In recent days, some users have discovered that a pop-up full-screen VPN advertisement appears in the Firefox browser. The pop-up advertisement will disable the browser's functions, deny users access to the interface, and gray out all content in the background until it is closed.
Some users complained on Reddit that annoying full-screen ads even caused Firefox to become unresponsive for up to 30 seconds, forcing it to terminate the browser process.
That doesn't seem like good marketing for a company trying to promote privacy, security, and an internet that meets users' needs. This ad violates two Mozilla principles at the same time:
- Principle 5: "Individuals must have the ability to shape the Internet and their own experiences on the Internet."
- Principle 8: "Transparent community-based processes that promote participation, accountability and trust."
Some users reported this problem to Firefox's bugzilla to express their outrage at Mozilla's intrusive propaganda:
Unexpectedly, this problem was marked as " RESOLVED WORKSFORME " by an unknown Firefox manager " mjb " (only three bugs were dealt with in 7 years) . This means that the pop-up ad itself is working as expected, there is nothing to fix, it's just that the timing is wrong.
However, according to BMO guidelines, the WORKSFORME solution should only be applied when the error cannot be reproduced and there is no known valid cause. The correct resolution status for this issue should be FIXED, and the WORKSFORME solution seems to be just to gag users - being marked as WORKSFORME means that the bug is not allowed to be discussed further, but FIXED is.
Although the WORKSFORME status was quickly changed back to FIXED by other administrators, this move made Firefox users even more angry and sparked wider discussions and questions . Under tremendous pressure from the community, Firefox finally made a response of "stop advertising and conduct internal review".
To be honest, the meaning of the community is not to allow Firefox to place advertisements, but the full-screen advertisements that force pop-ups will not automatically close without clicking the cross, which is too much like rogue software...
Ad Blocking Solution
Mozilla VPN is only available in the United States, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. So it can be assumed that only users in these regions see pop-up VPN advertisements in Firefox.
Users affected by this issue can enter "about:config" in the address bar and set browser.user_hates_advertising to true. In addition, installing an ad blocker such as AdGuard and AdBlock can also block Firefox's pop-up ads (this is not a kind of sadness).
