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Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage

bleepingcomputer.com

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Re: Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage

#2

Post by wlesieutre »

Makes you wonder how someone thought this was a good idea in a browser that was an early pioneer of popup blockers. Imagine if Firefox in the 2000's had seen popup ads and said "Yeah let's get in on that action!"

At least it was a small scale experiment and not something that rolled out to the whole install base, I use Firefox on a couple of computers and didn't see it myself. But should you really need user feedback to know that inserting an overlay that looks like in-page ad content is a bad idea?

Re: Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage

#3

Post by sandyarmstrong »

I noticed this yesterday. I've been using Mozilla/Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox as my primary browser for over 20 years. They've made some questionable calls, sure, but most of the recent things that have bothered people (like Pocket integration) haven't really irked me.

This is the first time where I got a visceral feeling that maybe this isn't the browser I knew and loved anymore. It's not like I'm uninstalling and switching to something else, but I do feel bummed out.

Re: Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage

#4

Post by logdap »

wlesieutre wrote: post #2

Makes you wonder how someone thought this was a good idea in a browser that was an early pioneer of popup blockers. Imagine if Firefox in the 2000's had seen popup ads and said "Yeah let's get in on that action!" At least it was a small scale experiment and not something that rolled out to the whole install base, I use Firefox on a couple of computers and didn't see it myself. But should you really need user feedback…

Mozilla management are malicious snakes. This isn't the first time they've tried something like this and it won't be the last. Each time they issue noncommittally apologies, if you can call them that, but it keeps on happening. They're testing the water for even more ads in Firefox, trying to normalize this until people stop complaining. Keep the heat on them, don't give them an inch or they'll take a mile.

Re: Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage

#7

Post by slater »

Someone needs to make a "Firefox Marketing Department Greatest Hits" page; this isn't the first time, by far, they've tried to shoe-horn some absolutely user-hostile garbage into some release, followed by the usual "we will do better" back-pedalling non-apology

Re: Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage

#8

Post by fabrice_d »

psychphysic wrote: post #5

Wow if ad blockers can work does that mean Firefox injects this advert? Its not just and overlay but code added to the webpage? I'm awe struck at the stupidity of this idea.

No it's not blocked by ad blockers, since this was not injected in pages but part of the browser UI (the "chrome").

Re: Mozilla stops Firefox fullscreen VPN ads after user outrage

#10

Post by red_admiral »

psychphysic wrote: post #5

Wow if ad blockers can work does that mean Firefox injects this advert? Its not just and overlay but code added to the webpage? I'm awe struck at the stupidity of this idea.

Unlikely. My guess is that the ad code runs in the context of the browser itself or some newly created context, rather than of the page you were reading before, but whatever fetch() or similar call it makes to load the ad goes through a subsystem that is affected by ad blockers.

Put another way, when you allow ublock or whatever you're using permission to intercept requests for ALL pages, that includes the "page" that mozilla is using to serve this ad.

Further evidence in favour of this hypothesis is that the ad can temporarily disable the rest of the firefox UI until you deal with it, which normal pages certainly can't do.

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