Firefox sponsored links, does this count as dark pattern?

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1

I just found out that if you disable “support firefox” option in the settings WHILE “sponsored shortcuts” enabled, you will still get ads on your homepage (this requires fresh install).
Note that the “sponsored shortcuts” is the sub option for the “support firefox” option. If the first gets disabled then the “sponsored shortcuts” get greyed out meaning it is not clickable anymore. Normally this should also disable the sub option but in this case it didn’t

I’m wondering whether this is dark pattern from firefox so that they could still get ads displayed and someone would forget about that setting or not understand it to double check the settings?

This can be found under the settings > “firefox home content” > “support firefox”

I did not notice this until after few days

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2

This UI behaviour exists with other checkbox toggles, such as within about:preferences#search for “Show search suggestions”, but the difference is that you have found a bug to report to Mozilla upstream on Bugzilla. That being said, I have confirmed on Firefox 151.0.1 that this is not reproducible on my end.

You can also access about:config and toggle browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsoredTopSites to false, or alternatively, toggle browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsoredCheckboxes to false, which unchecks the entire “Support Firefox” meta-checkbox.

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