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Comment by schleck8 | Hacker News Reader

This is just shown once after a browser upgrade right? And not even baked into the browser? And for a first party product?

Are we really complaining about something as little invasive as that?

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Yes. It’s obnoxious, shabby, and needs to be shut down—swift and hard—before Mozilla gets the idea that turning its browser into a billboard is an acceptable method of making money. Because believe me, if this kind of thing turns out to be profitable for them, that garbage will not be limited to a mere static image shown just once.

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.

It is important to keep Firefox solvent and operational as it is the last real independent browser. Everything else is built on Chromium (or Webkit), which are owned and spied upon by Google (and Apple?)

I definitely agree. I’m just incredibly suspicious—and sick—of obnoxious ads, especially when they’re being pushed by companies whose products play a pretty major role in what I do online. We’ve seen how disgusting some of those smart TV manufacturers were willing to get: unremovable home screen ads, selling user data, etc. I think that happened in large part because some marketing weasel was like “hey, what if we…” and the rest of us didn’t say “no, never, we will punish you for that.”

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.

Independent of what? The ad-o-sphere? If they are showing ads, they are not independent of them.

Independent of Google since a vast majority of browsers are Chrome or built on Google's Chromium platform - which means they can spy on users.

Yes. I'm sure a similar conversation happened during the first radio show, or the first magazine. Now the slippery slope has given us ads on billboards, on the radio, every three minutes on television, each inch of public space including right in your face at the urinal, on blimps, pulled behind airplanes, written in the sky, on the inside and outside of taxis and buses and trucks, in every store on every shelf, you are barraged while trapped at the gas pump, before a movie you already paid to see, they hire people to wave signs in your face while waiting at stoplights, and advertising is baked in to every electron of the Internet... you get the point; it's extremely bad for your personal mental health and that of society in general.

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.

> And for a first party product?

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...

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