Interesting tidbit I gleaned from the Hacker News comments:
Mozilla does sell users’ data. That’s how the sponsored links and stories work .
Occasionally, sponsors may pay Mozilla to specifically boost the score of their site during frecency ranking. In these cases, the shortcut is based on your history, but shown in the sponsored section. This still happens entirely on your device; your copy of Firefox has a list of participating sites, which receive a higher score during local ranking.
While the ranking happens on device, a smart sponsor will glean information from end users that click through because those links almost certainly track where the users come from. This is selling users’ private data to advertisers.
Mozilla’s dependency on Google has apparently warped their activism into fighting against these antitrust lawsuits since early 2025:
Interesting tidbit I gleaned from the Hacker News comments:
From here , with some minor formatting changes