsers to choose from, both from unethical companies that use slimy marketing speak to disguise their intentions.

i2cmaster 3y ago
[flagged]
doctor_radium 3y ago
Hear, hear! The problem is that browser complexity has exploded to the degree that at this point it seems impossible for a small team to reinvent the wheel. Who wants to write a web assembly engine from scratch, let alone the rest? 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.
- i2cmaster 3y ago
  Meh. Webassembly has polyfills. I think an incremental approach wouldn't be as hard as people make it out to be but someone does have to sit down and do it.
- guraf 3y ago
  > Who wants to write a web assembly engine from scratch 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?
sounds 3y ago
I see it as a larger trend away from general purpose computing and toward appliances: https://www.techspot.com/news/98811-windows-365-boot-paid-subscription-boot-local-pc.html https://www.techspot.com/news/98811-windows-365-boot-paid-su... https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/24/windows_365_boot_preview/ 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. [1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html

bornfreddy 3y ago

I love Firefox but starting to hate Mozilla. How many more tricks like that do they have in store for us? It's as if someone there is determined to undermine this browser's reputation.

slig 3y ago
It's not like their main competitor pays them half a billion a year.

jaredandrews 3y ago

Wow, I experienced this yesterday while I was absentmindedly using my computer.... I assumed I had clicked something without realizing it. The idea that it was an intentional pop up didn't even enter my head.

millzlane 3y ago
Same here, my first reaction wasn't anger. It was to dismiss it so I could get back to work.
AlexandrB 3y ago
For me it hit as a double-whammy. I tried opening a new tab, but had to stop what I was doing to restart Firefox instead because of a Snap[1] update, then I got this immediately after Firefox started back up. A really nasty snapshot of where free software is at in 2023. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_(software)
- zerocrates 3y ago
  I went through the song-and-dance for several versions to remove the Snap firefox and go back to the deb, and now that the deb is gone I just downloaded it directly from mozilla so it can use its own internal autoupdate feature. It works better that way anyway.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Cyder 3y ago

i gave up on firefox when i couldn't stop it from connecting to Google on a network device i was working on. Removing all the links from the advanced settings made it fail to start. That's when I realized how hypocritical they are. ( arm64 firefox-esr.) Even the latest chromium on arm64 connects to Google almost daily. i use epiphany-browser for that project now. no unwanted internet traffic from epiphany.

ravenstine 3y ago
Any issues with DRM content?
guraf 3y ago
Yeah when my DNS went sporty I noticed Firefox got very slow to load even local ips and investigated. 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.
- intelVISA 3y ago
  Unfortunately normal for the mainstream ones, you can even see similar with Brave.

kramerger 3y ago

"The advertisement boosts Mozilla VPN, a paid open-source VPN service that constitutes a crucial revenue source for the not-for-profit company." In 2021, Mozilla CEO received $5M in compensation. I don't really consider them a non-profit.

djbusby 3y ago
Wish my non-profit paid like that.
- zbuf 3y ago
  That's how you don't make a profit
uo21tp5hoyg 3y ago
It's intentionally confusing but "not-for-profit" and "non-profit" are two very different things and it seems the article gets them confused.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
sounds 3y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35829283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35829283 Mozilla's primary sources of revenue are for setting the default search engine. $500 Million.

freediver 3y ago

All directly or indirectly ad-supported business models will sooner or later come to the point of breakage in serving user”s best interests, as the fundamental misalignment of incentives between the business and its users creates a force too strong to contain. 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).

whoisthemachine 3y ago
Agreed. I can't help but think that giving normal, technical users a great browser, and then catering on bended knee to enterprises for a very controllable, supported, extended version as the source of revenue that supports the normal browser is a sustainable model. Maybe not a model that takes over the world, but one that sustains development of a good open source browser.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Are there any open source projects run like that? The closest thing I can think of is, like, Chromium but they don’t really make a framework that anyone can customize, they are inextricably tied to Google, right? 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.
  - whoisthemachine 3y ago
    Red Hat?

dang 3y ago

Recent and related: Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unrelated page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077360 - May 2023 (328 comments)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hiccuphippo 3y ago

Mozilla needs a new wway to make decisions, the current one is obviously not working. New features should have an Enhancement Proposal document that the community can read beforehand and a council that approves it.

Timber-6539 3y ago

If the privacy crowd expected different treatment from a woke tyrannical organization in full control of their choice of browser, they only have themselves to blame.

millzlane 3y ago

I saw this yesterday while I was using the browser at work. At first I really thought nothing of it. It was was strange seeing it out of nowhere and I was indifferent about it. I love the browser and it has saved me time and my sanity by allowing be to block advertisements that infect us all and being reliable as a browser I can always count on to work how I want. 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.

bentcorner 3y ago
I saw this too and wasn't too bothered, although I wondered if there was something I did on the page that somehow triggered the "we think you should know about our VPN thing" popup. Which IMO is also a bad thing - users don't know why you're showing them that thing at that particular moment. 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"

AlexandrB 3y ago

I think something not getting enough attention is the design of the popup itself. It is chock-full of dark patterns (different sized click targets, "not now" dismiss action instead of "No") and doesn't include any way to disable similar "messages" in the future. 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.

photonbeam 3y ago

What in the world were they thinking. Are we going to have to run IceWeasel builds again

pleb_nz 3y ago

I never saw the ad and I use Firefox an day, I use ublock, would this have blocked it?

lolinder 3y ago
No, this was in the browser chrome itself. It covered the address bar and tabs as well as the page.

jedahan 3y ago

InCityDreams 3y ago

[flagged]

whatshisface 3y ago

Well, I'm not going to use Chrome, but I guess WebKit is okay... what browser should we be using now?

triyambakam 3y ago
Brave is pretty good.
_xivi 3y ago
Arc
- pixelbath 3y ago
  Ah, yes. The closed-source, single-platform, invite-only browser made by a company nobody's ever heard of outside the startup ecosystem.

tezza 3y ago

Happened to me today. 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.

john2x 3y ago
I wouldn't mind seeing Mozilla VPN ads in the Settings menu or the 'new tab' page tbh. But injecting it on top of web pages directly is just scummy.

godshatter 3y ago

I keep hoping some of the laid off devs will fork the project and we can get back to a mostly volunteer model focused on just the browser. I'd much rather donate to something like that than the Mozilla foundation, at least as it currently stands.

aio2 3y ago
We have Librewolf fer desktop, and Mull and Fennec for Android. They are forks

tempodox 3y ago

Are the bean counters and ad freaks taking the helm? Maybe time to look for a different browser…

InCityDreams 3y ago

>"We’re continuously working to understand the best ways to communicate with people who use Firefox. Ultimately, we accomplished the exact opposite of what we intended in this experiment and quickly rolled the experience back. 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.

zuprau 3y ago

[flagged]

sinistersnare 3y ago

I think that there needs to be a level of accountability here for the programmers who did this. Tech workers need to stand up against this kind of anti-user hostility. Firefox is an openly-developed project, who wrote the code to allow this kind of attack, and should we ask them to commit to not writing such code again?

elaus 3y ago
I'm not sure what this would achieve? I mean, surely it wasn't some random developer who came up with this idea and implemented it. This is a management decision and management decisions are driven by the company culture.
- eska 3y ago
  If I joined a company like Mozilla as a programmer rather than Google etc my motivation would probably be to create a privacy-protecting browser. If my company asked me to implement user-hostile features I’d just walk out. It’s not like someone like that can’t find a different job somewhere else.

horeszko 3y ago

I suppose now is a good time to ask if there are any good _non-corporate_ open source browsers out there? 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.)

LeoPanthera 3y ago
On KDE, Falkon. 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://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
- vinay_ys 3y ago
  Safari – such a pleasure to use it.
- postalrat 3y ago
  Safari is the MSIE 6 of this time period.
  - LeoPanthera 3y ago
    That's lazy stereotyping and not even close to being a useful or accurate analogy.
    - postalrat 3y ago
      It's the default browser for many people and also the browser with the most quirks.
  - handsclean 3y ago
    Safari is the fastest browser, the most standards compliant browser, and regularly updated, the only similarity to IE6 is it’s buggy. Chrome, on the other hand, followed IE’s whole playbook: leverage a platform monopoly to push the browser, then leverage browser monopoly to undermine standards, coercing devs into dropping support for the competition.

jp191919 3y ago

I use firefox everyday for several hours and I have never seen this before. In the US.

zeruch 3y ago

This was definitely not one of their best moves.

uguuo_o 3y ago

As a firefox user of a couple of decades, I am now starting to look at alternatives. Anything chromium is a big no, but there are few alternatives. Perhaps it is time to go back to using Lynx.

NickHoff 3y ago

So, what do people think of Vivaldi? I'm a long-time Firefox user but I've been scanning for a new browser for a while now. Even if it weren't for stuff like this, I'll have to change anyway when Firefox dips below ~3% and websites stop supporting Gecko.

sphars 3y ago
I used Vivaldi on and off over the past few years, but I've been using FF full time since late last year. Vivaldi eventually starting slowing way down for some reason. Startup took nearly 10 seconds, when it used to be < 3. Not sure what did it. It may be due to the chrome (UI) as it's a very heavy custom CSS solution. 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.
deely3 3y ago
I use it as main browser for the last 7 years I believe. And honestly - I love it. It have some gimmicks - sometime its slow a bit, sometime there some bugs that you have to wait for fix in the new version, but amount of customizability is a thing that overcome any issues. 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.

beefnugs 3y ago

[flagged]

Zuiii 3y ago

How do you forcefully eject an ineffective "CEO" of a nonprofit from their position when they have failed their duties and violated their org's charter/mission while giving themself unjustified pay-raises and bonuses? Is there any gov process we can invoke to hold them accountable?

s3p 3y ago

I've never seen this on my machine. Been using FF exclusively for years.