1835158 - Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unrelated page

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Messaging System, defect)

Description

[Zak Wilson]

Attachment: Screenshot_20230525_224308.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/113.0

Steps to reproduce:

Browsed an unrelated page (in this case, a the Syncthing admin UI generated from a server running on my own PC)

Actual results:

A pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN appeared on top of the page, and disabled the rest of the Firefox UI until closed. It is shown in the attached screenshot.

Expected results:

The browser should not have displayed an advertisement.

Comment 1

[lordpidey]

Attachment: Wider image of the phenomenon

A view of the entire browser window during the incident.

Comment 2

[jscher2000]

Suddenly, there are numerous reports of this on r/Firefox. Seems related to bug 1834728 but I don't understand the message routing so it's difficult to have anyone reconstruct the trail.

https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/components/newtab/content-src/asrouter/docs/index.html

Comment 4

[Vtay]

We’re continuously trying to understand the best ways to communicate with people who use Firefox. Ultimately, we accomplished the exact opposite of what we intended in this experiment and quickly rolled the experience back yesterday. We apologize for any confusion or concern.

Comment 5

[Zak Wilson]

(In reply to Vtay from comment #4)

Ultimately, we accomplished the exact opposite of what we intended in this experiment

Indeed you did.

For what it's worth, I wouldn't have found promotion of a new Mozilla service on a post-update "what's new" tab or the like problematic and I suspect most others wouldn't have either. An ad overlay on an unrelated site, however is reminiscent of the spyware that people would pay me to get off their Windows 98 machines a couple decades ago.

Comment 6

[Ray Kraesig [:rkraesig]]

As a procedural note: per BMO guidelines, the WORKSFORME resolution should be applied only if the bug cannot be reproduced and has no known plausible cause.

(The proper resolution-status in this case was indeed FIXED, because — as with any other FIXED bug — the behavior had stopped because we had done something to stop it.)

Comment 7

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

(In reply to Zak Wilson from comment #5)

I wouldn't have found promotion of a new Mozilla service on a post-update "what's new" tab or the like problematic

Messaging System does have a "moments page" surface to open up a tab at startup very similar to "what's new" which is sometimes shown on upgrade. Both take users away from their current page and avoids showing something on top of an unrelated page, but all including the spotlight shown here require some interaction to get back to the unrelated page. https://experimenter.info/messaging/messaging-surfaces/#moments-pages

I believe both those types of pages have included VPN promotions before, and part of this particular experiment leading to this bug was to see if we could get rid of the code for moments pages if other capabilities were sufficient or if they had bugs, e.g., triggering bug 1835175 and surface bug 1835481.