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The core idea (deploy an easter egg via an add-on) seems pretty reasonable. Looking Glass is a really cool idea for users who want it. But pushing it out broa

The core idea (deploy an easter egg via an add-on) seems pretty reasonable. Looking Glass is a really cool idea for users who want it. But pushing it out broadly, even in an inert state, was not good. I can assure you that there's an active internal discussion to that effect. I'm hopeful that we'll learn from this.

Simon_says 9y ago
> The core idea (deploy an easter egg via an add-on) seems pretty reasonable It's fine if you believe this, but it means I'm not using your browser. I switched to Safari today.
- targafarian 9y ago
  I interpret this as you switching from an browser by a relatively small organization that has certainly made some mistakes but is backing down with a relatively small amount of user feedback to one by a much larger organization that has less motivation to acquiesce to users' desires and less motivation to respect users' privacy. Also, as others pointed out, this sentence you quote (probably) isn't as bad as your interpretation (I think I interpreted as you did, too, on first read). If you want an easter egg in your browser, and you install an add-on to get it, what's bad about that? The interpretation that "add-on" means "installed by default by Mozilla" seems off compared to what was said elsewhere here (though as it happens, this add-on was installed by default, hence the interpretation that this was okay... but read on, and clearly callahad is saying that it wasn't okay to install by default). I think the statement is poorly worded, but with the larger context, I'll give Mozilla a chance here... or else I'll use a browser that I think is more privacy conscious and that is more likely to listen to its users, not a browser that I think is less privacy conscious and less likely to listen to its users.
lagadu 9y ago
> The core idea (deploy an easter egg via an add-on) seems pretty reasonable. Yes, deploying an easter egg via an add-on is pretty reasonable, hell if it's out of the way enough even in the core browser. But Mozilla didn't deploy an easter egg: they deployed an advertisement.
leeoniya 9y ago
let's not pretend this is some isolated incident. see: rest of this thread and many threads before it. EDIT: > The core idea (deploy an easter egg via an add-on) seems pretty reasonable. no, no it doesn't. especially not when done silently, without confirmation and modifies headers and content on pages i visit. in what alternate universe is this "reasonable"? "reasonable" would be to push it to a tile on the new tab page. EDIT 2: Mr Robot is the exact type of sensationalized shit i want to keep out of my tools.
- callahad 9y ago
  I won't dispute that history; just trying to add context to this one and agree that it's disappointing. As to your edit, I absolutely agree. That's what I meant when I said pushing the add-on was not good. I was only suggesting that an add-on is a reasonable place to implement an easter egg, since it's separate from the core browser code. Distributing that add-on is a different matter, and I personally disagree with what happened there.
  - acqq 9y ago
    > I was only suggesting that an add-on is a reasonable place to implement an easter egg, since it's separate from the core browser code. It was not a common add-on but an ad disguised as a "study." The question is still: why? Why did that marketing team need that treatment instead of giving to the interested users a link to the normal add on? What was the actually planned scenario? Was it planned that that "study" (the studies are apparently officially "a way of making more informed product decisions based on actual user needs") uses some functionality not available to the normal add-ons? Was it that the normal add-ons wouldn't have access to the API that the "study" would use but that is forbidden to the normal add-ons since v57?
    - acqq 9y ago
      Indeed, that was not a normal extension: "The addon is actually deployed as an embedded WebExtension, which is subtly different. It has a 40-line legacy XUL/XPCOM bootstrapper controlling whether the WebExtension part of it runs. The legacy code actually could upload your hard drive and isn't bound by any of the WebExtension restrictions. We know it doesn't do anything harmful, but it could have done so. The WebExtension itself also has <all_urls> and webRequest permissions, granting it the ability to sniff the content and headers of every page." (Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/7k7wum/when_all_online_tests_are_invalidated_blame_mr/drcohn5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/7k7wu... ) The question is still: what was the goal?
RubyPinch 9y ago
Please note this comment isn't specifically to you, but, I guess more to any mozzarellian that comes across this comment - - - for other reasons I wanna comment on the "seems pretty reasonable" bit "In this day and age" what with fear and stuff being a main chunk of news , perhaps using a webext (which can really only modify a page to do any tricky cool stuff) is a bad thing? (especially when it plays off of the pre-existing FUD by referencing hacking n' stuff!, but not my point) same for any unexpected icons appearing in the toolbars! People are being told to be weary when using their browsers: look out for signs the pages might be fake or messed with, look out for unexplained installation of programs and addons, being hammered in from every secure site! Its worrying that, I know it would fuck with my parents pretty bad WHEN it would be enabled, because there isn't much point in developing something for it to not be enabled! Especially when money is probably on the table, when higher ups probably rammed this through normal steps designed to prevent this sort of stuff (again) I need something to give my parents, something that is ethical, something that cares about them, and something that works: chrome still works better for them, and mozilla seems really really keen on blurring the lines for the other ones (I know I know, it requires users to opt into shield studies etc, but man, I had a talk with my ma, "do you wanna contribute back to mozilla in this way?", please don't punish us for asking other less-techy people that.) If you guys need easter eggs, probably keep them off to the side, in the settings or about sections
- Y_Y 9y ago
  > People are being told to be weary when using their browsers Freudian typo.
  - Piskvorrr 9y ago
    Yes, after the Dark Ages, Browser Wars, and burying Opera, I am increasingly weary to use a browser, any browser. And I am getting weary of the new "this site best viewed in Chrome", but it's almost as if nobody else gives a damn. Off to Palemoon, I guess? (And just when I thought that the new FF was looking good)
2bitencryption 9y ago
> The core idea (deploy an easter egg via an add-on) seems pretty reasonable. Looking Glass is a really cool idea for users who want it. But who actually wants it? Who wants a fundamental part of their daily work suddenly manipulated by somebody else at a whim? What if Ford decided it would force-push add a cool "Star Wars" tie in to its cars (no pun intended on "force push")? That's a mission-critical part of my life, I drive my kids in it. Don't mess with my car over-the-air without telling me, I don't care if it's all fun and games to you, to me it's my life. Same for my browser. It's not a toy I use for fun. It's how I see my medical records, pay bills, transport extremely sensitive and confidential information... I don't want anyone to suddenly push "cool fun easter eggs" to it, under any circumstance.
- bastawhiz 9y ago
  > What if Ford decided it would force-push add a cool "Star Wars" tie in to its cars (no pun intended on "force push")? FWIW, Tesla includes easter eggs in its cars. You need to go out of your way to use them, and they're pretty much hidden unless you go looking for them, and they keep adding more via OTA updates. If your question is "Who are easter eggs made for?" then the answer is "the people that care to go looking for them." The difference between a Tesla easter egg (which are almost entirely regarded as delightful) and this easter egg is that this easter egg was poorly executed. A Tesla easter egg is silly and whimsical. This easter egg parodied something that's potentially threatening. And hell, Firefox has had easter eggs since its first release; go visit `about:mozilla` in your address bar. Saying easter eggs are bad outright is silly, but they should be done in a way that isn't concerning to users.
  - rifung 9y ago
    > The difference between a Tesla easter egg (which are almost entirely regarded as delightful) and this easter egg is that this easter egg was poorly executed. I don't own a Tesla but I assume a key difference is that the easter eggs exist solely to delight the user whereas this was more of a partnership designed to make Mozilla money.
    - 9y ago
gkya 9y ago
This is really... well, I don't know. You're not comedians. You make the reliable, trustable browser. That's why people use Firefox. And you're spending that capital very generously. Firefox's privacy defaults are not that of a privacy-focused browser. Things like Hello or Pocket are not what people expect from you. Get your things together because there's nobody to push FF via default installs like Chrome, Safari or IE. If you alienate people, they have some nice options at present too.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
ekianjo 9y ago
> The core idea (deploy an easter egg via an add-on) seems pretty reasonable Erm no. I don't use a browser to have fun. I certainly don't want any surprises, and coming from Firefox/Mozilla this is very, very disappointing. How can we trust you guys to do the right thing from now on?
- khedoros1 9y ago
  That's why you'd want it as an add-on, as opposed to core browser code. It's reasonable for all the silly crap that no one wants to be in the add-on directory. It's not reasonable for them to push the add-on to people that didn't choose to install it. That's the part I'm upset about.
- jasonlotito 9y ago
  To be fair, Mozilla had a long history of easter eggs. So do other things that you'd want to take seriously (Tesla and Google for example). Easter eggs are a part of software culture whether you like it or not. > How can we trust you guys to do the right thing from now on? The same way you can continue to trust the GNU/Linux system which contains easter eggs.
  - theclaw 9y ago
    This is an advertisement in the form of an easter egg, that’s not common and not OK
  - jodrellblank 9y ago
    Oh the same way I can trust Canonical to include advertisements in Ubuntu? ( https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2221490/eff-urges-canonical-to-make-ubuntu-1210-amazon-ads-optional https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2221490/eff-urges-... ) Easter-eggs, to me, means something like "press a key combination, get a list of developers" or "go through the levels in a fast time, unlock a secret level" or "on march 14th there's a message about Pi day". It doesn't mean "if you change xyz settings, we'll sell some control to your system to a third party for our profit".
  - Endy 9y ago
Tempest1981 9y ago
I think we're all sensitive to malware that installs Add-Ons. I just removed one from a friend's computer the other day. What % of your users did you think you would frighten -- I guess it was acceptably low?
simias 9y ago
>The core idea (deploy an easter egg via an add-on) seems pretty reasonable I don't understand why you believe that, especially when it's not an "easter egg" but actually an ad. When's the last time I upgraded my linux kernel and it came bundled with an "easter egg" kmod, loaded by default, which made lightsaber noises if I wrote 1 to /sys/class/ad/starwars/enabled? Would you think that's appropriate? You're developing a web browser, a critical piece of software. Almost an OS within an OS these days. You got rid of "cookies are delicious delicacies"[1] (an actual easter egg) because you deemed that the joke wasn't worth obfuscating an important piece of information. 15 years later you're adding stealthy extensions that look like backdoors. What changed? I can assure you, people who want novelty extensions know where to find them. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213186 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213186
- Vinnl 9y ago
  > I can assure you, people who want novelty extensions know where to find them. I think you agree: > But pushing it out broadly, even in an inert state, was not good.
- bholley 9y ago
  My impression (without any internal knowledge on the subject) is that this was intended as a way to promote Firefox to Mr Robot viewers. A lot of people in this thread seem to have this backwards, IIUC - it's not an ad for Mr Robot, it's the onboarding experience of an ad for Firefox that ran in Mr Robot. The folks behind this presumably wanted this experience to be seamless, and were also trying to keep it under wraps to preserve the surprise factor. This meant that they bypassed the usual processes by which Firefox engineers would have had the opportunity to (a) raise concerns about the deployment approach, and (b) suggest other mechanisms that would have achieved the desired experience while keeping deployment appropriately scoped. It's really heartbreaking that it ended up this way. The marketing team was trying to think outside the box to bring new users to Firefox, which is crucial if Quantum is to succeed. Surprises and stealth are the bread and butter of marketing, but they didn't think through the dangers of applying those things to engineering. Moreover, the very nature of surprise and stealth meant that they missed the chance for internal feedback before it went live. A lot of us inside Mozilla are hurting right now. We poured our lives into Quantum for two years for the long-shot dream of giving Firefox a fresh start and saving the web from monopoly. It's frustrating to feel that all our hard-earned goodwill might be squandered by a few people and a botched marketing stunt. But the people behind that stunt were only trying to help, and I'm sure they feel especially terrible right now too. Mozilla will learn from this. But the mistakes here are probably less sinister than they may appear, and it would be sad if they caused our most closely-aligned users to switch to Chrome.
ptero 9y ago
> The core idea (deploy an easter egg via an add-on) seems pretty reasonable I am stunned. I need to think about it for a few days, but this, to me is enough of a reason to stop using FF. Force feeding users this way is not even Chrome-style; it is early Internet Explorer like behavior.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  What's unreasonable about deploying an easter egg via an add-on? Dan is saying "Easter egg yay, auto-include in browser nay".
  - Piskvorrr 9y ago
    Yet, here we are.
    - scrollaway 9y ago
      You're missing the point.
  - ptero 9y ago
    > Dan is saying "Easter egg yay, auto-include in browser nay". Let me clarify: I do not want Easter eggs in my browser. At all. If you have to insert it, doing it via an add on is better than via core capability (I guess), but either way it is a very bad idea. And I think (correct me if I am wrong) that it is not "auto include nay". It is rather "Easter egg yay, auto-include yay, auto-activate nay". At best an Easter egg is some useless junk and at worst it is a possible backdoor which can be activated by mistake on the developer side (as happened) or by a user fat fingering some input. Sadly, I do not trust Mozilla anymore. It is just another evil empire competing to capture any user information it can. Any time there is another non-removable "feature" added I could bet 10:1 that the goal is to try putting yet another hook into the user and "good news: we are enhancing user experience again" is a clumsy PR. My 2c.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
sanbor 9y ago
For me it's not about this particular oversight. As parent comment and the link mentions, it's about opening a tab and getting a bunch of distractions, adding pocket, hello, etc. It's about bad decision after bad decision. I get the feeling that the user experience in Firefox gets worse over time.
- btschaegg 9y ago
  This. Whenever a story like this happens, I'm left wondering who came up with those ideas and who okayed them. From my perspective, anyone who thinks those things (as they were implemented) were justified is not suited to make decisions in a project like Firefox, period. Another comment in this thread asked what will be done to make sure something like this doesn't ever happen again. I am aware that probably, nobody here can answer that question. But in essence, this is the thing Mozilla should be considering and communicating clearly in the near future.
xir78 9y ago
Then why were the tickets private?
kemonocode 9y ago
I call shenanigans. about:mozilla is an Easter egg, this was an ad and it put a big dent on Mozilla's reputation. I hope said "active internal discussion" leads to something beyond a few corporate hollow apologies.
dumbneurologist 9y ago
> I'm hopeful that we'll learn from this. Consider for a moment what you think the lesson is. Now that you have it... (have it? great) ... is it different from the lesson when Pocket was made part of the browser?
0xcde4c3db 9y ago
> But pushing it out broadly, even in an inert state, was not good. I don't see how "push" is even useful here. It's ARG content; teasing players into actively seeking out content is the bread and butter of ARGs. While it's certainly part of the premise that they exist as a sort of overlay on top of reality, well-run ones usually have a clear concept of which media are "in-game" to discourage people getting off into the weeds of fan-made content and unintended red herrings. The game is typically not meant to leak into unrelated media (such as the add-ons tab of Firefox on my company-issued laptop). Good examples of wider distribution for the initial round of hints to advertise the existence of an ARG include the "corruption" in a Halo 2 trailer (I Love Bees) and the heat-sensitive ink on the Nine Inch Nails Year Zero CD. > I can assure you that there's an active internal discussion to that effect. I'm hopeful that we'll learn from this. Here's one thing that somebody at Mozilla ought to learn (though I worry that the people who most need to learn this are going to be above the fray of the internal discussion): This was absolutely not a mere PR misstep, as the current non-apologies from official channels suggest. The primary problem now isn't that users misunderstood what Looking Glass is, it's that Mozilla management misunderstands what Looking Glass represents. If the Mozilla brand stands for anything at all, it stands for the mission of building the future of the web on behalf of the full spectrum of end users and developers instead of parochial and shortsighted corporate interests. The fact that Looking Glass was deployed in this way, with any internal alarm over it clearly either absent or overruled until after the fact, sends the opposite message. That message was further reinforced by the "clarifications" issued in response to the backlash. Right now, I feel like any apology is likely to ring hollow. All indications so far are that upper management badly wants this sort of thing and that there will just be another flavor of it next year, as though it's just a matter of tweaking the recipe until they find a version of the pill that people will swallow. I really love the work you guys do, but I feel like it's being undermined by exactly the sort of thing Mozilla is supposed to be the antidote to. I imagine many Mozillans feel the same way. So what the heck is going on?
rents 9y ago
The problem is that you guys can't even see how wrong it was. Only when it is starting to gain publicity and blowing in your face, then you are even "starting" to have a discussion about it. There were very disappointing answers by mozilla employees on r/firefox.

Simon_says 9y ago

> The core idea (deploy an easter egg via an add-on) seems pretty reasonable It's fine if you believe this, but it means I'm not using your browser. I switched to Safari today.

targafarian 9y ago
I interpret this as you switching from an browser by a relatively small organization that has certainly made some mistakes but is backing down with a relatively small amount of user feedback to one by a much larger organization that has less motivation to acquiesce to users' desires and less motivation to respect users' privacy. Also, as others pointed out, this sentence you quote (probably) isn't as bad as your interpretation (I think I interpreted as you did, too, on first read). If you want an easter egg in your browser, and you install an add-on to get it, what's bad about that? The interpretation that "add-on" means "installed by default by Mozilla" seems off compared to what was said elsewhere here (though as it happens, this add-on was installed by default, hence the interpretation that this was okay... but read on, and clearly callahad is saying that it wasn't okay to install by default). I think the statement is poorly worded, but with the larger context, I'll give Mozilla a chance here... or else I'll use a browser that I think is more privacy conscious and that is more likely to listen to its users, not a browser that I think is less privacy conscious and less likely to listen to its users.

lagadu 9y ago

> The core idea (deploy an easter egg via an add-on) seems pretty reasonable. Yes, deploying an easter egg via an add-on is pretty reasonable, hell if it's out of the way enough even in the core browser. But Mozilla didn't deploy an easter egg: they deployed an advertisement.

leeoniya 9y ago

let's not pretend this is some isolated incident. see: rest of this thread and many threads before it. EDIT: > The core idea (deploy an easter egg via an add-on) seems pretty reasonable. no, no it doesn't. especially not when done silently, without confirmation and modifies headers and content on pages i visit. in what alternate universe is this "reasonable"? "reasonable" would be to push it to a tile on the new tab page. EDIT 2: Mr Robot is the exact type of sensationalized shit i want to keep out of my tools.

callahad 9y ago
I won't dispute that history; just trying to add context to this one and agree that it's disappointing. As to your edit, I absolutely agree. That's what I meant when I said pushing the add-on was not good. I was only suggesting that an add-on is a reasonable place to implement an easter egg, since it's separate from the core browser code. Distributing that add-on is a different matter, and I personally disagree with what happened there.
- acqq 9y ago
  > I was only suggesting that an add-on is a reasonable place to implement an easter egg, since it's separate from the core browser code. It was not a common add-on but an ad disguised as a "study." The question is still: why? Why did that marketing team need that treatment instead of giving to the interested users a link to the normal add on? What was the actually planned scenario? Was it planned that that "study" (the studies are apparently officially "a way of making more informed product decisions based on actual user needs") uses some functionality not available to the normal add-ons? Was it that the normal add-ons wouldn't have access to the API that the "study" would use but that is forbidden to the normal add-ons since v57?
  - acqq 9y ago
    Indeed, that was not a normal extension: "The addon is actually deployed as an embedded WebExtension, which is subtly different. It has a 40-line legacy XUL/XPCOM bootstrapper controlling whether the WebExtension part of it runs. The legacy code actually could upload your hard drive and isn't bound by any of the WebExtension restrictions. We know it doesn't do anything harmful, but it could have done so. The WebExtension itself also has <all_urls> and webRequest permissions, granting it the ability to sniff the content and headers of every page." (Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/7k7wum/when_all_online_tests_are_invalidated_blame_mr/drcohn5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/7k7wu... ) The question is still: what was the goal?

RubyPinch 9y ago

Please note this comment isn't specifically to you, but, I guess more to any mozzarellian that comes across this comment - - - for other reasons I wanna comment on the "seems pretty reasonable" bit "In this day and age" what with fear and stuff being a main chunk of news , perhaps using a webext (which can really only modify a page to do any tricky cool stuff) is a bad thing? (especially when it plays off of the pre-existing FUD by referencing hacking n' stuff!, but not my point) same for any unexpected icons appearing in the toolbars! People are being told to be weary when using their browsers: look out for signs the pages might be fake or messed with, look out for unexplained installation of programs and addons, being hammered in from every secure site! Its worrying that, I know it would fuck with my parents pretty bad WHEN it would be enabled, because there isn't much point in developing something for it to not be enabled! Especially when money is probably on the table, when higher ups probably rammed this through normal steps designed to prevent this sort of stuff (again) I need something to give my parents, something that is ethical, something that cares about them, and something that works: chrome still works better for them, and mozilla seems really really keen on blurring the lines for the other ones (I know I know, it requires users to opt into shield studies etc, but man, I had a talk with my ma, "do you wanna contribute back to mozilla in this way?", please don't punish us for asking other less-techy people that.) If you guys need easter eggs, probably keep them off to the side, in the settings or about sections

Y_Y 9y ago
> People are being told to be weary when using their browsers Freudian typo.
- Piskvorrr 9y ago
  Yes, after the Dark Ages, Browser Wars, and burying Opera, I am increasingly weary to use a browser, any browser. And I am getting weary of the new "this site best viewed in Chrome", but it's almost as if nobody else gives a damn. Off to Palemoon, I guess? (And just when I thought that the new FF was looking good)

2bitencryption 9y ago

> The core idea (deploy an easter egg via an add-on) seems pretty reasonable. Looking Glass is a really cool idea for users who want it. But who actually wants it? Who wants a fundamental part of their daily work suddenly manipulated by somebody else at a whim? What if Ford decided it would force-push add a cool "Star Wars" tie in to its cars (no pun intended on "force push")? That's a mission-critical part of my life, I drive my kids in it. Don't mess with my car over-the-air without telling me, I don't care if it's all fun and games to you, to me it's my life. Same for my browser. It's not a toy I use for fun. It's how I see my medical records, pay bills, transport extremely sensitive and confidential information... I don't want anyone to suddenly push "cool fun easter eggs" to it, under any circumstance.

bastawhiz 9y ago
> What if Ford decided it would force-push add a cool "Star Wars" tie in to its cars (no pun intended on "force push")? FWIW, Tesla includes easter eggs in its cars. You need to go out of your way to use them, and they're pretty much hidden unless you go looking for them, and they keep adding more via OTA updates. If your question is "Who are easter eggs made for?" then the answer is "the people that care to go looking for them." The difference between a Tesla easter egg (which are almost entirely regarded as delightful) and this easter egg is that this easter egg was poorly executed. A Tesla easter egg is silly and whimsical. This easter egg parodied something that's potentially threatening. And hell, Firefox has had easter eggs since its first release; go visit `about:mozilla` in your address bar. Saying easter eggs are bad outright is silly, but they should be done in a way that isn't concerning to users.
- rifung 9y ago
  > The difference between a Tesla easter egg (which are almost entirely regarded as delightful) and this easter egg is that this easter egg was poorly executed. I don't own a Tesla but I assume a key difference is that the easter eggs exist solely to delight the user whereas this was more of a partnership designed to make Mozilla money.
  - 9y ago

gkya 9y ago

This is really... well, I don't know. You're not comedians. You make the reliable, trustable browser. That's why people use Firefox. And you're spending that capital very generously. Firefox's privacy defaults are not that of a privacy-focused browser. Things like Hello or Pocket are not what people expect from you. Get your things together because there's nobody to push FF via default installs like Chrome, Safari or IE. If you alienate people, they have some nice options at present too.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

ekianjo 9y ago

> The core idea (deploy an easter egg via an add-on) seems pretty reasonable Erm no. I don't use a browser to have fun. I certainly don't want any surprises, and coming from Firefox/Mozilla this is very, very disappointing. How can we trust you guys to do the right thing from now on?

khedoros1 9y ago
That's why you'd want it as an add-on, as opposed to core browser code. It's reasonable for all the silly crap that no one wants to be in the add-on directory. It's not reasonable for them to push the add-on to people that didn't choose to install it. That's the part I'm upset about.
jasonlotito 9y ago
To be fair, Mozilla had a long history of easter eggs. So do other things that you'd want to take seriously (Tesla and Google for example). Easter eggs are a part of software culture whether you like it or not. > How can we trust you guys to do the right thing from now on? The same way you can continue to trust the GNU/Linux system which contains easter eggs.
- theclaw 9y ago
  This is an advertisement in the form of an easter egg, that’s not common and not OK
- jodrellblank 9y ago
  Oh the same way I can trust Canonical to include advertisements in Ubuntu? ( https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2221490/eff-urges-canonical-to-make-ubuntu-1210-amazon-ads-optional https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2221490/eff-urges-... ) Easter-eggs, to me, means something like "press a key combination, get a list of developers" or "go through the levels in a fast time, unlock a secret level" or "on march 14th there's a message about Pi day". It doesn't mean "if you change xyz settings, we'll sell some control to your system to a third party for our profit".
- Endy 9y ago

Tempest1981 9y ago

I think we're all sensitive to malware that installs Add-Ons. I just removed one from a friend's computer the other day. What % of your users did you think you would frighten -- I guess it was acceptably low?

simias 9y ago

>The core idea (deploy an easter egg via an add-on) seems pretty reasonable I don't understand why you believe that, especially when it's not an "easter egg" but actually an ad. When's the last time I upgraded my linux kernel and it came bundled with an "easter egg" kmod, loaded by default, which made lightsaber noises if I wrote 1 to /sys/class/ad/starwars/enabled? Would you think that's appropriate? You're developing a web browser, a critical piece of software. Almost an OS within an OS these days. You got rid of "cookies are delicious delicacies"[1] (an actual easter egg) because you deemed that the joke wasn't worth obfuscating an important piece of information. 15 years later you're adding stealthy extensions that look like backdoors. What changed? I can assure you, people who want novelty extensions know where to find them. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213186 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213186

Vinnl 9y ago
> I can assure you, people who want novelty extensions know where to find them. I think you agree: > But pushing it out broadly, even in an inert state, was not good.
bholley 9y ago
My impression (without any internal knowledge on the subject) is that this was intended as a way to promote Firefox to Mr Robot viewers. A lot of people in this thread seem to have this backwards, IIUC - it's not an ad for Mr Robot, it's the onboarding experience of an ad for Firefox that ran in Mr Robot. The folks behind this presumably wanted this experience to be seamless, and were also trying to keep it under wraps to preserve the surprise factor. This meant that they bypassed the usual processes by which Firefox engineers would have had the opportunity to (a) raise concerns about the deployment approach, and (b) suggest other mechanisms that would have achieved the desired experience while keeping deployment appropriately scoped. It's really heartbreaking that it ended up this way. The marketing team was trying to think outside the box to bring new users to Firefox, which is crucial if Quantum is to succeed. Surprises and stealth are the bread and butter of marketing, but they didn't think through the dangers of applying those things to engineering. Moreover, the very nature of surprise and stealth meant that they missed the chance for internal feedback before it went live. A lot of us inside Mozilla are hurting right now. We poured our lives into Quantum for two years for the long-shot dream of giving Firefox a fresh start and saving the web from monopoly. It's frustrating to feel that all our hard-earned goodwill might be squandered by a few people and a botched marketing stunt. But the people behind that stunt were only trying to help, and I'm sure they feel especially terrible right now too. Mozilla will learn from this. But the mistakes here are probably less sinister than they may appear, and it would be sad if they caused our most closely-aligned users to switch to Chrome.

ptero 9y ago

> The core idea (deploy an easter egg via an add-on) seems pretty reasonable I am stunned. I need to think about it for a few days, but this, to me is enough of a reason to stop using FF. Force feeding users this way is not even Chrome-style; it is early Internet Explorer like behavior.

scrollaway 9y ago
What's unreasonable about deploying an easter egg via an add-on? Dan is saying "Easter egg yay, auto-include in browser nay".
- Piskvorrr 9y ago
  Yet, here we are.
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    You're missing the point.
- ptero 9y ago
  > Dan is saying "Easter egg yay, auto-include in browser nay". Let me clarify: I do not want Easter eggs in my browser. At all. If you have to insert it, doing it via an add on is better than via core capability (I guess), but either way it is a very bad idea. And I think (correct me if I am wrong) that it is not "auto include nay". It is rather "Easter egg yay, auto-include yay, auto-activate nay". At best an Easter egg is some useless junk and at worst it is a possible backdoor which can be activated by mistake on the developer side (as happened) or by a user fat fingering some input. Sadly, I do not trust Mozilla anymore. It is just another evil empire competing to capture any user information it can. Any time there is another non-removable "feature" added I could bet 10:1 that the goal is to try putting yet another hook into the user and "good news: we are enhancing user experience again" is a clumsy PR. My 2c.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

sanbor 9y ago

For me it's not about this particular oversight. As parent comment and the link mentions, it's about opening a tab and getting a bunch of distractions, adding pocket, hello, etc. It's about bad decision after bad decision. I get the feeling that the user experience in Firefox gets worse over time.

btschaegg 9y ago
This. Whenever a story like this happens, I'm left wondering who came up with those ideas and who okayed them. From my perspective, anyone who thinks those things (as they were implemented) were justified is not suited to make decisions in a project like Firefox, period. Another comment in this thread asked what will be done to make sure something like this doesn't ever happen again. I am aware that probably, nobody here can answer that question. But in essence, this is the thing Mozilla should be considering and communicating clearly in the near future.

xir78 9y ago

Then why were the tickets private?

kemonocode 9y ago

I call shenanigans. about:mozilla is an Easter egg, this was an ad and it put a big dent on Mozilla's reputation. I hope said "active internal discussion" leads to something beyond a few corporate hollow apologies.

dumbneurologist 9y ago

> I'm hopeful that we'll learn from this. Consider for a moment what you think the lesson is. Now that you have it... (have it? great) ... is it different from the lesson when Pocket was made part of the browser?

0xcde4c3db 9y ago

> But pushing it out broadly, even in an inert state, was not good. I don't see how "push" is even useful here. It's ARG content; teasing players into actively seeking out content is the bread and butter of ARGs. While it's certainly part of the premise that they exist as a sort of overlay on top of reality, well-run ones usually have a clear concept of which media are "in-game" to discourage people getting off into the weeds of fan-made content and unintended red herrings. The game is typically not meant to leak into unrelated media (such as the add-ons tab of Firefox on my company-issued laptop). Good examples of wider distribution for the initial round of hints to advertise the existence of an ARG include the "corruption" in a Halo 2 trailer (I Love Bees) and the heat-sensitive ink on the Nine Inch Nails Year Zero CD. > I can assure you that there's an active internal discussion to that effect. I'm hopeful that we'll learn from this. Here's one thing that somebody at Mozilla ought to learn (though I worry that the people who most need to learn this are going to be above the fray of the internal discussion): This was absolutely not a mere PR misstep, as the current non-apologies from official channels suggest. The primary problem now isn't that users misunderstood what Looking Glass is, it's that Mozilla management misunderstands what Looking Glass represents. If the Mozilla brand stands for anything at all, it stands for the mission of building the future of the web on behalf of the full spectrum of end users and developers instead of parochial and shortsighted corporate interests. The fact that Looking Glass was deployed in this way, with any internal alarm over it clearly either absent or overruled until after the fact, sends the opposite message. That message was further reinforced by the "clarifications" issued in response to the backlash. Right now, I feel like any apology is likely to ring hollow. All indications so far are that upper management badly wants this sort of thing and that there will just be another flavor of it next year, as though it's just a matter of tweaking the recipe until they find a version of the pill that people will swallow. I really love the work you guys do, but I feel like it's being undermined by exactly the sort of thing Mozilla is supposed to be the antidote to. I imagine many Mozillans feel the same way. So what the heck is going on?

rents 9y ago

The problem is that you guys can't even see how wrong it was. Only when it is starting to gain publicity and blowing in your face, then you are even "starting" to have a discussion about it. There were very disappointing answers by mozilla employees on r/firefox.