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Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

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I hate. Absolutely hate that you can't say anything directly anymore without sugarcoating stuff in HN. Downvotes follow. I mean, the hell is HN for then?

Even the most obvious stuff needs to be said like... I don't know... but it looks like Google might be slightly bad here.

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The CEO literally paid her hell a lot of money while she sold MDN to competition. While Rust to competition. While market shared shrinked from 9% (or 7%, forgot the exact number) to where it's now. Citing - NO MONEY!!!

We still have her controlling Mozilla right even though she is not CEO? And apparently we are not supposed to criticise em.

Coming into a thread just because it mentions Firefox to make a generic post about Mozilla being bad gets tiring.

Virtue signaling the hell out of all posts and stuff saying we are for the people and doing everything against their interests gets super tiring as well.

The thread is about a marketing piece where Mozilla plays their usual "look we're the good guys" spiel. Pointing at their dirty laundry (which they still try to hide instead of learning from their mistakes) is very much appropriate.

Narrowing it from "every post about Firefox" to "every post about Firefox doing something good" still leaves it tiring. That extension wasn't even a bad core idea, it was a bungle of implementation choices. Oh no they hid the ticket. The real criticism is bad management and while it's valid it really doesn't need to come up on every article.

Mr Robot? What?

https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/15/mozillas-mr-robot-promo-ba...

> If you’re a Firefox user, you may have noticed a weird new extension that suddenly showed up in your browser this week. > The extension is called “Looking Glass 1.0.3” and this is its description: MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT FROM YOURS. Now that sounds ominous. It’s really not, though. It’s a promotional campaign between Firefox and the TV series Mr. Robot that brings an alternate reality game to your browser. This must have sounded like a great idea when somebody pitched it to Mozilla, but the backlash has been fierce.

Besides the other sources, here's the HN discussion at the time:

"Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser" - 757 points - Dec 15, 2017 - 515 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15931730

Well you see Mozilla did one Bad Thing a decade ago and that's a good reason to continue using the Ad Industry's chosen web browser instead; The one that gained most of it's marketshare by taking a page out of the malware industry's books and paying Oracle to include Chrome in the Java installer, among many many others.

You could always tell they didn't mean to install chrome, because these people would also have a malware "Chrome" browser that installed through the exact same pathway.

The bug is still hidden to this day. And they have done many other bad things since then, including adding more ads to FF. And if you need to compare them against Chrome to make FF look good then you are only proving the point that they have lost the plot.

In 2017 Mozilla silently installed an extension promoting the TV show in everyone's Firefox.

The extension did not do anything unless you put in a secret setting. It wasn't promoting anything.

If this had been a hardcoded easter egg there would have been no real complaints. But showing up as a mystery extension spooked some people, and then misreporting made it spread a lot further than if all the reporting was accurate.

I just rewatched Mr Robot and that actually sounds cool. What was the secret setting ?

Once you get the extension installed, you open up about:config and add a boolean preference "extensions.pug.lookingglass" set to true.

There might have been another way to do it later but we'll never know.

Interesting. What did that accomplish ?

Adds an effect to certain words on websites (like puppet, control, economy, robot), sends an extra header to red-wheelbarrow.com that changes what you see.

https://github.com/mozilla/addon-wr/blob/master/addon/backgr...

Dude, the existence of the extension was the promotion. And Mozilla was paid for it. And the bug report is still hidden showing they have not learned their lesson. Why are you defending bad behavior?

People weren't supposed to be finding it like that. I really don't think "oh what is this new firefox experiment?" was an intended promotional path. It was an extension because that was easier to do and isolate. That's why I'm defending the intent.

And I don't think the visibility of a bug report tells us whether they learned their lesson.

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