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Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

(support.mozilla.org)
757 points shak77 | 3 comments | 15 Dec 17 13:47 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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proaralyst ◴[15 Dec 17 14:18 UTC] No.15931920[source]▶
Looks like it's a promo for Mr Robot, which is really not ok.

> What's happening? Are you a fan of Mr Robot? Are you trying to solve one of the many puzzles that the Mr Robot team has built? You’re on the right track. Firefox and Mr Robot have collaborated on a shared experience to further your immersion into the Mr Robot universe, also known as an Alternate Reality Game (ARG). The effects you’re seeing are a part of this shared experience.[0]

EDIT: looking at this[1] comment, perhaps it's not a promo?

[0]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/lookingglass [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7jh9rv/what_is_loo...

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exelius ◴[15 Dec 17 14:26 UTC] No.15931992[source]▶
Seems kind of like it is part of an ARG. I can't say I'm totally against something like that; Mozilla's gotta make money somehow, and as long as it's not selling out user privacy it's a better tradeoff than Chrome.
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tamriel ◴[15 Dec 17 14:34 UTC] No.15932063[source]▶
> Mozilla's gotta make money somehow

They're a nonprofit; they're not allowed to just "make money". And, they already take donations.

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hbosch ◴[15 Dec 17 14:37 UTC] No.15932081[source]▶
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...
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tamriel ◴[15 Dec 17 14:56 UTC] No.15932230[source]▶
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.

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1. TheRealPomax ◴[15 Dec 17 17:40 UTC] No.15933481{5}[source]▶
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.

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2. kelnos ◴[15 Dec 17 19:25 UTC] No.15934304[source]▶
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.
3. DonHopkins ◴[16 Dec 17 01:13 UTC] No.15936727[source]▶
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.