[_zzaw]

Yes. It’s obnoxious, shabby, and needs to be shut down—swift and hard—before Mozilla gets the idea that turning its browser into a billboard is an acceptable method of making money. Because believe me, if this kind of thing turns out to be profitable for them, that garbage will not be limited to a mere static image shown just once.

Given Mozilla’s current financial problems, and who their core users tend to be, this was a very stupid experiment on their part. Genuinely sad to see this grubby crap from them.

[plinkplink]

It is important to keep Firefox solvent and operational as it is the last real independent browser. Everything else is built on Chromium (or Webkit), which are owned and spied upon by Google (and Apple?)

[_zzaw]

I definitely agree. I’m just incredibly suspicious—and sick—of obnoxious ads, especially when they’re being pushed by companies whose products play a pretty major role in what I do online. We’ve seen how disgusting some of those smart TV manufacturers were willing to get: unremovable home screen ads, selling user data, etc. I think that happened in large part because some marketing weasel was like “hey, what if we…” and the rest of us didn’t say “no, never, we will punish you for that.”

At least, not in time. Right now, Mozilla is dipping a toe in the water, and it needs to be made unignorably clear to them that mistreating what remains of their userbase is not the answer.

[throwaway81523]

Independent of what? The ad-o-sphere? If they are showing ads, they are not independent of them.

[plinkplink]

Independent of Google since a vast majority of browsers are Chrome or built on Google's Chromium platform - which means they can spy on users.