I deal with a lot of VMs for varying purposes, and it seems frequent that my purpose for opening firefox is derailed by some kind of nag. For example, I frequently get the “you haven’t used firefox in a while” in vms that I rarely use firefox and have to go disable the “meta refresh” option in the “about:config”.

Now, I’ve started seeing this one… it’s not even one of the passive banners but a full-page stop-the-world w/ semi-transparent background and right-click prevention.

Before I invest too much time trying to figure out how to disable these, or templating profile options en-masse, or the like… I thought I might ask… is there a way I can tell firefox that I only want it to only be a web-browser? i.e. an effective tool and not an attention sink or exciting video-game-like challenge of exploration and closing popups and suggestions while trying to remember why I launched it.

Somewhat relatedly, there is some kind of irony with firefox prominently offering to copy a URL without tracking for other sites, but when it is their own ad (however benign it might seem) that they disable right-clicks and load up on the trackers. The above button links to:

  •  Plume (She/Her)   ( @Plume@beehaw.org ) 
    24•1 month ago

    You know, there is a lot that is to blame for why Firefox doesn’t get the market share that it needs, but I would blame a part on its community as well. I have never seen a community that is so reluctant to any change or basically any features being added to a product than the Firefox community.

    Firefox developers:

    Look! To try and make the browser easier to use for new users, we have added a pop-up remind you that hey, Firefox sync is an awesome feature of this browser. Because feature discoverability is hard.

    The Firefox community five seconds later:

    E N S H I T I F I C A T I O N

    Mozilla isn’t perfect. Far from it. I have a lot of things to say about them and features that were never added or removed years ago that I’m still pissed off about and will continue to complain about until it is resolved, like fucking PWAs for example.

    But damn, being a Firefox developer sounds really hard. Like, trying to please a bunch of people who are always complaining about the state of this browser, but also will, without fail, always complain every time you change or add features sounds fucking exhausting.