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?
Skill issue 
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
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Just turn it off. If they don't have income they don't exist.
Mozilla already has Scrooge McDuck amounts of money. It doesn’t need any more to maintain a browser and an email client.
From jwz, who founded Mozilla & Firefox:
- 2020: This is a pretty dire assessment of Mozilla
- 2023: Remember when Mozilla made a web browser?
- 2024: Mozilla is an advertising company now
- 2024: Mozilla's Original Sin
.
Mozilla had a duty to preserve the open web.
Instead they cosplayed as a startup, chasing product dreams of "growth hacking", with Google's ad money as their stand-in for a VC-funding firehose, with absolutely predictable and tragic results.
And those dreams of growth and market penetration failed catastrophically anyway.
(Except for the C-suite, who made out quite well. And Google, who got exactly what they paid for: a decade of antitrust-prosecution insurance. It was never about ad revenue. The on-paper existence of Firefox as a hypothetical competitor kept the Federal wolves at bay, and that's all Google cared about.)
Now hear me out, but What If...? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?
As I have said many times:
In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
- Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
- Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
- There is no 3.
Mozilla already has Scrooge McDuck amounts of money
no. they don't.
the google money that they rely too heavily on, may not always be there. they need more diverse funding. these paid placements, which can be turned off, are one way to do that.
turn off and delete the sponsored stuff at install, never see 'em again. it's not like they're microsoft or something, constantly turning that kind of shit back on with every-other-update.
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/mozilla-is-an-advertising-company-now/#comment-249969
Preemptive subtwit.
Let's say you run a nonprofit animal shelter. And for some reason, some people feel you should be seeing hockey-stick growth, but the donations aren't covering it.
So you decide to start up a side-line of selling kittens for meat.
Then you will inevitably have someone stroking their chin and saying, 'Yes, yes, but how could they afford to stay open if they weren't selling kitten deli slices?"
Some might say -- maybe you aren't an animal shelter any more. Some might say.
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While this analysis is somewhat convincing, let's not forget that for now Firefox is all we have. Important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
In my ideal scenario, Mozilla becomes like the Wikimedia Foundation. Which has somehow also accumulated "Scrooge McDuck amounts" of cash but seems to be on a firmer footing and better managed.
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You should see brave lol
Or, ya know, literally any other browser that's not a fork of Firefox.
And Brave has significantly lower costs, given they don't develop an own engine, but rather just put lipstick onto Chromium.
I bailed on brave when I learned more about the shenanigans that one dude pulled.
Don't give them any ideas
Either that or they go bankrupt. Design your own browser and give it out for free if you don't like it
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I thought you said "What's next, a few ads in the URL bar?" ...because Mozilla has put a few ads in the URL bar.
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How do you get this? My home page just has some recent links
Depending on where you got Firefox from, default settings are different. Maybe your distro ships with these deactivated.
Yep. I get it from Librewolf. 😁
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