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.

If your complaint is that Firefox doesn't support enough standards, ladybird is so far behind

The implication by users who frequently bring this up is that there's some unique influence on Mozilla. Yet if we're going by reminders Mozilla had a deal with Yahoo for three years in-between for it to instead be the default search engine and they were still paying hundreds of millions for the privilege (it's been estimated they were even paying $100m more than Google at the time, though by 2017 Mozilla reportedly felt they should have been making more and ended the deal prematurely after Yahoo was bought by Verizon).

Ie: I haven't seen evidence it's been unique partnership with Google in that regard. If there are more concrete examples of influence though I'd be interested (and it has to be understood I'm not a Google apologist either, I just seek more accurate critique as it's more robust).

I thought they weren't paid, and I know for sure that the plugin didn't load the code unless you set a special thing in about:config.

By the standards of easter eggs it was fine.

> When someone raised a bugzilla bug

I didn't hear about this part, I'd like to see your source. Though I don't know if that really worries me?

And I have no idea how it, or Pocket, is supposed to have any connection to privacy.