Then it wouldn't matter that everyone was in an airplane, because stupid proposals wouldn't be accepted in the first place.
It would also be nice if the CEO or CTO would chime in, having an official reply by marketing makes it look like marketing is calling the shots.
1) this was not an ad 2) Cliqz is not an advertising stunt. If there's ever a way to dismantle search engines monopolies it has to have support from a browser.
So what is it exactly? It's neither for security nor enhancement purpose.
That being said your reply and others before make me a tad uneasy because you seem to say that it's possible for a small team of, I guess, mostly marketing people can sneak an extension into a Firefox release "under the radar". Are you telling me that if I have some access to the Mozilla repos I can wait for one of this "bi-yearly" meetings and get questionable changes into the next release? A web browser is a critical piece of software, you shouldn't be able to push a novelty extension (regardless of intent) willy-nilly.
I think adding a new default extension in Firefox should go through tons of scrutiny and code review. And if that was the case I can't imagine that nobody would've raised a big red flag along the way saying "wait guys, are we sure we really want to do this?"
Also the stated goal from here by the folks working on remediations for the post mortem is this can't happen again so hopefully what is shared at that time will help alleviate concerns.
If only such care was put into deciding whether or not to ship adware in your browser, maybe you guys wouldn't have this problem.
If you have bi-yearly meetups. This is not unforeseen. In fact, it's quite predictable.
Lots of orgs have a no-realeases-before-the-weekend policy because stuff that happens Friday doesn't get fixed until Monday.
Or rather, from my perspective, of course there are coincidences; it's just that I don't trust them.
... and I need to be able to trust my tools.
Yeah, maybe you should concentrate on the week ahead.
Mozilla is 10% share (and going down) on desktop, near 0% on mobile/tablet.
We must have an alternative to Google, Microsoft and Apple.
All the heads who were responsible for this gaff should be let go and go to Google/Microsoft/Apple, they will do well there with like minded suits.
None.
And choosing to release this before the weekend is.. well, even worse.. because it shows YET ANOTHER PROBLEM: Terrible QC/User Feedback mechanisms.
But hey, "We're Sorry".
Mozilla is a distributed organization and was on the last day of its in-person, week-long, bi-yearly all-hands meeting in Austin on Friday when this started. At the time, and through large parts of Saturday, many Mozillians were in last-minute meetings, airports, in the air, or on the road, and were all concluding a week's worth of meetings where everyone was getting face time with collaborators and hashing out in person what we're doing for the next 6 months.
I was not involved, but you can imagine that when trying to decide what to do in response to something like this that many people need to coordinate. So it was a bit of a perfect storm of having tired humans, many of whom were in and out of internet access, etc.
edit: I fully understand the frustrated replies -- as I mentioned I personally feel that the reaction by the community to what happened was justified -- I wrote this not to comment on what happened (as noted in the post, Mozilla has publicly committed to a post-mortem) but wanted to provide this info about this unfolding when a lot of people were traveling, etc. I was happy and thankful to see this posted today and our rollback of the add-on over the weekend and hope that the follow-ups planned help us learn and move forward in a way that the community supports.