> 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.
I was on reddit, and couldn't be sure that it wasn't reddit doing it. Though I half-suspected Firefox. Imagine my surprise when I saw this post.
Nothing about this seems "quickly stopped". The timestamp on your link says nearly 7 hours ago.
This phrase is approaching a Betteridge's law level tell for who’s at the wheel - nobody needs to insist they’re putting people first unless it’s really obvious they’re not.
“My corporate doublespeak has a lot of people asking questions already answered by my corporate doublespeak.”
That says to me that Firefox is aware the ad experience did not put people first, and that Firefox broke their commitment. They are discussing internally how this was allowed to happen.
Should read as:
> Oops, we got caught again doing stuff that our core users don't like. Let us remove this until we find a better way to make you angry
I still remember when the slogan was something like "putting users in control of their online experience", got silently changed to "individuals" instead of "users" at some point, and apparently it's just "people" now.
There is no ethical advertisement. At the root of advertisements are intentional psychological engineering used to manipulate people.
I would absolutely expect them to pull the whole thing out.
Given that there has been a context previously where it was welcome, there may well be contemporaneous contexts where ads could exist in harmony with independently motivated user objectives. Basically all of what I see today, though, ain't it.