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by jasode 2549 days ago
As others stated, the submitted title of "Ad-Free Internet by Firefox" overstates what this actually is: pay $4.99/month for ad-free experience on a handful of media publishers' websites[1].

(I.e. it's not a universal ad blocker that lets you avoid ads on Youtube.)

The Firefox webpage itself doesn't oversell the feature as "ad-free internet" so not sure why writing a misleading title for HN was necessary.

[1] https://scroll.com/sites

(Edit to also mention Scroll doesn't have some popular news sites such as NYT, Washington Post, WSJ, etc -- probably because getting a fraction of $4.99/month is not enough money for them and it competes with their direct digital subscriptions.)

4 comments

> the submitted title of "Ad-Free Internet by Firefox" overstates what this actually is

it's not even that! it's not even something that they have! go on click the link to subscribe and see what happens.

It's surely fair to use the page title as the HN link title.
Ok, fair enough. Before I wrote my comment, I did perform a "view source" to search for "ad-free internet" and it wasn't found. However, if one uses F12 Developer Tools to inspect the DOM, it does have:

  "<title>Ad-free Internet by Firefox</title>"
It's interesting that that phrase is not visibly used and the big bold text people actually see just says "Support the sites you love, avoid the ads you hate".

EDIT to the replies: Yep got it. I can't see the title text on any tabs because they're too narrow when I have 50 tabs open.

It's used in the tab / window heading which is pretty visible I'd say.
It's the page title. It appears e.g. in the tab heading (but yours may be very small).
Mine are also very narrow, but yeah, it's weird that they only set it with JS.

  <title data-react-helmet="true"></title>
is in the source.
In this case, I think Firefox is disingenuous.
In fact the official guidelines here actually urge people to do so.
Yes but the HN guidelines also lets the submitter use some judgement if the title is misleading:

>Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

But I'm not going to nitpick this thread's title. If "Ad-free internet" is the best representation for HN readers because Mozilla itself used it, that's fine too.

> Scroll doesn't have some popular news sites such as NYT

The NYT is one of the co-sponsors that started Scroll, so I'm sure that they'll be on board eventually if they're actually not already.

I dont want this interated into Firefox. It should remain a neutral platform.

The only way to make this work is to track your id across many properties. (I assume)

I do welcome this effort, which is similar to the Apple News (or whatever they named it, I think) but it would need a lot more content before I am interested.