If this isn’t a targetted advert in my browser, I don’t know what is.
And here’s where you turn it off:
like all you have to do is turn off the option in settings; you can even add it to your policies.json to end it everywhere.
Waterfox, Ironfox, Fennec, others
There’s so many Firefox forks, just use that
I wanted to see what Floorp does and got this on my first test
thanks wikipedia
The fact that you can turn it off is a good thing and is why Firefox is a good option.
Yeah like is anyone paying for Firefox? The only reason is still exist are the sponsors. Hell, one of the biggest by far was (is?) Google.
Google only supported it to keep the appearance of competition for chome to keep regulators off their back.
I would be happy to pay them for brave origin equivalent of a stripped down Firefox without the sponsorships. Could use forks or disable stuff but I’m not against paying them for it to support them if that is something they offered.
Firefox just lets you turn all of that off for free, and donate to their non-profit. I don’t see a problem paid Firefox would solve.
I wouldn’t mind giving money to mozilla if it means we all get a better product that isn’t subservient to big tech
That is fair, though I think it would be a tough pill to swallow for most people, and Firefox is neither leading the charts nor do they have any significant advantage over the competition in web browsing to roll out a bold move like this.
It’s a tough position. I do use it and hope they make it (*remain in business), just for the sake of competition.Id happily pay for firefox without their ai bullshit
I also pay for winrar, with a yearly subscription on android, even though im not using it anymore.
And you should too.
Waterfox as well
I tell people Waterfox if you just want Firefox without the bullshit.
LibreWolf if you’re more hardcore about privacy and are willing to deal with the occasional site not working.
I have both installed but mainly use LibreWolf. I have Waterfox for “irl stuff” like banking/shopping, etc stuff that doesn’t approve of VPN use and I have to enter my real details into anyway.
LibreWolf if you’re more hardcore about privacy and are willing to deal with the occasional site not working.
I used both Libre and Firefox; sometimes you need a browser that will just load the website without you having to faff about.
*privacy
Nicely spotted lmao.
Fixed now :)
Yup, waterfox on phone, librewolf on pc 🤘
You mean ironfox on phone, librewolf on PC?
i just started using Ironfox on my phone! It’s great
What’s the difference between waterfox and ironfox?
Ironfox is a fork of mull. It’s like the difference between waterfox and librewolf afaik
- waves from lonely ios island
Waterfox is life!
If this isn’t a targetted advert in my browser, I don’t know what is.
Somewhere, a dastardly Mozilla engineer is cursing you out for figuring it out, even though they specifically labeled it ‘Sponsored’ as a double-bluff.
It’s crazy that you think this was the engineers’ idea and not someone like the marketing director using their corporate capital to force the dev team to implement it… like pretty much every other company
It’s crazy that you think I thought that
Also, haven’t they been doing this for a long time?
The phrasing that shows in my version on mobile is now “support Firefox with occasional sponsored suggestions,” to try the guilt angle as well.
Those monsters!
Thanks for making me aware that there was yet another bullshit “feature” I needed to disable.
Yeah, i gave up self managing the adware and went to the Firefox fork, LibreWolf
I’ve considered doing the same myself. How has it been working out for you?
been running it for a year, not bad, had to just allow webgl coz so many sites won’t load properly without it
That’s good news as far as I’m concerned. I’ve got WebGL disabled in Firefox now. Frankly, if a website needs direct access to my GPU to run, I don’t need that website.
What does add-on support look like? The baseline privacy looks (very) good, but I think I’d still like things like umatrix to block unnecessary or unwanted resource requests and to prevent running any extraneous javascript etc. An ad-blocker like ublock origin goes without saying. I refuse to access the WWW without one.
If that ever becomes impossible, I’ll switch to Gemini exclusively :)
i think it’s mostly the same as firefox for extensions, i have UBO, improve youtube, Twitchtv adblock, allow rightclick
Then I think I’m all set to transition. Thanks for answering all my questions. I appreciate it!
I am guessing the build in flathub ships with this turned off, I dont even have firefox suggest as a settings area. Nor is it in the build that ships with Fedora
And here’s where you turn it off:
Yeah. That’s why none of us ever see that crap. It’s easy.
You know the reason why I see it? Because it’s a new feature. I already had all of the other rubbish turned off - but guess what - they turn it on for you by default.
Because it’s a new feature.
the ads in your address bar were added back in October of '21.
Bro is posting from the covid…
I mean they have to make money somehow
They make most of it (a boatload already) from their google deal, how about using it better
The Google deal is a problematic dependency and a single point of failure. I don’t like putting ads in the browser as an alternative, but I’m unsure what would be a good funding model for the project.
Mozilla should definitely focus its resources on improving the browser rather than side quests.
Even more problematic because the LLM are destroying search.
Wait till people freak the fuck out when it becomes the Gemini bar.
I think they have plenty of resources already, some of their uses are questionable. Mail/VPN (i think they already rolled out their own vpn service for some countries) could be a sidequest not for the sake of a sidequest, doubt it’s gonna match 500M per year though
Firefox doesn’t do mail AFAIK. Thunderbird is a different branch and is funded separately.
The VPN is just a re-skinned Mullvad last time I checked.
Yeah ik, I’m saying they could to diversify
Mozilla is simultaneously both a genius Google-sponsored company that you can’t criticize their decisions because you don’t fund them, and a money-starved company that needs to make a profit and you’re a monster for denying them the revenue
because you don’t fund them
Also you cannot fund them. All the money you give goes to Mozilla and its CEO which needs $millions to take those stupid decisions.
If we donate enough we can match their 7 ish million salary! (iirc)
Mozilla is simultaneously a vassal of Google because it’s 85% funded by its search revenue, and an over-resourced company that is a monster for trying to bring in even more revenue.
Benefits of their Corp/Foundation structure I guess. Though if I was funding them I’d criticize them harder lol
Diversification is a good thing. If people don’t donate at scale then we have Chrome, and FF so long as Google allows it to exist unless they find other streams.
Google “deal” … Google gain way more coz we don’t have MozillaOS today.
Also, they sold and selling users to search engines and still more and more milking their users…
Using FF we get double fck*d…if not using forks, a better option will be Chrome at this point
That “somehow” is doing some heavy lifting.
Do they? Why?
anyone know the about:config value key?
edit: found it. Set
browser.urlbar.suggest.quicksuggest.allto false. For anyone not using user.js, I highly recommend it. It means you only ever have to find these settings once. I keep mine in a git repo so it’s easy to transport between machines.Can you expand on user.js.
Is that the arkenfox user profile? How do you upload it? How often is it updated?
Sure. User.js is a file you can add in your Firefox profile directory which gets loaded each time Firefox starts.
Pretty good documentation here: https://kb.mozillazine.org/User.js_file
The arkenfox one is a fully loaded pro-privacy user.js made by some knowledgeable people. I did use that one for my initial version iirc: https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/blob/master/user.js
How often do I update it? Just when mozilla rolls out a new feature I don’t like. I commit it to my repo, that way I easily take my settings to each different machine. You cannot change every FF setting with that file, but you can change the majority of them.
So two things: basically install user.js and forget it (except changing minor settings you want).
What about recommended extesnsions. It just says minimize extensions (which is a good policy), but which extensions are recommended to use with it.
Are there certain privacy extensions that are redundant because of it?
I understand I may be asking things outside of your purview, but I am curious how does this work.
Interesting enough, if I visit a fingerprinting site such as kuber.studio/cookie, it still recognizes me as a visitor, even with user.js.
Yeah, I’m not a privacy expert. And I didn’t ever think of user.js as privacy protection personally. I use it to turn off AI and other things that annoy me. Privacy-wise I use OBO and few others. The arkenfox settings I used as a basis but I removed anything that wasn’t ai related or that I didn’t understand.
I think the main protection I’m looking for at the moment is fingerprinting protection. ON their site they do claim that, but there isn’t much info (at least that I can understand about that).
Okay, that is a different topic in my mind. User.js is about settings. The settings it impacts can be anything. You may want to try librewolf if privacy is your focus.
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You can, that’s easily found and the point of the post. I don’t want to do that on four machines every time I end up needing to reset Firefox
Never been a problem on my browser.
Ah, dang. This is as real bummer. What do we do instead? Are we at the point of paying for this app?
I’m thinking about Signal too: software isn’t free so where does the spend come from?
Signal is funded by donations. They got a few pretty big ones a while ago from some wealthy donors, so I don’t know whether the donations by normal people by now are enough to cover their costs. I try to donate a bit though, at least enough to cover my costs and those of a few of my friends.
Check the box and forget the feature ever existed until you install the browser again from scratch. It’s been there for 5 years, so it’s not exactly a new or unsolved problem.
Okay, see you the next time this comes up.
It comes up every few months because someone forgets they ticked it off 5 years ago when the feature first released and then they reset their browser.
It’s not a crowd setting; it’s maintaining a product. We love this one because it matches our goal, but that goal requires our fellow persons’ time.
Use Waterfox or Librewolf. Or Zen. Or some other fork.
I do daily Zen but this note moves the problem.
I have started regularly donating to foss projects, especially those who are clear on their limits of ai in code. Been donating to signal for years too.
https://servo.org/ would be the one to donate to for web independence specifically.
I would pay for Firefox if they kept updates like that off by default. Maybe they could have a screen that shows new options you can turn on which I’d happily ignore most of the time. It obviously takes tons of time to build a web browser so I expect it to get paid for somehow, but yeah, the on-by-default enshittification is no good.
as someone else suggested, a fork is the best way to go. if you are most concerned about privacy, Liberwolf is the way to go. if you want privacy, but aren’t willing to go as far as Librewolf does, then Waterfox is a solid alternative that provides better privacy than Firefox.
Another vote for librewolf
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