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Comment by rrr_oh_man | Hacker News Reader

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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