Technology

Because you dont pay them and Google isn’t gonna forever. Money’s gotta come from somewhere.

I’d rather they create something better than what we have now because if you think you will ever live in a world without advertising, you’re unfortunately completely wrong.

Nobody likes being tracked by advertisers, and of course nobody likes advertising. It’s invasive, deceptive, and diminishes the user experience in every way imaginable. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that we can all agree to this stance.

Now, where I will disagree with you (and others that feel like you) is that Firefox is not pandering to advertisers. If anything, I feel they are compromising with them, with the user’s best interest at heart. Bear with me for a moment…

There is no arguing that Firefox made a huge misstep in how they’re executing this feature. They should have been talking about it long before the feature was released. That is a huge missed opportunity, and I for one can understand why people would have this knee-jerk “Firefox bad” reaction. It feels shady. It’s a bad look for an otherwise stellar product. Hopefully we can agree here too.

But I believe that if we all take a deep breath, and a step back, for a moment, then we can all see that in the long run this helps the user. No longer will advertisers need to rely on fingerprinting and tracking users. No longer will PII need to be sent to track conversion rates. It’s completely anonymous, and encrypted. And, it’s transparent to the user.

Will it work? Who knows.

But everybody running around screaming about how horrible of an idea this feature is and that everyone needs to disable this feature for no other reason than Firefox made a bad decision to not be more upfront about it, certainly won’t help.

And who would benefit from that? Advertisers.

Advertisers right now thrive on being deceptive, collecting PII, and fingerprinting mine and your behavior. They have invested billions on their infrastructure and networks. If this is successful, it will suck for them. But if it’s successful, it’ll rock for us.

Because they don't want to scare advertisers.

Instead of the traditional model of serving ads using identifiable data gathered by your browser, it takes the data and aggregates it to make profile type reports that advertisers can use instead of tracking you personally. It basically makes you anonymous while still serving general data to advertisers. This is a pro consumer experiment they did not need to work on.

Sure it's not ad-blocking, but it's better than feeding your personal info indiscriminately like some other browsers I could name..

They did mention it in the change logs, but they didn't make it opt-out.

I wouldn't use any other extensions, especially something like Chamaleon for Mullvad browser though.
Extensions, specifically the ones that change how a website behaves or how a website sees the user (such as an adblocker or a user agent string switcher) can be detected. Mullvad only comes with NoScript and uBlock Origin which is enough most of the time, and installing other extensions can be used to fingerprint you, especially since Mullvad tries to have every user seem like the same user to websites (which is why things such as letterboxing are enabled).