13 Oct 2025 Search

Previously: Goddammit, Mr. Noodle!

Remember when if you were into computers it was a big deal to get early access to some new thing, or line up to buy the new release? Now the power user tips are about how to keep your old thing working or turn some new feature off. This time it’s programmatic ads coming to the New Tab page in Firefox, announced at Advertising Week New York.

Mozilla Ads announcement for “adding trust to your ad buy”

According to Mozilla, this has something to do with trust in the platform but, if you ask real Firefox users, this sounds like more of the kind of shenanigans Mozilla keeps doing to erode trust.

Programmatic ads are a new risk that Mozilla is now asking users to take. Firefox is distributed under a license that, like most software licenses, disclaims liability.

Covered Software is provided under this License on an “as is” basis, without warranty of any kind, either expressed, implied, or statutory, including, without limitation, warranties that the Covered Software is free of defects, merchantable, fit for a particular purpose or non-infringing. The entire risk as to the quality and performance of the Covered Software is with You. Should any Covered Software prove defective in any respect, You (not any Contributor) assume the cost of any necessary servicing, repair, or correction. This disclaimer of warranty constitutes an essential part of this License. No use of any Covered Software is authorized under this License except under this disclaimer.

And, of course, if Mozilla’s adtech partner serves malvertising, they’ll use Section 230 to avoid liability, too. Since the entire risk as to the quality and performance of the Covered Software is on me, I choose to limit my malvertising risk. This could be a good question to ask of anyone who makes a turn off your ad blocker request. So, if I turn off my ad blocker, are you offering me warranty protection from malvertising? And are intermediary companies involved in serving malvertising to me covered by Section 230?

So I updated my policies.json to set the home and new tab pages to blank. In about:config these are:

  1. Set browser.startup.homepage to chrome://browser/content/blanktab.html.

  2. Set browser.newtabpage.enabled to false.

Remember, though, that if you do these in about:config they only affect the current profile. In my experience it’s easy to forget to do privacy/security settings for every new profile, and it’s a hassle to make all users do their own accounts when the work can be done once.