it's a bit unclear what they intended here but I see a lot of people assuming the absolute worst intent.
That Firefox would fully intend to insert full page unskippable adverts of it's own into unrelated websites is a major accusation and there is evidence this was an accident.
Looks more to me like bleepingcomputer purposefully sensationalized the issue as clickbait.
Did you even read the article? There's a screenshot which shows that this "feature" even got its own config items (browser.vpn_promo.*). This hardly looks like an "accident".
Also note the weasel language of their statement: "We’re continuously working to understand the best ways to communicate with people who use Firefox. ...".
"Communicate" my *ss. It really makes my blood boil how the Mozilla management hijacked Firefox for their unethical bullshit (because it happens again and again, as soon as the dust has settled over the last 'accident').
Firefox's responses are absolutely shit, for sure.
But Firefox has all kind of promo things (the latest I saw was adverts on their overview/links page - which you can also disable), so the presence of a config item for this doesn't mean they intended for it to show up where it did.
What else could they have been trying to do? From seeing the bug filed/fixed wrt the issue, it seems like the only unintentual part was that the popup appeared to quickly, it was showing up after 20ms instead of 20s or something like that
they could have been intending to insert the advert into other places, which wouldn't be quite as outrageous (though I happen dislike them inserting them anywhere, but some places are definitely worse than others).
I don't know exactly what anyone else experienced. What I experienced is: I was away from my computer and noticed that my Syncthing[0] folders were out of date, so I used KDE Connect[1] to make sure Syncthing was running on my PC, which opens a tab connecting to Syncthing on the local machine in the default browser - Firefox in my case. Some time later, I unlocked my PC and found the advertisement on top of my Syncthing admin page.
So yes, it popped something up while I was AFK, though I can't guess whether it would have done so if I hadn't remotely triggered a new tab. Needless to say, I was very surprised to see that behavior from Firefox, and even more surprised that despite posts to reddit and HN complaining, I didn't find a report in Bugzilla.
That Firefox would fully intend to insert full page unskippable adverts of it's own into unrelated websites is a major accusation and there is evidence this was an accident.
Looks more to me like bleepingcomputer purposefully sensationalized the issue as clickbait.