Comment by nkrisc

9 years ago

Wow. So Mozilla lets advertisers push extensions to your browser? Is that right or am I misunderstanding something?

11 comments

nkrisc

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icebraining  9 years ago

It seems to be developed by Mozilla employees, which is less terrible than allowing actual third-party addons, and it's disabled by default, but still - pretty distasteful.

teamhappy  9 years ago

> So Mozilla lets advertisers push extensions to your browser?

Of course not.

Mozilla can install extensions if you have "shield studies" enabled. They use extensions it to run UI studies and things like that. I think you have to opt-in to each study individually if you want to be part of it. Enabling the studies in your settings only means "notify me when there's a new study I can participate in".

See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/shield and https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Shield/Shield_Studies

Now they have partnered with Mr Robot to use the same feature to offer some sort of "Alternate Reality Game".

  • pbhjpbhj  9 years ago

    That sounds like "no they haven't pushed an unsolicited advert at all ... except to people who offered to be in a development program, who they've pushed an unsolicited advert to" ...

    • teamhappy  9 years ago

      I was talking about advertisers running code in your browser. I think you have to opt-in to participate in one of the studies, so that's not happening without your consent.

      It looks like Firefox auto-installs the studies though if you've enabled the feature. But it only activates the individual extensions for the studies once you've opted in to participate.

      The extensions themselves need to be approved by a bunch of people at mozilla (at least for the normal studies). So I guess nothing bad can happen until you click "participate" or whatever they call it.

      Still, I would also consider the notification itself to be an ad. This was obviously a bad idea and I don't want anyone to think I'm defending it. I guess they've chosen to abuse their shield studies for this because it's the only way for them to send notifications to the browser, but that's no excuse. I have the studies disabled anyway but now I'm not even going to consider ever turning them on.

      5 replies →

  • nkrisc  9 years ago

    But it appears from the link thread that there was no individual opt-in to this particular study, done for what appears to be the purposes of advertising. Clearly it's not as bad as what I first thought it to be, but still sounds fishy.