[brimble]

They use pop-up ads for Pocket, or their recent "color ways" thing, or whatever, pretty often. They also like to pop in new tabs and move focus to them, which is at least as bad.

The evidence is using Firefox for any length of time, with default settings (maybe there's a way to turn this off, I dunno, I use Safari most of the time these days so it hasn't been worth figuring out, but happens enough to be pretty annoying even in my limited use of FF on my Windows gaming PC)

[jdlshore]

Pocket only appears on the new tab screen. That's not a pop-up.

Colorways did have a pop-up, but it was an announcement of a new feature, not an ad, and didn't repeat.

I haven't seen the pop in new tab behavior you're talking about. That's so far out of left field I have to wonder if you have some sort of extension installed that's causing your problems.

Maybe it's a matter of configuration—I've been using Firefox since it was named Phoenix and I could have turned off the behavior you're upset about. But a quick web search for "firefox pop-ups" and "firefox advertisements" doesn't show anybody else complaining about this. Given that people hold Mozilla/Firefox to a much higher standard than other browsers, I'm inclined to believe it doesn't exist.

And all that aside, you've still provided no evidence that Mozilla plans to make this Disney ad a pop-up. It's just a fantasy you've concocted.

[brimble]

> Pocket only appears on the new tab screen. That's not a pop-up.

I've seen nag "notification"-type pop-ups advertising Pocket and other things, that I have to dismiss.

> I haven't seen the pop in new tab behavior you're talking about. That's so far out of left field I have to wonder if you have some sort of extension installed that's causing your problems.

It's every single time it updates even if there's nothing any normal user needs to know about in it. Just today I remoted in to a work machine with FF on it, and already open, and sure enough, there one of these was, staring right at me. Somehow I get by OK in Safari and every browser before FF started doing this, without having changelogs pushed at me as an excuse to raise my "brand awareness", which I assume is why they do this.

> And all that aside, you've still provided no evidence that Mozilla plans to make this Disney ad a pop-up. It's just a fantasy you've concocted.

You don't expect them to do what they did with the Colorways announcement? Maybe they won't, but I'd be surprised. I don't know why they'd do this and not push it out over their favorite (and, if counted by audience size and effectiveness, practically only) advertising channel, which is to push it at people using their browser.

[EDIT] Oh man, it just occurred to me that they probably did the obnoxious Colorways announcement in the first place to measure its "engagement" precisely in order to sell this kind of stuff. Otherwise there was no reason to make such a big splash and interrupt people's workflows over putting some UI theming back in a browser that already had it, years ago. I'd wondered why they made such a big deal out of that and pushed it out in such a strange way, but that makes all the pieces fit together.

[yoasif_]

> I've seen nag "notification"-type pop-ups advertising Pocket and other things, that I have to dismiss.

Any chance you have a screenshot of this? I see those kinds of notifications for Safari and Edge (on macOS and Windows), but not Firefox.

[brimble]

Nah, but they're UI tooltip-type mini-windows attached to the relevant UI element (the Pocket button, usually), IIRC, except not requested by user action. If I install FF fresh or sometimes after updates it'll decide it needs to try to sell me Pocket again.

[EDIT] Also, I've not seen what you're talking about with Safari (but I believe you—I probably haven't seen it because I use Safari almost exclusively, on Apple operating systems) but I know exactly what you're talking about with Edge. Ugh. That and the little nags about OneDrive and shit down in the system tray. It's weird, back in the heyday of hating Windows—when I was even a really heavy Linux user, in fact!—I never really hated them, but I kinda do now, mostly over their turning into ad- and spy-ware (hm, there's a pattern here).

[yoasif_]

> Nah, but they're UI tooltip-type mini-windows attached to the relevant UI element (the Pocket button, usually), IIRC, except not requested by user action.

This sounds like a popover (not sure what the Firefox term is), but I have only ever seen it in response to an action.

As others have mentioned, there are definitely pages that are opened by default on browser starts/restarts, along with tab modal dialogs (also on restart). But yeah - I can't recall seeing a popover featuring Pocket that just happened by itself.

For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popover_(GUI)