Some Mozilla Firefox users have recently received popup advertising in the browser. Mozilla used the advertisement to promote its own Mozilla VPN service to users of the browser. The company has now suspended this campaign.
Mozilla officially launched its VPN service in 2020. using the infrastructure of moleA VPN service that is known for its focus on privacy. This is an optional service that users can subscribe to.
The advertising that users saw in Firefox appeared unexpectedly for users. Some people noted that their browser window became unresponsive for a period of time before the popup ads were shown.
The ad itself promoted Mozilla VPN with a 20% discount code. The ad did not include a turn off option that would turn it off permanently, only a “not now” option, which many companies do these days in favor of not giving their users any option to say “no, thank you”.
there was a bug report created On Bugzilla, Mozilla’s official bug tracking site. Several threads were also created on Mozilla’s official support site, see Here And Here For example.
User ben153 wrote: “Today Firefox completely shut down and dimmed the entire window and the “Try Firefox VPN” message popped up. I use Firefox specifically to stay away from disruptive, intrusive breaches like this. This needs to be removed immediately and will never happen again. This is completely antithetical to the core values of Firefox.”
A forum moderator replied to the threads, saying, “Firefox is committed to creating an online experience that puts people first, so we’ve shut down the ad experience immediately, and are reviewing internally”.
The reply made some users even more angry. He said that “an online experience that puts people first” should never show ads in this manner or use the “not now” option as the only option to turn off prompts.
It appears that Mozilla has suspended the ad campaign for the time being. Longtime users of the browser may remember the Mr. Robot campaign that Mozilla ran in Firefox in 2017. It promoted TV shows by automatically installing a browser extension in Firefox. While installing browser extensions is a different level of interference with user devices, many Mozilla employees were not aware of it when the campaign launched.
It seems like the marketing has pushed this into Firefox, suggesting that Mozilla could push VPN subscriptions significantly this way. This is speculation on our part, and we’ll have to wait for Mozilla’s official response to know more about it.
While it’s understandable that Mozilla wants more customers for Mozilla VPN, pushing popup ads in Firefox is not the right way to go about it.
now you: Did you get ads? What is your take on this?
