If you were being cynical (and to be honest I don't think this is exclusively what happened here), you could view it purely as a short term marketing campaign.

If you were being cynical (and to be honest I don't think this is exclusively what happened here), you could view it purely as a short term marketing campaign. It generated lots of positive reporting about Firefox, associating them with: launching a new product, encryption, freedom and ease of use. It also had an element of virality, in that a passionate Firefox user could use the service to send to someone who doesn't use Firefox and forcibly introduce the brand to them. All of this helps to build brand and mindshare, which, in an ideal world, leads to more installations and more ad revenue. There are some comments about how they should focus on their browser. As much as I'd like to say otherwise, I'd argue that activities like this have a much better chance of pulling people over from Chrome than ticking off a few bug reports, or improving the certificate workflow for extensions.