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Comment by msla | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the fact they bundled adware/spyware in with their browser will affect this.

Why would you insert your misleading message twice in the same topic within 15 minutes? It is hard to understand whether you are a disappointed Mozilla supporter or a paid troll for somebody. This is not exactly an accusation, but that's how it looks.

On the other hand, after this move, now I'm seriously planning to switch to Mozilla.

Because it's a discussion we need to have, and I realized that my standalone comment wasn't going to accomplish that.

My later comment did, BTW, even though it's now "hidden" to some extent for some unknown reason. HN mods being pro-Mozilla?

(BTW, an accusation which you claim is not an accusation is a poor accusation indeed.)

There is a growing list of stumbles as Mozilla pursues additional market share, but the the company is building the browser pointed in the best direction. Hopefully there is a happy medium somewhere between "a mistake has been made" and "the end justifies the means" but it's still being sorted out. In case you missed it, the extensive discussion was here last month:

Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15931730

Firefox is on a slippery slope | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144

I hope that HN's 'downvote to disagree' squad doesn't reduce your collection of random internet points too severely! I personally try to upvote every comment worth replying to. I would love to see the ratio of upvotes to downvotes & number of 'flags' associated with each account as kind of a 'degree of genuine participation' indicator.

PS. It's not the mods... 'ain't nobody got time for that!'

If you're talking about the Mr. Robot controversy, that wasn't spyware.

Not even adware or an ad in the state it was rolled out either, as it did nothing, except checking for an about:config-flag. If you manually enabled this flag, then it would have flipped around a few words.

We don't fully know that.

We know it was forced onto browsers in a manner which reeks of spyware.

We do know it, the extension is open-source [1]. The addon does nothing unless enabled via about:config and even then, it does not spy on you.

1 - https://github.com/mozilla/addon-wr

In case you're not aware (and for anyone curious enough to look), the extension was changed dramatically within days of when the story hit the fan. It's really hard for someone as inexperienced as me to tell what was actually run! https://github.com/mozilla/addon-wr/commit/7d4e422bf573f675b...

I believe it did technically run enough code to decide whether or not it was enabled, and I'm not sure whether or not its installation was avoidable (I believe enabling SHIELD studies is opt-in [perhaps part of opting in to analytics?]).

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