Make no mistake, Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit entity. They're owned by a nonprofit shell, but I imagine that nonprofit could easily sell them off.
The incident was trivial, but it exposed serious concerns in the process. Mozilla itself strongly promotes privacy and digital rights, but their marketing people did not understand that this was a breach of trust, and all of the technical people involved in the release of the add-on either did not realise this either, or were overruled.
No, I agree at least. I mean, it was a bad move and thoroughly short-sighted, but then again - what's the score?
One slight privacy infraction from Mozilla, vs. the countless others from Google, or Facebook, or whatever. It wasn't a good move, it also wasn't as bad as people make it out to be, and it's defeinitely better than any competition.
But keep in mind that while it was pushed out into people's browsers in a stupidly-lacking-in-foresight fashion, it still required use activation before it'd do anything...
I'm at least four nines sure Google have got worse privacy-eroding code in Chrome that does way worse things that flip some text upside down after you specifically activate an add-on...
Like logging you into Chrome when you log into GMail.
This one hit me hard. And that was after I knew about it. I logged into Gmail on Chrome on my personal computer, without realizing I had been logged into Chrome itself, which then ended up mixing my personal browsing history with my work account, something I’ve tried very hard to avoid.
As I tell everyone that tries to defend this, it's not about what the plugin did or didn't do. It could have literally been a copy of about:blank, it changes nothing.
The entirely justified outrage was its purpose for being put there (which boils down to advertising) and the lack of consent for its being put there. That's it.
Doing nothing is not advertising. The only way for this to be used in advertisement was from Mr. Robot fans to Firefox.
> lack of consent
Pretend it was a copy of about:blank when you answer this question: What makes this different from the giant pile of patches merged into each release of firefox that you don't read?
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo...