Alert HN: Mozilla puts advertising into Firefox AGAIN

See: How to customize Firefox Suggest settings, https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-suggest

They have added a new option to Firefox privacy settings, enabled by default of course, to allow "suggestions from sponsors" to "occasional"ly appear in the navigation bar dropdown, as if they were bookmarks. I noticed this by seeing a link to Office Depot in the pulldown, wondering what Office Depot page I had bookmarked or in my history, and discovering that it was an in-browser "sponsored suggestion". It appears to work by sending all your navigation bar typeahead to Mozilla so it can match you with a sponsor (oops about that privacy, lol). I'm not sure how recent this "feature" is, but I think it is recent, and I only noticed it today (I'm on LTS Firefox but installed an update a few days ago). Maybe the less stable releases have had it for longer.

Turning the sponsored suggestions off is not that difficult (see the url above for instructions), but Mozilla's unceasing obsession with inveigling advertising into the browser is... disturbing. Another day in the enshittification of the web.

Luckily, there’s a solution…

https://librewolf.net/

Yeah I guess the few people still using it can modify the source code and compile it...

It does indeed look superior. But getting the 2nd most important software on my PC from a group of randos with not even full names and God knows what level of opsec is just too scary even for me.

I've been toying with the idea of setting up a build enviroment for LibreWolf myself but that would still require auditing the patches and their changes as they come in every day.

And here we go again, Mozilla pissing its users, just few weeks ago after they pushed their VPN ads into Firefox.