I enjoyed the read, but this is somewhat irrelevant unless a variety of people actually read it. I'm reasonably confident none of my friends read Mozilla's blog.
The point, though, is that they could. If you wanted to drop links to them with more details about why the should be excited about Firefox again, Mozilla is actually producing those.
This is one of those things that only seems unimportant until people stop doing it. Then you find out it was actually a pretty big deal.
If we do our part then everyone might be rewarded with a healthier ecosystem over the next months. (And "everyone " includes die hard Chrome users as well as people forced to use IE at work.)
Edit: what I mean is that all consumers generally benefits from healthy competition.
Plus Mozilla is a non-profit, so they're probably more interested in their reputation specifically amongst HN readers and the like than they would be if they were a commercial company just trying to sell as many widgets as possible.
Edit: Not trolling, pretty serious. Would Google allow the webpages favouring Firefox over Chrome to show up on the top search results (or even the first page)? I'm not sure about it.
But, when you're engineering search results to manipulate public perception, you don't just obliterate all of the undesirable content with hamfisted obviousness. You just weight the content differently. Maybe you ensure that anyone already looking for that content can find it, but ensure that a more generic search is favorable. Maybe you just manipulate the heap to ensure the top result is the good one. Maybe you merely aim for a favorable ratio of desirable to undesirable content.
Consider: "best search engine"
The results are full of discussions about alternate search engines. Both duckduckgo and dogpile make the front page. Yet, the #1 result is an article about how Google is the most popular search engine: https://www.reliablesoft.net/top-10-search-engines-in-the-wo...
Is that true? Sure. Is the result manipulated? Probably not. But if I was google and I was going to manipulate a search result, that's exactly how I'd do it. I'd maintain the illusion of impartiality by presenting lots of alternatives, but I'd ensure the most prominent result was the one I wanted.
In any case: a quick search is insufficient to detect search bias and proves nothing.
People find it through social media channels anyway. I'm only aware of it because of HN/reddit
It's the top bar ad on reddit for me right now (the topic, not this blog post). All the commentary is how people dislike it and are reverting to a prior version. Many are simply because it looks different. There is one person who talked tech, and in typical reddit fashion, he was called a corporate shill.
In no way am I saying the content is bad, I just struggle to view it as any significant or meaningful marketing strategy.