Edit: as noted in the linked ticket, there are some discussions going on about this in https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/ .
Screenshot https://web.archive.org/web/20220308222503/https://www.mozil...
HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30608022
> Thank you for reaching out with your concern. Firefox is committed to creating an online experience that puts people first, as such we quickly stopped running the ad experience, and are reviewing internally.
https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/components/n...
"Messaging System"
"Vision"
"Firefox must be an opinionated user agent that keeps folks safe, informed and effective while browsing the Web. In order to have an opinion, Firefox must have a voice."
"That voice will respect the user’s attention while surfacing contextually relevant and timely information tailored to their individual needs and choices."
Somewhere in all of these companies exists the belligerent ** who orders the subordinates to inject inappropriate profit-seeking changes into the product. And then cajole/order/encourage another subordinate to write a florid virtuous editorial justifying their belligerent idea.
Related: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/mozilla-now-only-...
That said, if you don't want to use Chrome, a fairly good alternative would be Vivaldi [0] - a surprisingly neat browser created by the ex-founder of Opera. It's based on the Chromium engine, so no weird rendering shenanigans, but at the same time is quite technically capable, with ad blocking, mouse gestures, email client, etc.
Basically, what they wanted to do was to build a background process that detects when you're away from the PC and then pops up the message, so it's the first thing you see what you get back.
Unfortunately (or maybe not) the detection logic had a bug, which caused the message to pop up right away sometimes, spoiling the whole thing.
Yes, I am willing to pay say 100$/year for web browser if money would entirely go to development. Maybe something to support staff like CEO. But not over 5 000 000 per year ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary... )
And if such browser would be actually user-first, without ads for VPN and Disney movies (especially without ads pretending to not be ads).
They pull this crap all the time and never learn their lessons.
https://youtu.be/QWCINJ8uvIc?t=1m8s
(cut out some of background to focus on where he gets to similar patter)
In any case, fully agree. There are always these environmental pressures and "agents" (to evoke / use a sort of game theory modeling context) that lead to this sort of nonsense. Depending on the incentives, scope of power of people making decisions, training (esp., MBAs - simply being trained to look at "numbers in spreadsheets", essentially), etc., it's all too easy, these days, to end up with this kind of B$.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?product=Firefox&que...
Frankly, it's much less problematic than Google writing a blog post bragging to it's advertising customers that it has started buying a copy of everyone's credit/debit card transaction data so they can spy on potential customers more than ever.
> as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.
So, if you buy stuff with a card, there’s a less than one-in-three chance that Google doesn’t know about it.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/25/242717/google-no...
For example, how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker-Miller_pink is used in prisons to foster a less violent culture among the prisoners.
"voices making the world a better place" is referring to Martin Luther King, Jr.
Thunderbird, for example, gained a new life because of donations: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...
I recently switched from Edge to Firefox (on both Desktop and phone) specifically because Edge was showing me irrelevant "news" articles (which I assume are just ads in disguise) [1].
I guess on phone I can move back to Safari (which I abandoned due to a bug where scroll position is frequently lost when navigating backwards), since it is apparently the only major browser that hasn't tried to show me ads.
Not sure what to do about desktop...
Money donated to Mozilla isn't used to develop Firefox: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/
I'd be fine paying or donating to help Firefox development, but I can't.
I joined Replay as a senior front-end dev a year ago. It's real, it works, we're building it, and it's genuinely life-changing as a developer :)
Not sure how well this would have fit into Firefox as a specific feature, given both the browser C++ runtime customizations and cloud wizardry needed to make this work. But kinda like Rust, it's a thing that spun out of Mozilla and has taken on a life of its own.
Obligatory sales pitch while I'm writing this:
The basic idea of Replay: Use our special browser to make a recording of your app, load the recording in our debugger, and you can pause at any point in the recording. In fact, you can add print statements to any line of code, and it will show you what it would have printed _every time that line of code ran_!
From there, you can jump to any of those print statement hits, and do typical step debugging and inspection of variables. So, it's the best of both worlds - you can use print statements and step debugging, together, at any point in time in the recording.
See https://replay.io/record-bugs for the getting started steps to use Replay, or drop by our Discord at https://replay.io/discord and ask questions.
1. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
Not a fantastic situation, but at least it seems to work.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/paid-firefox-to-get-rid...
we need to make those the most popular ideas on mozilla connect
Two years later and they're still doing it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/ppludl/since_when_...
Well it worked on firefox before, but only on macOS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDq1AN1kSn4
https://web.archive.org/web/20210331133857/https://developer...
> But kinda like Rust, it's a thing that spun out of Mozilla and has taken on a life of its own.
It could has been a feature that make firefox the browsers for developers, instead it's a new paid subscription dev product.
"Firefox VPN Spotlight modal test content" [0]
We are running a/b tests on a VPN spotlight modal in Firefox. Here's a link to the project info: Google doc
There are two versions of content, identical except for the inclusion of a promotional code in one of them. Where the tests also differ is in the imagery used, which you can see in the Figma file linked in this ticket.
Also,
"Add vpn spotlight targeting" [1]
Targeting to support https://mozilla-hub.atlassian.net/browse/OMC-419 - Existing users with a profile >28 days old, at least 1 day of use in the last 28 days, on Windows 10+, no VPN or Enterprise policy
LibreWolf (https://librewolf.net/) is essentially this: Firefox, with the telemetry and Mozilla adware disabled. And you can use homebrew or other package managers to handle updates (instead of getting spammed by update dialogs every day or two in the browser itself).
Figuring out what they do is a different story, but at least that's one way to get a list of all of the possible ones.
You can try it with an imgur link: https://imgur.com/gallery/gom01RZ (sfw, vid/loop of a boa constrictor drinking water from a glass).
