1589991 - Firefox simplified Chinese edition ships with unbearable ads

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1590128

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Hung-I Wang]

Attachment: WindowsSandbox_QJ7xX1yHiH.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:69.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/69.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Download Firefox with "zh-CN" locale preset from either https://www.firefox.com.cn or https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/ .
2. Install it.
3. Launch it.

Actual results:

Half of the home page is occupied by unbearable ugly ads as in the attached image..

Expected results:

Clean home page as it is in non-"zh-CN" edition.

Comment 1

[lilydjwg]

I can reproduce this with Firefox nightly zh-CN build of version 71.0a1 (2019-10-19) (built and distributed by Mozilla) on Arch Linux.

Comment 2

[arthur200126]

See Bug 1467698.

Comment 3

[YF (Yang)]

I also saw this scrren in recent days.

Large advertising seems to have been removed for now. let us go bug 1590128.

Comment 4

[Hung-I Wang]

Attachment: i.g-fox.cn

The half-screen ads have been replaced by a smaller one after plenty of complaints are made by users around almost all Chinese tech communities.

It is sort of off-topic, but I find nowhere more suitable to write:
Does Mozilla realize that what is done by Mozilla China, which is reported to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mozilla, around the Firefox products has been greatly criticized for years by Chinese users, who usually choose Firefox because they think Firefox is more privacy-respecting, clean in design, of no b------t like **intrusive** ugly **targeted** advertising?
Does Mozilla realize that what Mozilla China did goes far away from what Mozilla propagandize, ruining the reputations of Mozilla / the Firefox browser among Chinese users? 
For example:
- https://linux.cn/article-2295-1.html, "Mozilla China is found to do some evil", 2003. The homepage / quick dial page addon bundled with Firefox China Edition[1] hijacks user-created shortcuts of some shopping websites by adding referral links.
- The above evil can still be found somewhere today: 
  - On the default zh-CN homepage: https://start.firefoxchina.cn/ , which deploys a third-party webpage analytics service provided by one of the most infamous company in China, who certainly does not respect "Do Not Track" tag. (Line 5-9, hm.baidu.com/hm.js ...)
  - User searchs are bounced through https://i.g-fox.cn/search .
  - Of which the source code includes nothing other than inserting referrals:
```

    - 
[1] Firefox China Edition refers to the one provided on https://www.firefox.com.cn/ which is controlled directly by Mozilla China, using different digital signatures from the firefox.com one.

Comment 5

[Hung-I Wang]

The previous comment gets posted accidentally before I finish. So it is expected to have some typos and inconsistent format. But I think it is enough to get the problem clear.

Comment 6

[Sean Feng [:sefeng211]]

Attachment: start_firefoxchina_ads.png

I wonder if we should reopen this bug as the half-screen ads has been replaced by smaller ones? See the attachment for how it looks like now.

What makes me more concerning is the ads come from two online shopping companies, which do a lot of user tracking, I wonder why we accept to partner them in the first place.