Firefox is adding ads, because only insults are free

Mozilla’s motto is “internet for people, not profit,” however the realities of having to fund all of its ventures are forcing the company into adopting one of the web’s less human-friendly aspects: sponsored content. Having acquired read-it-later service Pocket last year, Mozilla has been populating new tabs in Firefox with Pocket reading suggestions — and those are now going to include links that an advertiser has paid for.

If you’re using Firefox’s nightly and beta builds, you might have already seen sponsored links appearing among the Pocket suggestions, and the feature will be making its way into the proper Firefox browser with the release of version 60 this month.

In a blog post last week, Pocket founder Nate Weiner explained that the online “advertising model is broken,” citing the loss of privacy, transparency, and control for the user. What he and Mozilla propose as an alternative is to restore all three of those facets to Firefox users while still generating some income by placing paid-for links in front of those users. Mozilla’s promise is to only promote “valuable content, worthy of your time,” while giving you the option to hide stuff you don’t like or to disable sponsored suggestions altogether.

Without the fine-grained targeting that Facebook and Google are able to offer advertisers, Mozilla will surely be making a lot less through its ads, but it seems like the company thinks it will be enough to make the irritation for its users worthwhile.

With this new change in approach from Mozilla, the top alternatives to Google’s Chrome browser are either limited in availability — Safari, which doesn’t run on Windows or Android — or ad-supported, as in the case of Firefox and Opera. So you’re either sacrificing privacy, device compatibility, or your own attention, depending on which trade-off you choose to make. It may be an annoyance to be confronted with such a choice, but it just goes to show that nothing useful on the internet is ever free.