The reason people are upset isn't because you can't disable it. The frustration comes from the fact you need to be able to trust your web browser. And mistakes like this, mistakes that are so egregious, and demonstrate such bad judgement, that it makes it harder to trust something that you need to be able to trust.

Ads by default are still not acceptable to me.

Yes, I am willing to pay say 100$/year for web browser if money would entirely go to development. Maybe something to support staff like CEO. But not over 5 000 000 per year ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary... )

And if such browser would be actually user-first, without ads for VPN and Disney movies (especially without ads pretending to not be ads).

I did—I saw this one. I can't keep opting out of every new abusive system Mozilla puts in. I'm done.

Where's the "don't suggest stuff" box? That seems much easier than the multiple about:config changes I'd have to do to turn off all of the new avenues for advertising

I disabled suggestions on installation some time ago.

Then it appears they recently added an additional sponsored option, and defaulted it to enabled, in an update, even for users like myself who had every other sponsored option disabled.

They're hardly the only organization that does this, but it is extremely disappointing. Were Firefox not the only major browser with very useful extensions, I'd certainly switch to something else.

Yeah they were weird to see until I turned them off immediately. I don't like the direction they've taken Pocket in with so much focus on "editorial" content. Instapaper's better at getting out of the way (even if it feels neglected).

I have. Every time it updates it opens a new tab to spam about their VPN (or whatever the flavour of the month is).