Unknown Mozilla dev addon "Looking Glass 1.0.3" on browser

Many people seem to be shocked because Mozilla installed an add-on automatically. In my opinion, it doesn't really matter since the code is coming from Mozilla - they're building the whole browser, so they could introduce functionality anywhere. If someone distrusts their add-ons, why trust their browser at all?

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.

This is being added to the browser, outside the realm of security updates, through what is supposed to be a UX improvement program, for commercial purposes. It's written by a commercial company that produces advertisement content. It's not clear this code is audited.

Sorry, but I'm uninstalling firefox. They have broken the basic trust I have in them as a user to not push arbitrary code to my machine against my interests.

Have fun in Lynx. that's probably the only browser that wouldn't do something like this.

Well maybe Safari, not because Apple wouldn't, but because they just don't care enough about ad revenue.

Chrome: They leech everything they can get away with, granted it goes only to Google, but you know it's just to feed their never-ending ad-revenue goal.

MS: They bypassed IE only ads, and went on to build ads into the entire OS.

The truth is that there have been other text-only browsers both before and after lynx. I have tried every one I could ever find, since the 1990s. Some of them seem to have been forgotten. IMO, whatever is in todays package collections is not a true representation of all text-only browsers ever written. Most times when someone cites "lynx", as is common on HN, I interpret this as a signal they are not too familiar with text-only browsers. IMO, lynx is relatively big, slow and clunky with too many options; definitely not the best text-only browser I have used.

I happen to like text-only browsers for viewing HTML (e.g HTML tables), tcpclients like netcat for making TCP connections, and my own software for generating HTTP requests. Almost all websites work[FN1], with zero "loading time" as one may experience when using "modern" browsers to do these tasks. I can easily get the content I want (text, with option to download images, PDF, video, etc.) and skip the stuff I dont want. No autoloading of resources. I choose what I want.

Surprisingly, the web is actually getting more, not less text-friendly. Today I can often get text encapsulated in JSON, Markdown, etc. instead of wrapped in HTML, making parsing even easier.

There is heaps of Javascript written by others available on the web today but as a user I have little interest in running it. I would rather write my own.

FN1. "work" means I get the body the page that contains the content.