Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

>Are these guys losing their minds?

Yes

I don't know what the hell is going on with Mozilla. Ever tried to install Firefox on Android? The new tab page is full of ads by default!

And this is the company we are supposed to trust? Because right now I feel like I trust Google more, and that's a lot to say.

We can't argue with your feelings.

To solve this "problem" on android, check this xposed framework module:

http://repo.xposed.info/module/de.defim.apk.unbelovedhosts

Then these pages should not be full of feelings:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/internet-health/

Could you please be more clear? I disabled all my extensions and still don't see anything there that is based on feelings?

Adds are annoying yes, but they are only bad for your privacy if they track and profile you. Adds allow for free stuff and they can be done the right way. Granted this is becoming more and more rare so I understand your standard association of adds with distrust. The adds you refer to are non tracking (please tell me if I'm wrong though) and will slowly be replaced by sites you visit (often).

Ads abuse the user's time, attention, and privacy. Minus the tracking, that's still two factors of abuse rather than three.

I don’t mind ads... uMatrix and uBlock Origin take care of that noise for me.

I think they are feeling betrayed by Mozilla, and that they are saying language like "We all love the web" and "Internet for people" inspires feelings.

How do they abuse your privacy without tracking? Of course if they didn't abuse your time and attention they wouldn't make sense. But someone has to be paying Firefox's development, and it is not you. I'll take that last part back if you contribute to Mozilla. Hey, maybe it's an idea for a donation: make a 5$ Firefox without adds. I'd pay. To bad part goes to Google that way.

> Adds[sic] allow for free stuff

The opposite is true: ads must be paid for, which makes products and services more expensive.

Ads are a convoluted, inefficient form of wealth redistribution; whether that's "good" or "bad" depends on the specific circumstances.

For example, we might (simplistically) say it's "good" when we receive something paid for by ad revenue, but the burden of paying for (e.g. by price increases) and being subjected to those ads is carried by others. For example, if we tune in to a radio station, listen to a song, and tune out before some ad for a product we don't use.

We could say it's "bad" when the opposite happens, for example if we pay higher fees for shopping on Amazon, which then get spent on advertising Prime Video which we don't use.

No. Firefox was too big for my old phone and I switched to palemoon when firefox stopped allowing unsigned plugins on my desktop. I've been using habit browser on my phone. I don't really trust it at all so I give it minimal permissions and try not to do any browsing on my phone I don't expect to be tracked or monitored. It's fast and customizable and has a built in adblocker so I've been fairly happy with it. I've tried a lot of different mobile browsers. I haven't really found any I liked. They all kinda suck in one way or another. I was really hoping something from F-Droid would be appealing to use but they were all disappointing. The state of mobile browsers in general is kind of abysmal.

The irony is that people pay, just not to the right place. Every unnecessarily-bloated download tears through data plans and costs people money to their ISP that never makes it to the provider.

I want plain-text ads that provide just as much revenue to web sites but without obnoxious experiences and fat downloads.

> Every unnecessarily-bloated download tears through data plans and costs people money to their ISP

Only in third internet world countries like the US... Elsewhere, we don't have limited data plans.

This is going to put me in weird company but I really don't see why metered billing is such a terrible thing. Most other utilities are pay-for-amount-used. And as a bonus, this creates an incentive for developers (via customer pressure) to not use insane amounts of data.

You could have asked me what I meant.

It is because data, unlike water or electricity, isn't a finite resource. Your electricity bill includes the generation in the power plant and the transmission over the power lines. When it comes to Internet access, you're paying for the transmission (bandwidth), but there isn't a "packet generation plant" that you should have to pay for.

Also, data caps mean people will use less data, meaning using less bandwidth, meaning ISPs will have less of an incentive to upgrade their already ancient infrastructure. It would be giving them more money to use less of what they provide.