You want both of these to be false.

browser.urlbar.suggest.quicksuggest.sponsored

browser.urlbar.sponsoredTopSites

For aesthetics and anti-stupidity's sake, might I also recommend:

browser.urlbar.trimURLs

False.

It is possible that I'm so culturally eccentric that the obstruction of useful information fails to appeal to me.

Thanks.

They were already off for me, and I don't remember being asked about enabling them after an install...

They won't ask or inform you of this it just gets enabled. (Currently just in US). HN discussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28804588

There were stories about it a few days ago. It's US only thing, for now.

They added it unannounced in the last update, Firefox 93. There was a small outrage on behalf of the dozens of people still paying attention to Firefox, but nothing came of it. If you're on a good distribution, you'll probably see it disabled by default.

Honestly I have been disappointed beyond the capacity for outrage with Firefox. Do you know of any positive cases of a distribution that disables this?

Edit: just to add to this, my understanding is that Mozilla uses (abuses?) their trademark on Firefox to keep the distributions in line. If you distribute a version of Firefox that's been patched to remove anti-features, you can't call it Firefox.

Arch Linux seems to have disabled it. Both the config flags are false for me and I haven't touched that.

They do not. You can check their build files yourself here: https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/tree/packages...

Indeed, it would be rather surprising if they did, as I'm an Arch user as well and they have not disabled the sponsored new tab suggestions or the Pocket article recommendations. Hard to say what would be beyond the pale for the Arch maintainers.

From what I can tell from this thread, they are currently selectively enabling this for certain users. Maybe it just hasn't been enabled for you yet, or you're in a region (non-US) that doesn't get it enabled?

I've never seen ads in the address bar and when I checked the about:config for those two items they were both false. I installed it from the Pop OS! repository.

It isn't a patch to Firefox just configuration.

As far as I can tell, they do not. I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that their Firefox package is just taken directly from Ubuntu, and they only apply a single theming option on top of that: https://github.com/pop-os/default-settings/blob/master_focal...