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?
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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.
Personaly those shortcuts are a feature I literally never use so much so I don’t even register their existence anymore.
There are some more privacy friendly forks of “Firefox for Android”, which have sponsored shortcuts disabled or minimized by default. For example:
Feel free to give them a try :)
+1 for fennec
I use Fennec for my phone, but I’m rediscovering Floorp on desktop right now and I’m seriously impressed. Smoothest Fox Fork I’ve used in a long time.
@UltraGiGaGigantic Sorry about that, not quite what is expected to happen. I understand that it has been looked into and has now been resolved.
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.
Name an internet browser that costs money
How much money are they likely to make over a lifetime of a user from the sponsorships. Would FirefoxPro actually be a good idea?
Name an internet browser that’s not rigged to show you adds, or one that doesn’t havest your data.
Y’all can use LibreWolf or BestHomePageEver if it really bugs somebody. I do get being annoyed by shortcut ads though.
I wouldn’t recommend LibreWolf to the average user as they’ll unfoubtedly stretch their attack surface thin.
It’s not gonna make them more exposed than vanilla Firefox
Microsoft Edge
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.
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.
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 was a bug
And looks like it’s been fixed :)
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?
Open source projects shouldn’t have “making money” on their priority list. I would donate to Mozilla if I had some guarantee that my money would actually fund Firefox development
But why does (some) people want every software to be open source if making money can’t be an objective? /genq
I’m not one of those people, and to be clear I support for-profit companies open sourcing code. Mozilla is a unique case where donations are a tiny fraction of their income and Firefox development is a tiny fraction of their expenses. I just want to donate directly to the parts I care about (Firefox, MDN).
This is why I torrent firefox pro using Limewire.
Then turn it off?
The best thing about this is that you can turn it off
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.
I think the downvoters can’t hold these two thoughts in their mind at the same time:
- Firefox is the best browser.
- Firefox has serious problems because Mozilla is a terrible steward of it.
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”.
Firefox is the best browser
It’s only real competitors, in my eyes, are Firefox forks.
Agreed. I love Firefox and don’t really like Mozilla.
Let the people downvote. These points don’t matter. I turned off the visibility of points. I am immune, my morale is unbreakable. The downvoters have no power here!
