From the 'Don't advertise in my open-source browser' files:

The recent Mozilla Firefox 33.1 browser release introduces what many in the open-source and Linux communities consider to be a very distasteful feature - namely it includes an advertising feature by default.

That advertising comes on the new tab page, and is on by default. How Mozilla can possible justify such an epic failure of its principles is behind my own meager capacity to understand such a travesty.

I'm not the only one that finds the new advertising abhorrent. Fedora Linux developers are also not keen on the new advertising and are likely to abandon Firefox as a result.

In a Fedora mailing list discussion, developers are now actively debating dropping Firefox, even though the advertising issue doesn't technically make Firefox non-Free. The challenge is that there isn't a good replacement (yet) though developers are actively working on improving the Gnome Ephiphany browser to replace the advertising hungry Firefox.

In the meantime, while Firefox has clearly strayed from the right path, it still offers users a choice at redemption.

"We should stick with Firefox for the time being, and simply disable the ad feature one way or another," developer Michael Catanzaro wrote in a Fedora mailing list post.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist