A quick cursory search of that phrase on GitHub reveals this is not an isolated incident. The exact same promotional text appears in over 11,000 different pull requests across thousands of repos on GitHub. Even merge requests on GitLab are not safe from the injection.

At first, you might think the ads are coming from Raycasts Copilot extension, which lets you start and track Copilot coding agent tasks, kick off Copilot jobs, monitor progress, and manage pull requests from within the Raycast launcher using prompts. But the ads appear to be tied to Microsofts Copilot coding agent tips rather than Raycast itself. Neowin adds:

If you look at the raw markdown of the affected pull requests, there is a hidden HTML comment, START COPILOT CODING AGENT TIPS, placed just before the ad tip. This suggests Microsoft is using the comment to insert a tip that points back to its own developer ecosystem or partner integrations.

There is a growing push for monetization in generative AI, as labs and platforms try to cover the massive costs of inference computing.

With an over $400 billion gap between the money invested in AI data centers and the actual revenue these products generate, Silicon Valley slowly returned to the tested and trusted playbook: advertising.

From the mockups, it appears Mozilla took some inspiration from Googles Material You (or at least, the dynamic color extraction part of it) because the browser color accent appears influenced by the wallpaper setting. Choosing a mint-green desktop background automatically shifts the top navigation bars to match that exact shade.

Mozilla has a habit of redesigning Firefox every few years. Before "Nova," there was the "Proton" redesign in 2021, the "Photon" redesign in 2017, and the "Australis" redesign in 2014. Nova is still in early development, so it might take a year or two before it appears in an official stable Firefox release.

Neowin adds:

Not every redesign project ends well for Mozilla, though. You might remember 2012sFirefox Metro, an ambitious attempt to build a custom browser for Windows 8s touch-first interface. The team built it to operate both as a traditional desktop application and as a touch-optimized Metro app.

The whole thing was scrapped in 2014 after two years in development due to a dismally low user adoption rate (a preview version of the software had been released a year earlier on the Aurora channel).

Incidentally, the characterisation of ribbon-style interfaces as "modern" or "standard", used by several users, is not based on any objective usability parameter or design principle, but is the result of Microsofts dominance in the market and the huge investments made when the ribbon was introduced in Office 2007 as a new paradigm for productivity software.

Zorin OS 18 just reached 100,000 downloads in a little over 2 days... Over 72% of these downloads came from Windows, reflecting our mission to provide a better alternative... Thank you for making this our biggest launch ever!