Comment by autoexec

> A reminder that years ago they were paid by an advertising firm to secretly install a plugin for a TV show.

More recently they pushed an ad for Disney on users and the only way to prevent that was to turn off the redirect to the "what's new page" the show us after updates (browser.startup.homepage_override.mstone = "ignore") which means that now users have remember to manually check out https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/ for release notes.

Then later they pushed a full screen VPN ad on every firefox user. In response to the immediate outrage, they suspended the ad campaign and told people to add "browser.vpn_promo.enabled" to about:config and set it to "False", even though that only applied to the one ad everyone had already seen and been forced to click past. What they should have done was add "browser.promos.enabled" and made sure that any ads they added to the browser in the future respected that preference.

I agree 100% that pocket is a huge offense. It should never have been anything but an add-on.

> ...meanwhile in Chromium browsers, WebSerial has been supported for years

Most people using Chrome are already handing all their private info and internet browsing history to Google. No exploit needed. Last I checked (it's been a while admittedly) there was no way to totally disable WebRTC or service workers in chrome and they don't want you to be able to disable ads either. Chrome isn't really an option.

Firefox is a very imperfect browser, and I'm afraid that it's getting worse all the time, but it's still the best we have.