bitofhopeFirefox: Sponsors on the home page and New Tab page
SoyweiserStuff like this has been coming for a while now, and I hate it. See also how your windows login screen can have ads on it.
Considering the rate of return on advertisements, I don’t think this is a financially good sign.
And interestingly a friend of mine who basically only games switched to Linux, and it seemed to have been rather painless. And most of his games work with minimal fiddling. (And there are even tools to help you with ‘which games of my library will not run well’. Which did surprisingly well on his large library. So linux on the desktop might be closer than we think).
It’s unfortunate that Linux is not immune to this. I noticed this happening to Firefox on a Linux machine and there was the debacle with Amazon search in Ubuntu’s menu about a decade ago. It seems a lot less endemic, though.
I’d hope that on linux annoyed users would easily hack it out, compared to stuff like windows. But sadly that is also expecting active users who can do coding and then can/want to spread that code, and then being able to trust that code. I have seen in other places how much of a mess that can be.
There certainly are users, both on Windows and Linux who do “hack out” these things. With Firefox it can range from just going through the small hassle of unticking the sponsor option in settings to making forks like the LibreWolf which people seem to like. When the Ubuntu Amazon thing was ongoing I recall people switching desktop environments and even distros in protest and for Windows I know people who hunt elusive enterprise only versions or even Chinese market editions of the OS to avoid the ads.
I usually appreciate it when distros avoid fucking with the upstream versions of the software they package, so in the occasional case like this where the upstream decides to ship a shitty “feature” I would actually prefer being patched out by the distro package maintainers, I don’t mind accepting the responsibility of just turning off the setting or compiling a fork on my own if necessary.