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.
> 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 :-]