Why am I seeing this adorable red panda?(mozilla.org) |
Why am I seeing this adorable red panda?(mozilla.org) |
I use Firefox to protect my privacy from advertisers and to block ads. So you may be able to imaging my rage when Firefox updated and automatically loaded this full-page ad from Our Dark Lord Disney:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/98.0/whatsnew/?oldvers...
It's no secret that Mozilla needs cash. But I imagine this move is counter-productive as a lot of people like me, who support them monetarily as much as I can by purchasing their various apps and services, are driven away by loathsome ads.
you_have_become_the_very_thing_you_swore_to_destroy.meme
It's honestly like quitting your drug of choice (e.g. even just coffee or alcohol) and observing the affect it has on you after using it again for a long time. Only in this case, there is no "upside" to these (forced) capitulations.
Advertising has become so entrenched that it acts as if it has absolute right to your hijack your attention, and this landscape respects no boundaries. Apple in particular drives me nuts doing the same thing: pitching their arcade or wifi hot-spot partnerships with absolutely no opt-out mechanism.
Because it does not get better. As you begin to adapt to them, the ads change.
I find it intolerable that every high-end device comes with less control and more ads than ever before. Therefore I no longer buy such devices.
I am happy on my barebones Linux desktop and my second-hand Android phone that is not logged into anything - because I have control.
[edit] I used a United States VPN now. Indeed a Disney ad for a movie. In Europe it's a static page with some text about Mozilla VPN.
EDIT: vs screenshot what EU sees: https://i.imgur.com/S1ueBQn.png
I hate this "We forced you to update, also we are the privacy, also we absolutely can fingerprint you because we forced you to see this page you didn't asked to look".
When Mozilla "gets behind" something, I tend to think of the ethics they state here:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
Of course, no one believes for a second that Mozilla gives a shit about Disney's latest disposable childhood friend. The words on the page are completely meaningless and insincere, and the copy was probably not even written by someone who's ever worked at Mozilla. They're in front of us because Disney sends armies of marketeers, each with wheelbarrows of money, to promote each of their movies. Everyone knows that. But it's still embarrassing to see.
I feel even worse about this than I would if they had a big Facebook ad up. Say what you will about the likes of Meta, but Disney is some sort of ancient Lovecraftian horror manifested in corporate form.
Doesn't this sort of endorsement require disclosure? Not a lawyer but I would expect there to be something marking the content of the page as an advertisement. Some cursory browsing of what looks like relevant FTC pages (I and Mozilla are both American) seems to support this[1].
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/ftc...
I haven't tested it, but this page describes an about:config flag that apparently inhibits the /whatsnew/ page:
https://kb.mozillazine.org/Startup.homepage_override_url
If browser.startup.homepage_override.mstone is set to "ignore", the browser's homepage will not be overridden after updates.I still am annoyed at Google for adding ads onto the new tab page of Chrome. Yes, it's possible to use an extension to replace the new tab page, but I don't want a new new tab page, I want the stock one without ads.
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
The world will be a lot poorer when Firefox light is extinguished, which seems all but inevitable, unless Mozilla can get back to delighting users instead of abusing them.
I'd love to do a shameless plug for radioparadise.com as a wonderful model of someone who does an extremely tasteful periodic reminder to donate :).
Mozilla is a nonprofit. They need income obviously but it feels like they are taking a very different approach than most nonprofits.
The American Cancer Society convinced professional sports teams to wear pink for an entire month, the Goodwill collects people's unwanted junk and sells it, the YMCA recorded a song and choreographed a dance...the only approach I'm aware of that non profits take is the one that generates the most money..
The fact that Mozilla is a non profit and have built a product that performs on-par with products built by two of the most valuable companies in the world (Microsoft and Google) is astonishing. The engineers building Firefox cost the same amount as the engineers building Chrome and Edge. But balk all you want at seeing an adorable red panda fill up your screen
Are we really complaining about something as little invasive as that?
Given Mozilla’s current financial problems, and who their core users tend to be, this was a very stupid experiment on their part. Genuinely sad to see this grubby crap from them.
If we don't complain and let them know that subjecting us to sleazy ads is intolerable, where will it end?
A browser is a tool that we have to use for work. It is impossible to block bait-and-switch ads built in like this. It's bait-and-switch because the expected behavior is to display the changelog, not an advertisement for Disney.
This seems to depend on what country you load it from. This web archive link shows you what we get in the US.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220308222503/https://www.mozil...
Disabling updates was not straightforward. Settings in about:config and GPO are ignored, I had to create a policies.json as described here, https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1304175.
1: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/choosing-firefox-update...
Quite the opposite. I have really poor ability to tune them out, especially any audio portions. Once in front of me, they get under my skin easily and this isn't something I feel comfortable trying to just accept, despite how much "easier" it'd make things.
> Because it does not get better. As you begin to adapt to them, the ads change.
Agreed 100%, thus why zero tolerance is the only permissible option for me.
Here is a wager I don't wanna win: the "apps are constantly force-updated" world merges with the marketing world so that downtime is filled with ads. It's devilishly perfect: you're eagerly waiting to use the thing, so you're already a captive audience.
At least, not in time. Right now, Mozilla is dipping a toe in the water, and it needs to be made unignorably clear to them that mistreating what remains of their userbase is not the answer.