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Mozilla apologizes for unskippable VPN ads shown in Firefox

After user backlash, Mozilla stops the "madness" of mandatory ads in
its browser

   By [45]Alfonso Maruccia May 29, 2023, 7:59
   Mozilla apologizes for unskippable VPN ads shown in Firefox
   TechSpot is celebrating its 25th anniversary. TechSpot means tech
   analysis and advice [46]you can trust.

   In context: Mozilla often tries to persuade users about its stance
   against intrusive advertising, promoting the Firefox browser as the
   best way to enjoy the web almost ad-free. Still, the San
   Francisco-based corporation is well known for forcing its own ads on
   users every now and then.

   Mozilla officially [47]promotes ad blockers on Firefox as a "best
   friend" for users forced to watch too many unsolicited advertisements
   while browsing the web. The average person sees "an average of 4,000
   ads a day," Mozilla says, and that's a bit too much. And yet, Mozilla
   recently joined the crowd of ad-serving companies with an "unskippable"
   message trying to promote the company's own paid VPN service.

   [48]Mozilla VPN is a subscription-based product designed to shield
   users' activity online, with hundreds of servers in over 30 different
   countries to enhance privacy and the overall internet experience. The
   service is one of Mozilla's many ventures to seek additional revenue
   sources, as the company is still largely relying on Google Search money
   to fund Firefox promotion and development.

   This past week, Mozilla started to show fullscreen advertising about
   its VPN service to disgruntled Firefox users. The ad campaign was met
   with [49]universal displeasure, with many lamenting the "disruptive,
   intrusive" violation that goes against Firefox's supposed core values.
   The ad was shown through the browser's Messaging System, so it was
   difficult to block with a traditional ad-blocker like uBlock Origin.

   Furthermore, the VPN ad was seemingly [50]breaking Firefox and web
   browsing for several users. Many bug reports submitted to the Bugzilla
   platform were initially marked as "resolved" by Mozilla developers, as
   the ad was working as intended and there was nothing to fix. Power
   users could disable the VPN advertising altogether by changing the
   browser.vpn_promo.enabled config (on the hidden about:config page) to
   false.

   In the end, Mozilla decided to stop the advertising campaign while
   apologizing to its users. The company now [51]says it was just trying
   to "understand the best ways to communicate with people who use
   Firefox," but it accomplished the exact opposite of the intended
   result. The unwanted, intrusive "experiment" was quickly rolled back,
   as Mozilla already did several times in the past.

   Besides being annoying and counter-productive, the VPN advertising
   fiasco was also exacerbated by a bug in the Firefox code. The browser's
   Messaging system is designed to show a Firefox-made promotional ad when
   user interaction has been silent for 20 minutes, but the VPN ad was
   seemingly being triggered inappropriately due to a [52]time
   miscalculation error.
   [53]5 comments 43 likes and shares
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