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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

> I have nothing against straight ads.

Why? It's almost always noise nobody wants to see. Advertising hurts usability by definition. Putting ads in the address bar of all places is actually hostile to users: people who are used to finding bookmarks that way will end up opening sponsored links instead due to muscle memory.

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But it's also Firefox, just go into about:config and turn it off if you don't like it and presto?

It's great to have an out. But are those synchronized? Because I find the increasing number of tweaks difficult to remember. Tyranny of the default is real.

Put any preferred tweaks in a user.js file in the profile directory, // commented with meanings and reasons, and save wetware memory.

When I was young and enthusiastic I used to maintain user and chrome CSS overrides like that. Synced via DropBox no less!

Now I am older and tired of doing the symlinking every time I setup a new install of Ff.

Just copy your ~/.mozilla everywhere. I too have been using the same profile for about a decade, across many machines.

How often do you set up new installs?

I've been moving around the same firefox install since Opera died.

Oh they're trying to remove that ability as well:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1543752

It's a slow and steady advance, not something that happens overnight.

Yeah until the pref just stops working one day.

You just described all software ever released. Things always stop working one day and then we're forced to learn/get used to a new thing.

Why not? The bills have to be paid. Wouldn't you rather they monetize their product in a responsible way than join the others? We live in the real world after all.

The responsible way to monetize something is to charge for it. Advertising makes it normal to have "free" products and people become slaves to it. Can't say or do anything they don't like lest they kill your income.

Sure, let's all build tree houses and live in them. If only problems can just be solved by willing the solution you want!

That's exactly what everyone should do. Instead of letting them get away with it, we should block it all unconditionally and by default, forcing them to find another solution that's acceptable. Linux distributions in particular are in the perfect position to patch this out and improve user experience for all their users.

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