It was a marketing stunt performed in partnership with a television show and was installed without the user's knowledge or consent.
> It was code that did absolutely nothing unless you set a secret flag.
It destroyed a lot of trust. Seriously. I too was really confused when I suddenly saw an extension I never installed. (This could happen before when desktop installers could add extensions but I don't think they can anymore so I was properly confused until K searched for it on the Internet.)
> It was not advertising. It was an easter egg.
Those two are not mutually exclusive :-]
The thing is, Mozilla has always had the ability to put arbitrary things into firefox, and it's always had easter eggs in it. The way they did it was a big mistake but from my point of view only because it was scary-looking (and showed their extension pipeline had issues, I guess), not because of what it actually did.
> Those two are not mutually exclusive :-]
How about this: It wasn't there to advertise to anyone that didn't already know about it.
- but it seems we mostly agree on this.
I still don't have any problems with easter eggs. Give me back my whimsy.
I mean: I too like whimsy, and adding an about:<something noncommercial> would probably be ok with me. (In fact I think there was an easter egg on some about:-protocol-page st some point.)
It was just the sudden surprise of seing an extension I didn't expect and then what at least felt like a hidden commercial motive on top of that.
Maybe it's the jarring worlds of security! paranoia! Absolute Control! vs. the FF wants to fun! unpredictable! Think different (no wait, that slogan's tainted now...)!
Given the way they present the extensions... it - in retrospect - should have been clear to them it would trigger more initial reactions from the first set of perspectives, and not just the second.
You calling this an easter egg had me confused as to what the hell this thread was about, searching for "firefox easter egg" shows nothing about it.
You could see the existence of the extension because of poor decisions.
But it didn't turn on unless you went into about:config and manually flipped "extensions.pug.lookingglass" to true.
Definitely intended as an easter egg. Even of the people getting upset about the visible extension, 99+% of them never saw the enabled effect.
The analogy applies to computing in 2 ways: they're hidden, and it's something desirable. Niether of those ways apply to what Mozilla did. Therefore it wasn't an easter egg and you trying to pretend otherwise is just confusing.
They made a mistake in deployment that turned it into a scary mysterious blob. That's bad, but doesn't change the underlying nature of the code.
We can agree that the exact same code in C, not showing up in any lists or menus, not triggering without a magic about:config phrase, would be a clear easter egg, right?
(Also easter eggs don't inherently have to be fun, sometimes they're just someone's initials.)
What does that have to do with independence and transparency?