VPN popup spam

[NoMozillaPopups]

Why is mozilla now forcing ad popups for their vpn service? This browser hijack is unacceptable from a supposedly open company. The to find a browser that has more respect for their user base.

[chrisj11235]

Hi folks, I'd like to give some feedback on your VPN promo pop-ups. While browsing, I got a modal window which overrode everything else in the browser. There are reports on Reddit of this crashing the current page.

The company I work for uses Firefox to view and project web content in government meetings, along with many other critical tasks. This type of intrusive popup will make it increasingly difficult to use in production. I'll have to spend time deploying a Salt state to disable these on our entire laptop fleet, which is... vexing.

I have three suggestions:

• Ensure that these are disabled by default in the Enterprise ESR releases. Since those are less consumer-focused, I suspect you would not get many sales from those users anyway.
• Make it a non-modal popup, as you have done in the past.
• Clarify where to disable it, preferably not hiding it in about:config.

I appreciate that there needs to be a business model to keep development funded, but you may end up driving off your userbase if the browser becomes difficult to use reliably. Thanks!

[a10d]

I was looking something up this evening when a full page browser ad popped up.

Is this really how you want to treat your users?

I have been donating regularly to Mozilla, but this is not something I want to support.

[michael_gee]

I ran into the VPN browser ad

Coincidentally, I had been in the process of migrating back to Firefox from Chrome. While I've used Firefox since its original release for Linux, I've ping-ponged back and forth between Chrome and Firefox for some years now.  When Firefox had a stability issue, I would move to Chrome. When I ran into a bug where Chrome wouldn't render pages, I'd migrate back to Firefox.

Browser-hijacking ads from *anybody* will make me move to another browser. It's a bad idea and your user base will not be happy. I'm certainly not.

[Disco_duck]

Mozilla popup ad for their vpn shouldn't be turn on by default. No ads should be. Many of us use ad blockers because of the increasingly intrusive ads were subject to. So getting one directly from our browser is frustrating. 

[r6squeegee]

I've had 3 popup modal windows / dialogs show up today trying to sell me mozilla VPN. I never signed up for AD's in my firefox.

There shouldn't be built in, default opt-ed in, ad's in my browser.

I was annoyed and shocked at the first one.
I was really annoyed at the second one.
I started contemplating my browser choices at the third one.

[isr]

Specifically made an account to voice my concern about this "feature" that they clearly pushed on us and are now trying to backtrack on.

Mozilla, DO NOT DO THIS CRAP. You already have a SMALL market share in a very tenuous time for the internet, where your competitors will blow you out of the water if you don't give your users GOOD reasons to stick around. Avoiding invasive and manipulative popups and advertisements from the likes of Chrome is a HUGE reason why I and many people use Mozilla's software, and people like me WILL move on to other software if your ecosystem stoops to the level of all the other grubby greedy corporations. It'd suck to move on because Mozilla seems like it's trying to not be a horrible company, but I will move on if features like this are pushed onto me, especially in such an invasive way. Seriously, POPUP AD that doesn't let me close it super easily? I know you guys need money but REALLY? How about improving the quality of your product and letting it speak for itself instead of pushing ads on us?

[cvxtrzuhjk]

Really? If Firefox is emulating podcasts now in pushing unneccessary VPNs 😐, will they advertise expensive pillows 🛏 next?

[cvxtrzuhjk]

Since today users are encountering ads overlaid on top of the website they are browsing, advertising Mozilla VPN. This erodes trust in the browser, and makes it more difficult to recommend Firefox as alternative to other browsers. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1835158 and https://support.mozilla.org/de/questions/1414278