zlacker

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.

>>comice+(OP)
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+(OP)
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+(OP)
Can you point to that evidence? I'm wondering how that change was even ideated let alone rolled out to people.

>>comice+(OP)
Bugzilla links in yesterday's post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077360

seem to indicate that Mozilla intended for the popup to be shown if the user is AFK for 20 minutes but that timer malfunctioned

>>comice+(OP)
What else could they have been trying to do? From seeing the bug filed/fixed wrt the issue, it seems like the only unintentual part was that the popup appeared to quickly, it was showing up after 20ms instead of 20s or something like that

>>flohof+R
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+Y
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?

>>Rebelg+M1
they could have been intending to insert the advert into other places, which wouldn't be quite as outrageous (though I happen dislike them inserting them anywhere, but some places are definitely worse than others).

>>VTimof+k1
This is a great way to freak people out and make them distrust you — move their stuff while they're not looking.

>>VTimof+k1
That's worse.

The last thing I want is my browser popping something up when I'm AFK.

>>comice+v4
No, they did not. The complaint is poorly worded. They added an internal browser pop-up that covers pages to display an ad.

>>VTimof+k1
> seem to indicate that Mozilla intended for the popup to be shown if the user is AFK for 20 minutes

Wow, that would have been a whole lot worse than what actually happened!

>>comice+v4
No, browser chrome is the part that isn't the web page (i.e. browser UI itself).

>>eterm+5h
(Bug reporter here)

I don't know exactly what anyone else experienced. What I experienced is: I was away from my computer and noticed that my Syncthing[0] folders were out of date, so I used KDE Connect[1] to make sure Syncthing was running on my PC, which opens a tab connecting to Syncthing on the local machine in the default browser - Firefox in my case. Some time later, I unlocked my PC and found the advertisement on top of my Syncthing admin page.

So yes, it popped something up while I was AFK, though I can't guess whether it would have done so if I hadn't remotely triggered a new tab. Needless to say, I was very surprised to see that behavior from Firefox, and even more surprised that despite posts to reddit and HN complaining, I didn't find a report in Bugzilla.

[0] https://syncthing.net/

[1] https://kdeconnect.kde.org/