Firefox app on android. Never seen this before until today. But Firefox is now putting ads in the app?
settings > homepage > shortcuts > uncheck ‘sponsored shortcuts’
I think people need to appreciate that Mozilla is probably the only company in the world who will allow you to turn off ads like this, for free.
I turn everything off in Firefox’s new page except search! I always found the news stuff distracting too.
that’s typically what i do but on desktop i turn off search too since a) i use the awesomebar primarily and b) my ntp is a background and i’d rather see that for a cleaner look :)
You should be able to turn off “web search” too if you go to the page mentioned in the parent comment.
(Note the Edit icon in the corner of the homepage does not give you all the options. It used to let you turn off sponsored content, but Mozilla removed that a couple versions ago.)
Thankies…you solved a problem I didn’t know I had
So, every real alternative to Firefox, is most likely based on all the work that Mozilla has done on Firefox. People get it for free, and yet they crumple and whine, when Mozilla tries to get the money to keep steady development going.
I want it free, I want them to do all the work, and then I’m going to use another browser, based on their work, because I don’t like that great development cost money - and I won’t pay! Buhuu!
Get over yourself. Mozilla does great work for users worldwide. Don’t like to see ads? Then start donating! Grow TF up, and realize that nothing is free in a capitalistic world!
Donating to Mozilla doesn’t change any behavior in Firefox.
Also, donations to Mozilla don’t go towards Firefox development. As far as I’m aware the only way to “give” money to Mozilla Corp (who work on Firefox, as opposed to the Mozilla Foundation) is to subscribe to the VPN service they resell.
It might… But I guess it’s easier to just badmouth Firefox.
I would pay for Firefox. The same way I donate every year to Thunderbird!
But do you?
I prefer to view this as a socialist. Firefox is the work of tens of thousands of laborers, and is not owned by an out of touch upper class. Yet, they are mismanaging it.
It took me time to realize that I, a highly trained engineer, was a laborer and have similar issues to most people the last few centuries.
It is literally needed that the workers of Firefox rise up and revolt before the entire project is harmed beyond repair
That might be… Then you should work for that.
While I get the sentiment, I think you are missing the two pieces here. One is that advertising is not the only method of monetization which can support something like Firefox. The second is that advertising is by it’s nature influence. Both in influence over the purchaser and reader. It’s an influence we should not approve of in both cases, without better boundaries.
Oh, do enlighten me. How should they get som money otherwise?
I think Mozilla loathe ads as much as you and I… But do enlighten os, how can they earn enough money otherwise?
My question is: can it be turned off?
Mozilla has been trying to get me to look at news or use Pocket for years now, but it’s easy to turn off.
Mozilla Firefox have never forced you to do anything in regards of ads. They fight for your right, for your freedom. Do you know there’s a help file in the browser? It’s a lot easier to use, than to write in here about mundane problems.
Settings>Homepage>Sponsored shortcuts
I turned it off a long time ago, I don’t think this is new.
Yes. I’m pretty sure you can disable sponsored suggestions in the options, or you can also just delete the individual sponsored options. I’ve not seen one of these in the last 4 years.
I think those have been there since forever?
This should be towards the top. I’ve been on FF4A for years now and they’ve had those links there the whole time. You can toggle them off if yku don’t want them.
how many people see that page tho? when i open a new tab i don’t even see the page, I open new pages quite often, all i see is the address bar until i type and hit enter. never even saw the “sponsored content”
You must have changed an option, by default the page shows up every time you open a new tab. (Though you can disable the ads on it)
I have wonderful tunnel vision. I opened a new tab and actually looked at the page and they do in fact exist, I have 3 sponsored links, I just never actually look at the page until i hit enter cause there is nothing of interest til then hehe
Pretty much
The default search engine being google is a much worse offence imo, but somehow people dont complain about that.
I’ve been using Duck Duck Go through Firefox for years now.
That’s the one thing keeping Firefox (and all it’s forks) afloat.
You can literrally change that with just a few clicks. It takes a few seconds…
But I guess you don’t like that great software costs money to develop, so you will start using those alternatives that wouldn’t exist, if it were not for Mozilla/Firefox… Make that make sense!
I didn’t mind the occasional sponsor or two for many years. Then one day they went over the line.
Yeah I know i should be on librefox/waterfox. Im lazy okay?
You can disable them, but also I’m pretty sure the default behavior is just to fill extra space if you have less than 8 pinned shortcuts. Your single shortcut is why there are so many ads.
Switching your firefox profile to a firefox fork is super easy peasy squeezy cheesy peas.
You just need to follow the steps for moving your profile in this Firefox support article: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/back-and-restore-information-firefox-profiles
When you start librewolf or whatever you switch to (librewolf is what I use) it will have everything from Firefox including whatever your last session was (if you save your session) and all of your history and bookmarks and even addons and UI customization etc.
As has always been the case, you can turn off Sponsored Shortcuts and Sponsored Stories.
Yeah… Never knew that setting existed because this is the first time I’m even seeing a sponsor.
If it was something besides some big Corpo I’d probably not have minded…
Mozilla’s #1 sponsor is Google, which is why you’ll see two Google logos on a fresh install of FF (after you click through their initial setup screens)
This isn’t new afaik. You can disable it in settings
Making a browser is expensive (especially with such incompetent management), they need to make money somehow.
They’re already getting money.
librewolf :3
How do you install it on Android?
u dont unfortunatly :'3 theres waterfox tho. idk if its any good?
It’s not on Android. The Android “equivalent” would be IronFox.
Based on Firefox, and would not exist, if Mozilla didn’t have income.
I guess you want it all for free, and are not yet grown up, and know how the world works.
If you don’t disable it, they always have.
My Android phone isn’t my primary and does not have an active SIM in it (it’s WiFi only), but my Firefox has no ads, and blocks all the ads (that I’ve encountered at least). iOS… is iOS. I mainly use Safari there, but, that’s a whole other story. Suffice it to say, I don’t have this problem on either handset.
It’s not that bad, IMO.
That being said, you sould 100% be using Cromite if you’re on android. Not only is its adblocking/antifingerprinting basically state-of-the-art, but its (unfortunately) way faster than firefox.
Killing sideloading might kill it though…
Just checked out cromite… Had AdbluckPlus in it… Uninstalled it… Sorry but i dont want a adblocker from a company on my phone…
It uses a modified version of its engine and its own filter source. It’s not commercial ABP: https://github.com/uazo/cromite/blob/master/docs/ADBLOCKING.md
Why was AdBlock Plus used rather than uBlock?
ADB is developed in c++ while uBlock is an extension in javascript. Currently, support for extensions is not active in Android. ADB in Cromite is enhanced with support for cname uncloaking and blocking even in workers (a unique feature of Cromite). Support for “acceptable ads” has been completely removed.
I view this as a huge plus, as (theoretically) a C++ engine is faster than a javascript one.
Now? That’s one reason I stopped using it 10 years ago
And what do you use now?
You expect them to work for free?
They get donations. Lots of them. And it is open source. I don’t expect ads in firefox, no
They get some small donations from some users… and Google.
It being open source means nothing. Open source developers still need to eat. It just means that you could remove all the things you don’t like.
I don’t get ads in Blender 3D.
Or Krita.
Or OBS.
You are severely underestimating the development burden of a modern web engine.
You’re severely underestimating the development burden of an industry standard 3D modelling program, much less the Swiss army knife that Blender 3D is.
If The Blender Foundation can operate with donations from big corporations like NVIDIA and AMD without selling out, then Mozilla has no excuse.
Mozilla gets fucking loads. Way more than it can spend on Firefox. Like a certain online encyclopdia.
Ads are greedy, unwanted, and symptomatic of the culture there. They can fuck right off imo. And most open source software manages to avoid ads, why do you think that is?
And freeloading is the reason why we have an ad-based economy… Do you donate? Do you work for free?
I have worked for free on OS projects, I have donated to OS projects. None of this changes my opinion that Firefox should not have ads
Then what should it have? You haven’t donated to it, so what do you do?
Mozilla gets fucking loads
From Google. And if that deal disappeared, Mozilla would probably go bankrupt or rely on a worse deal from another provider. Neither would be good for Firefox development.
It makes sense that Mozilla wants to branch out, diversify. It just sucks that they’re terrible at doing it. Would have been cool if Mozilla operated like Proton or any other privacy-orientated service provider.
most open source software manages to avoid ads, why do you think that is
Because they have scruples and usually have financial issues as a result.
Firefox would be better off without Mozilla at this stage. The donations mozilla receives from individuals supporting firefox would pay for a large dev team easily. Google is a total red-herring and this money is spraffed on exec pay afaict, and they should be ending this today, as has been said by many other people
If that was true, then why don’t we have a fork of Firefox being developed by the community that is better than Firefox?
The only thing we have now are forks of Firefox. Sure, some are better, but all still rely on Mozilla’s upstream contributions. If Mozilla stopped supporting Firefox, these forks would be dead. They just add some features and UI changes. They are not working on web standards, fixing implementations of those standards, or security fixes.
So you donate, do you? Or are you working for free in general?
I contribute to a major Bionicle fan project. Yes, for free. I’ve been offered a reward for my work on said fan project. I refused it.
Oh, so you do free work on a project that doesn’t do anything good for the internet, the internet users, internet freedom, and so forth - and that makes it okay to demand that you are provided with free software, that competes against multi-billion-dollar companies?
I can’t remember the details but aparently firefox on android is not the bastion of privacy it is on the desktop.
You’re best off with a chromium fork like bromite.
Also, now I think about it… I think mozilla is well meaning but they’re pretty much cooked. Just a litany of errors and refusal to listen to users over the last 10 years has made their products pretty unappealing. Ads on the new tab page is a pretty good example.
Edit: the thing I was trying to remember is site isolation. Android Firefox doesn’t have site isolation. Chromium does. I hate google as much as the next guy but there’s plenty of chromium forks that don’t send telemetry.
It’s just a link. I don’t see how this has anything to do with privacy.
Sorry chief, if you don’t see how monitoring your browsing behavior in order to choose what ads to show you has anything to do with privacy, then I don’t know how to help you.
Setting aside that embarassing that turd of stupidity, my comment offered ads as an example of Mozilla’s flagrant disregard for the desires of users.
The privacy issues I was trying to remember is that Firefox on Android does not have site isolation. Desktop firefox does (containered tabs by default). Chromium does on Android, not sure about desktop.
To my knowledge, there is no monitoring involved for selecting those links. They have different sponsorship deals per locale, so they show different links when you switch your phone’s language, but they can decide that on your device.
For a while, desktop Firefox would select different news articles based on your browsing history, but again, they have your browsing history on your device. They’d be mad to upload all of that just to pick one article or the other. They did also publish a blog post at one point where they explained how all of that worked, so that’s not me spitballing, they did actually select that exclusively on-device.
Back to Android Firefox, presumably they do send Adidas the information that someone clicked on this link via Firefox Android, so that Adidas knows how valuable their sponsorship deal is. But yeah, that is fine in my opinion. It’s hardly personal information and nothing happens, unless you click the link.
The privacy issues I was trying to remember is that Firefox on Android does not have site isolation. Desktop firefox does (containered tabs by default). Chromium does on Android, not sure about desktop.
Right, yeah, Android Firefox doesn’t implement process isolation of tabs. (Container tabs is a different privacy mechanism, which neither Chromium nor Android Firefox have.)
The lack of process isolation is typically deemed a security issue, since it’s only relevant when someone tries to do something actively illegal, but sure, the security measure exists to protect your privacy.I would argue that Chromium is terrible for privacy in many other ways (see e.g. https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium/blob/master/README.md ; albeit I don’t know how much of that applies to the Android version of Chromium), but if you deem the process isolation to be significantly more important, then that is an opinion to have.
Bromite is dead. You mean cromite. Vivaldi is fine too I think. Firefox is private enough on Android, the app is just not good
