The main question is what behavior is being introduced. I haven't researched deeply, but apparently the add-on does nothing until the user opts-in on studies.
Yeah, add-ons from Mozilla merits the same trust as the browser. But this cuts both ways, this stuff undermines my and probably more people's trust in the browser.
Security updates were and still are configurable to be installed after prompting, also when they are installed automatically I am notified that this has happened. There is also an implicit trust in the vendor that only security-related functionality should be changed in a security update.
“Firefox worked with the Mr. Robot team to create a custom experience that would surprise and delight fans of the show and our users. It’s especially important to call out that this collaboration does not compromise our principles or values regarding privacy. The experience does not collect or share any data,” Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, chief marketing officer of Mozilla, said in a statement to Gizmodo. “The experience was kept under wraps to be introduced at the conclusion of the season of Mr. Robot. We gave Mr. Robot fans a unique mystery to solve to deepen their connection and engagement with the show and is only available in Firefox.”
This is horrible. They pushed out this crap under false pretenses as a study and obfuscated it. Don't talk the ethics talk if you're not prepared to do the ethics walk.
I would not want it to have this kind of power as the security patches and critical updates are provided by the kind people managing the distro repositories, and if it could update itself it would remove the third party patches required because mozilla has been refusing for 15 years to integrate correctly in my desktop environment but did integrate in the main competitor.
For exemple australis and classic theme restorer.
Exactly.
> "The experience does not collect or share any data," Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, chief marketing officer of Mozilla, said
Looking in the sources of the extension, it adds additional HTML header to every HTML request to https://www.red-wheelbarrow.com/forkids/ pages. The activity of the users there could of course be tracked and the data dependent on the extension being active collected. Good try Mr. marketing officer of Mozilla delivering Mr. Robot ad using the mechanism for the "studies."
> "Firefox worked with the Mr. Robot team to create a custom experience that would surprise and delight fans of the show and our users."
Obviously fail. Surprise, yes. Delight? No.
The whole thing is still suspicious: it was delivered to everybody whereas if it was supposed to be used only by the users who are aware of it, as now Mozilla tries to spin it, i.e. only to those who decided to "play the game", then the hidden install, especially to every user, was unnecessary as the normal extensions to Firefox are easily installed by the user, a click or two are enough:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabby-cat-fri...
The problem is that Mozilla is a good company, that has had a true net positive effect on the world, especially in tech, and continues to do so today with wonderful projects like Rust etc.
If Mozilla were a shitty company, we could all simply dismiss Firefox and get on with our day. But Mozilla is not a shitty company and the fact they keep shooting themselves in the foot like GP said, the fact they are completely out of touch with their userbase, that they cannot see the OBVIOUS problems with this addon even after the Pocket debacle, is ridiculous.
I don't watch television, and I don't keep up with any popular modern shows. I had no idea what Mr. Robot was until looking through this thread, and the description text for the addon was, at first glance, suspicious. This was a terrible idea and isn't even remotely analogous to applying security updates automatically. If I have something I specifically installed, fine, I can expect those addons to be updated automatically. I don't expect them to side load something I don't even want. "Delight fans" my ass. You have to be a fan first, and I'm not even sure most people who are fans of Mr. Robot would think this is a particularly good idea.
Funny enough, the only thing I can think of that's even remotely similar to this is the "Hell, Dolly" plugin for WordPress, and that's installed out of the box as part of the distribution.
IIRC the person that advocated for Chromium (instead of a third-party Firefox rebuild) base it on performance (they were dubious Quantum is actually better, I personally find it fast enough except when loading Facebook), as well as the alternative versions of Firefox not keeping up with the official version. Also, supposedly Chromium (as opposed to Chrome) settings are reasonably privacy-friendly out of the box.
They did recommend installing uBO-Extra in addition to uBlock Origin on top of Chromium, which is revealing -- with Firefox, there is not even a need for uBO-Extra.
My original point (which I didn't elucidate clearly enough) is that this Looking Glass experiment is resulting in unwarranted backlash against Mozilla -- whereas from the standpoint of preserving an open web and protecting user privacy it's actually one of the better players.
If they'd decided to sneak in a Mr Robot-themed easter egg I wouldn't really care. The fact that they decided to use a debugging/telemetry permission to push out a stupid marketing gimmick makes me question the judgement of everyone involved.
Much like some other situations in the political arena over the past 2-3 decades, I don't care that much about what was done but the decision to do it makes me question the judgement of people that I'm supposed to trust to make good decisions.
Forking a project, and adding features and removing pulls that you don't want and/or need is kinda the idea behind the whole 'open source' thing.. cause what else would you do with the source code, but compile it.
Speaking of Firefox, a build or two ago, without warning, Firefox deprecated (broke) every add-on. Because [insert-old-architecture-security-justification]. It's not like anybody was doing anything real with a browser anyway.
This design decision is behind a large part of the performance improvement in 57.
Yes I'm sad, I lost some of my favourite addons as well. But this move was announced well in advance and it had a serious technical reason behind it.
In a difficult situation, Mozilla made a tough decision that is good in the long run and that benefits all its users. Crying "fork!" over it is so blind it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
> So if someone forks over 1 change or 10 they are still libre to do it, or is that passe?
It's nonsense. Doesn't mean they can't do it, doesn't mean it's not nonsense. Furthermore, in some situations, forks can be harmful to the overall health of an already fragile ecosystem. They're not free of externalities.
Wrong (unless proven otherwise).
From the Shield Studies FAQ[1]:
> What data do Shield Studies normally collect?
> [...]
> Mechanism:
>
> - at STARTUP, SHUTDOWN, INSTALL, UNINSTALL, - send a `shield-study` packet containing the Unified Telemetry Environment.
As was stated before, users report that they have had this extension pushed to their browser without their prior consent to sending any telemetry data.
"## Observed data
- Possible page view counts on SUMO
- Possible page view counts (with and without the special 'enrolled' header) on Partner pages."
I've also already explained the "special 'enrolled' header."
The turning on was obviously either planned for some special moment, which wasn't the moment of that the extension was actually delivered, or the extension was accidentally delivered in the unfinished state -- doesn't matter, it provably didn't get enough scrutiny, see my other comments here for the details, the damage it actually done is regarding "tracking" less than planned, but regarding annoyance of their users probably more.
It also wont get any of the improvements mozilla is in the process of making so it will ultimately be slower and with fewer features.
Its also moronic to have a different update policy per app that is achieved in 35 different UIs.
This is the norm on windows because they were late to the party as far as a central source of software and further managed to make it an unattractive proposition and didn't get much buy in from developers.
Totally aside from the implicit security issue the ui flow is also terrible. Either each of 35 different apps runs their own update checker process in the background wasting your resources and prompting you at annoying times or when you run an app one out of n times it will prompt you to update whereupon you will ultimately have to stop doing whatever you were actually doing and let it update itself and restart.
It is truly amazing that people not only put up with this ridiculous situation but defend this as a feature.
Your system should periodically on a schedule you set update every piece of software you own and never bother you otherwise.