Firefox Mr. Robot Adware (Looking Glass) Salt - Brendan Eich wouldn't have let this happen

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Remember the first season of Mr. Robot? The show was a miracle. A cinematic, smartly written, stylishly directed cyberpunk-flavored modern day show on a network like USA? It was hard to believe. They got all the computer and hacking stuff right in a way Hollywood never has. The cast was outstanding. The network was so forward-thinking about the show they released the pilot for free on torrenting sites. And somehow, a big show from a big network nailed the feeling of rebellion. The first season ends with a character derisively mentioning the Big Mac, for fucks sake. The advertisers can't have been real happy with that.

Then the second season came out with a dumb, unnecessary "twist" that alienated watchers, and it featured fake press conferences recorded for the show by The President of the United States like he was a fucking actor celebrity. Uh, okay.

Fast-forward to today. The third season is filled with anti-Trump virtue signaling. The narrative is so pro-establishment it had to take a swipe at Bernie supporters. (Yes, in a show about hackers who hates capitalism, the socialist candidate's supporters had to be put in their place.) And now this invasive, cringeworthy browser bullshit that angers the very people the network was targeting with the show in the first place, computer geeks.

Great job, USA. Great work, creator Sam Esmail. Maybe in season four Elliot will turn to the screen and lecture the audience about using Whiterose's proper pronouns.

NumberingYourState said:
Idg what's so great about Fire Fox anyways.
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People have gotten used to the add-ons they love and feel like they can't move to another browser if it means losing them. That's about it.
After this most recent Firefox "update" I can barely stand looking at the browser.
 
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https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/update-looking-glass-add/ (https://archive.fo/grfmI)
Update: Looking Glass Add-on
December 18, 2017


We didn’t think hard enough about how our actions would affect the community, and we’re sorry for letting you down.

How we got here
Over the course of the year Firefox has enjoyed a growing relationship with the Mr. Robot television show and, as part of this relationship, we developed an unpaid collaboration to engage our users and viewers of the show in a new way: Fans could use Firefox to solve a puzzle as part of the alternate reality game (ARG) associated with the show.

How did it work
Fans of the show enabled this game in Firefox by turning on the “Looking Glass” add-on effect via preferences setting. When enabled, and the user navigated to Mr. Robot’s ARG page, a clue necessary to advance the puzzle would be revealed. When enabled, the add-on would also invert text from a list of words related to the shows themes, throughout the web for a few seconds.

Instead of giving users the choice to install this add-on, we initially pushed an update to Firefox that installed the “Looking Glass” add-on for English speaking users. This add-on was installed and set to ‘OFF’ and made no changes in the user experience unless it was explicitly turned on by a user, but it was added. Even when turned on no user data was collected or shared.

The rollout did not meet the standards to which we hold ourselves causing concern that was surfaced through our Firefox community. We received feedback regarding the transparency of the rollout and the processes that govern our auto-install mechanism for add-ons. In response we immediately started our internal review, updated the add-on with a better description and began the process to move the Mr. Robot Looking Glass tie-in to the add-ons site as a regular WebExtension. We also shared the source in a public repository.

To our community
We’re sorry for the confusion and for letting down members of our community. While there was no intention or mechanism to collect or share your data or private information and The Looking Glass was an opt-in and user activated promotion, we should have given users the choice to install this add-on.

Being thorough
We recognize that real engagement means listening to feedback. We took immediate actions to correct this, and we are conducting a formal internal review to ensure our technical, legal and communications processes and policies are updated for the future.

We take seriously our responsibility to provide a trusted, secure platform for your online life and will always work to maintain the trust of our users.

We’re doing a post-mortem and are going to make changes to our processes. These will be public and we will link to a public list of process changes, likely mid-January.

By Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, Chief Marketing Officer

I took a look at Jascha Kaykas-Wolff's LinkedIn, his shit is full of buzzword spam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaykas
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Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7kp6j2/update_from_mozilla_looking_glass_addon/ (https://archive.fo/It2M3)
 
If you're a paranoid type who's worried about the CIA spying on your tweetstorms, chances are this is a non-issue. You get an option to turn off studies on Firefox anyways and you likely already turned it off.
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AnOminous said:
At a certain time long, long ago, it was the best browser. Then it turned increasingly into bloated shitware. I can't imagine why anyone would still use it except out of some kind of masochistic brand loyalty. Frankly, even Chrome is turning into shit.
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It was the best until the Faglovers had a hissyfit and kicked out the founder. I miss the days of old Adblock and Noscript. For those who don't know or remember, original adblock had it to where you could hover over an add and custom block right there, BAM, with the right click drop down window. Noscript was a fancier way to do a similar thing. And Firefox also had an app that allowed you to adjust and change the color of all websites, blacking out the background and adjusting the text. It was nice.

Back in the day.
 
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Mistake after mistake. After abandoning XUL-addons, Firefox has little left to differentiate itself from Chrome or Edge besides it's name.
At this point, I think near everybody knows to use Waterfox instead.
Oh well, on to the next controversy, which is probably going to be about Chrome shipping with adblock by default (only active on "bad" sites).
 
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:offtopic:I'm currently using Palemoon and it seems okay. Everyone seems to be mentioning Waterfox, is it better than Palemoon or have any features that are missing from other branches?
 
I have to use Firefox now due to being stuck with Vista for the foreseeable future. You can't update Chrome any further now on Vista and I started having issues on several sites. I do not like Firefox. My computer slows down immensely when I use it. I don't know enough about obscure browsers to pick one of those instead.

I've never heard of Mr. Robot. Is it a cartoon?
 
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Firefox is bloated garbage and their extension manager leaked memory like a fucking sieve for at least 7 years (maybe it still does, idk, I stopped using FF years ago).

Maybe one day I'll give up Chrome and switch to something else, but I gave Firefox a chance for a long time and the browser was bad, so fuck them.
 
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So their ARG about internet security was accomplished by...installing a suspicious looking extension on people's browsers?
 
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Also worth noting is that Firefox and Mozilla came to prominence when Windows-based browsers were a choice of Internet Explorer or Mozilla, which was a hilariously easy choice. These days there are plenty of options, to say nothing of shady shit that goes on at Firefox HQ.
 
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RadicalCentrist said:
Also worth noting is that Firefox and Mozilla came to prominence when Windows-based browsers were a choice of Internet Explorer or Mozilla, which was a hilariously easy choice. These days there are plenty of options, to say nothing of shady shit that goes on at Firefox HQ.
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You also don't really have to target specific browsers anymore unless you have people still running IE8 and shit. Remember "This site runs best on Firefox" banners? Now you just write generic code that runs in Webkit and it generally works on everything.
 
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