Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unrelated page

Re:Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unr... by xg15 on Thursday May 25, 2023 @08:08PM (#36078114)

One of the related tickets [1] seems to give some hints on the root cause - which in a way almost makes it worse IMO.

Basically, what they wanted to do was to build a background process that detects when you're away from the PC and then pops up the message, so it's the first thing you see what you get back.

Unfortunately (or maybe not) the detection logic had a bug, which caused the message to pop up right away sometimes, spoiling the whole thing.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1835175

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unr... by lamontcg on Thursday May 25, 2023 @08:18PM (#36078190)

I think it worked entirely 'correctly', and yet still annoyed the shit out of me.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unr... by housemusicfan on Thursday May 25, 2023 @08:21PM (#36078210)

> what they wanted to do was to build a background process that detects when you're away from the PC and then pops up the message, so it's the first thing you see what you get back

This unnecessary bullshit is how you introduce security bugs into software. Mozilla can preach all they want about security and privacy but this shows that it's all rotten to the core.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unr... by esprehn on Friday May 26, 2023 @01:28AM (#36080335)

Are you sure that code is related to this? That looks specific to the new tab page while the linked bug on HN shows a random website.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unr... by xg15 on Friday May 26, 2023 @04:05AM (#36081376)

It was linked in the "related" section of the original bug.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unr... by isaacremuant on Friday May 26, 2023 @06:59AM (#36082526)

This is terrible. I don't want their popups ever. Why do they feel they can block popups by default from others but their popups are fine?

Really hate Firefox doing this kind of thing. It's supposed to be a browser that cares about the user.

[ Parent | on HN ]