Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

I think the the term “non-profit” is more about how an organization spends the money, rather than how they make it. Non profits and charities definitely bring in money through channels other than donations...

> I think the the term “non-profit” is more about how an organization spends the money, rather than how they make it.

Tax-exempt non-profit (especially charity) status is very much about both how money is made and how it is distributed/spent.

I agree.

I merely challenge the notion that a nonprofit -- which proudly tumpets its benevolence and non-profitness -- should get a free pass for covertly installing advertising arrangements, just because they need to "make money".

Their charter and marketing is all about defending the internet from the companies doing shady things to make money, so they can't have their cake and eat it.

Non-profit orgs are such due to legal designations that give them favorable tax treatment. In return they promise to organize and operate only to fulfill a charitable mission. The mission of Mr. Robot (content sniffing) has nothing to do with the charitable mission of Mozilla, "Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all."

There is a difference between a non-profit and a non-for-profit (most health insurance companies are the later; go try and figure that out).

Firefox gets most of its donations from corporate sponsors. That's why the default search and switched back and fourth between Yahoo and Google; it's all about the amount of money they contribute for that. I'm not sure, but Pocket might be another example.

User contributions are actually pretty low. They don't go out and request them though like NPR or Wikipedia.

While I agree with you on that, your previous comment was simply wrong. Non-profits are very much allowed to just "take money" (legal restrictions aside, but for-profit businesses also have legal restrictions). They're not allowed to take that money and distribute it to shareholders as profit.

That would be a valid complaint if this was an advertising arrangment, rather than one where if you watch the TV show, you learn that you can activate a firefox addon to participate in an small AR game that changes your normal web experience into a Mr Robot style web experience for the duration.

The addon itself does not advertise for Mr. Robot, Mr. Robot advertises for this addon.

Mozilla bought Pocket a while ago.

Sure, but why install it on random people's installs, even in some sort of disabled state? Viewers should be called on to install it themselves. I'd be cool with, say, an about: page that makes it easy for users to discover it, but pre-installing the addon in people's browser's seems a bit much.

You're confusing mozilla foundation and mozilla corporation here. The default search with google and yahoo is not donations for the foundation but a commercial contract with the corporation.

I'm not sure mozilla even gets a significant amount of donations compared to their commercial contracts.

The charitable mission of mozilla ended with their deal with google in 2004. Let's not forget that mozilla had frozen 15 millions dollars because of the IRS audit related to this deal and mozilla status, ending up settling outside of court for 1.5 millions.

It actually claims to be an "Alternate Reality Game (ARG)", not a "small AR game" as in "Augmented Reality" or "Mixed Reality". That's something else:

https://research.mozilla.org/mixed-reality/

I'd charitably call it "Augmented Memory", but it's definitely not "Augmented Reality".

And I'd hardly call it a game, just a parasitic advertising gimmick that slows and bloats the browser. It just injects a bunch of JavaScript code, DOM elements and CSS effects into every tab.

There's really no game there, and it's pretentious to call it an "Alternate Reality Game", which is defined as "intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real time and evolves according to players' responses":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game

This extension just wraps all occurrences of a set of keywords (now including "fuck") in a span with some css animations and a tooltip that links to their web page.

https://github.com/gregglind/addon-wr/commit/da464ac8f1c3b08...

But in terms of memory usage, CPU and battery consumption, it's not that small, either.

It injects a blob of CSS and some JavaScript into every tab, then it does a regular expression search of every text node on each page, filtering out everything but paragraphs, then for each occurrence of a keyword in the text, it creates a new text node to split the current text node, then inserts a new span element between them, containing its own text node, then it creates an additional tooltip element containing six text nodes, five br elements, and one anchor element linking to https://support.mozilla.org/kb/lookingglass , and it also configures css class names to associate all those new nodes it created with the blob of css styling and animations that it injected.

This extension isn't the best example of their technology for Mozilla to be promoting and distributing, if they're really serious about delivering a fast memory efficient browser.