Almost all the links in my front homepage are sponsored now. What's next, a few ads in the bookmark bar? How about when I enter a URL, I then have to type "McDonald's" before I can actually navigate there?
These can be turned off. Not great that they’re on by default, but you gotta pay the bills somehow right?
Yeah, this is basically the least offensive thing possible that ensures the lights stay on.
Remember when most sites had simple banner ads, and there was no widespread outcry about how much they sucked and we needed ad blocking software? Then they started flashing, then the popups and pop-unders came, then vids started autoplaying, and now here we are.
If advertisers hadn't gotten greedier than banners on the sides of sites, maybe no one would've gotten around to blocking all their shit.
Pop-under ads were obnoxious. As were the popups that were like 1 pixel large but it still had the windows bordering around it.
Nicely said.
People keep giving Mozilla shit for taking money from Google, yet they see an ad for a different company and lose their shit.
I think the downvoters can’t hold these two thoughts in their mind at the same time:
Firefox is the best browser
It's only real competitors, in my eyes, are Firefox forks.
Agreed. I love Firefox and don't really like Mozilla.
No it's the complaint about one of the few transparent revenue flows Mozilla managed to pull off.
It's disabled one step deep on the settings
There is a shitload of stuff going wrong with the Mozilla foundation and this doesn't even make the top 10.
That's the reason for my down vote: it's nothing I want this community to focus on. It's basically engagement bait with the topic "ads bad".
This has been the case for several years. Super easy to turn them off
See ads, "how dare they" Sees paid version, "how dare they" Development costs time and money, pick your poison.
Then turn it off?
Skill issue 
The browser itself is free, and they have to make money somehow to keep the company running (if the CEO didn't keep most of it for themself). If you don't like it, you can turn it off or download an ad-free fork.
Better than the unlabeled sponsorship behind the default search engine.
If they make some money from harmless icons, I mean, I can live with it
Yeah but you can literally just turn this off with no fuss.
1.Firefox for Android.
2.Tap the menu button.
3.Tap. Settings.
4.Tap Homepage.
5.Deselect Sponsored shortcuts under Shortcuts.
And looks like it's been fixed :)
Can't you remove those?
If we want software to be FOSS we have to stop bitching so much about developers trying to make the math work.
I say let them cook a little, they arent drowning in donations and still do a tone of things for foss communities.
Let's remember that the de fuckto market (ie pleb) alternative is overwhelmingly Chrome.
We dont need such projects just so we as individuals can have privacy focused experiences but also for how that influences markets and society. And to have any influence you need certain power of masses.
So how exactly were you planning on them making money if they don’t take money from Google to be the default search engine and they don’t take money to place advertisements on the default home page?
Either that or they go bankrupt. Design your own browser and give it out for free if you don't like it
Personaly those shortcuts are a feature I literally never use so much so I don't even register their existence anymore.
How do you get this? My home page just has some recent links
Depending on where you got Firefox from, default settings are different. Maybe your distro ships with these deactivated.
Ads are one thing, but this seems excessive and probably unintentional. Looks like someone just filed this bug, which is another sign that it might be an unintentional problem: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1944704
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This is why I torrent firefox pro using Limewire.
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