Yup, you can turn it off.

It's not overly difficult to get to the setting either.

One could posit an ideal public sector development studio that takes grants from the state/federal government to produce useful Open Source software. Think public radio or public broadcasting, but for apps.

Hell, it isn't even wild in the current moment. Modern day AWS and Azure subsidize much of its small/new user client base with the massive public sector clientele. OpenAI and DeepSeek are both the product of giant state-sponsored initiatives to develop AI that is free at point of service. Plenty of the original internet architecture was the product of public investment and grants, as was the university-centric ARPNET that would eventually be commoditizated into the commercial World Wide Web.

Look up the history of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the pioneering of Mosaic, the first widely available GUI-based web browser. It was the foundation for both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, which licensed the original design for the tiniest fraction of what it would ultimately generate in future revenues.

Yeah, this is basically the least offensive thing possible that ensures the lights stay on.

+1 for fennec

I use Fennec for my phone, but I'm rediscovering Floorp on desktop right now and I'm seriously impressed. Smoothest Fox Fork I've used in a long time.

No it's the complaint about one of the few transparent revenue flows Mozilla managed to pull off.

It's disabled one step deep on the settings

There is a shitload of stuff going wrong with the Mozilla foundation and this doesn't even make the top 10.

That's the reason for my down vote: it's nothing I want this community to focus on. It's basically engagement bait with the topic "ads bad".

Firefox is the best browser

It's only real competitors, in my eyes, are Firefox forks.

Agreed. I love Firefox and don't really like Mozilla.

Mozilla already has Scrooge McDuck amounts of money. It doesn’t need any more to maintain a browser and an email client.

From jwz, who founded Mozilla & Firefox:

• 2020: This is a pretty dire assessment of Mozilla
• 2023: Remember when Mozilla made a web browser?
• 2024: Mozilla is an advertising company now
• 2024: Mozilla's Original Sin

.

Mozilla had a duty to preserve the open web.

Instead they cosplayed as a startup, chasing product dreams of "growth hacking", with Google's ad money as their stand-in for a VC-funding firehose, with absolutely predictable and tragic results.

And those dreams of growth and market penetration failed catastrophically anyway.

(Except for the C-suite, who made out quite well. And Google, who got exactly what they paid for: a decade of antitrust-prosecution insurance. It was never about ad revenue. The on-paper existence of Firefox as a hypothetical competitor kept the Federal wolves at bay, and that's all Google cared about.)

Now hear me out, but What If...? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?

As I have said many times:

In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:

1. Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
2. Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
3. There is no 3.