Are you sure this isn’t from an extension? Mine doesn’t have any ads or even “Thought-provoking stories”.

that does not look like a vanilla Firefox. You should not have those ads there. Check out installed extensions

NTP

Network Time Protocol?

That probably counts as a privileged page, as in something uBlock Origin can’t access or modify.

Mozilla has probably been running another “experiment”, meaning not every user is affected. In the past they claimed it’s not advertisements because they are “continually looking for more ways to say thanks for using Firefox”. (Bullshit.) If you go to Settings > Home, you disable anything you don’t want to see, or just set your home page to a blank page, period.

You probably downloaded some shitty addon, or installed firefox from the wrong source

Crap like this is why I set mine to about:blank

Why do you blame Firefox? It’s like blaming the car for how you drive it…