Comment by acqq

9 years ago

The biggest problem, for me, is that these extensions obviously get less scrutiny in Mozilla organization. The "core" is made with a lot of "eyes" taking care that not something "wrong" for the user enters the code base.

Then some marketing people both in and outside of Mozilla push something that is probably not passing the same strict reviews.

It points to the organizational problem in Mozilla.

Re: "not sure": don't worry, some people do this not for the content but for the author, some lack reading comprehension and some just press the wrong button. Just vote yourself, and if you reply, say that you agree, don't mention the word you mentioned.

5 comments

acqq

Reply
jonathankoren  9 years ago

Why would assume that it doesn’t pass through the same review process? None of your assumptions are obvious to me.

  • acqq  9 years ago

    Why would you assume that it does? Have you ever seen how big products like core Firefox binaries are written, reviewed and tested? I took part in that, and this doesn't look at all as part of that process. I see it's even not in the same repository where the "serious stuff" is. It's not the part of that process.

    This looks like "let's give litte Perry and these marketing departments something to play, whatever, it's just an extension, who cares." So little Perry writes a description of the extension "MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT FROM YOURS", the extension gets silently pushed to all the US users(!) (Firefox has support for that) who freak out, and the first response from somebody involved with that was "it was not supposed to be seen." You see, it was planned to keep the extension also "invisible" to the users -- Firefox has support that too! The extension was obviously not formally reviewed or formally tested, if the "invisibility" was the goal. Of course, it being "invisible" wouldn't be better. It's a misuse of the whole mechanism, compared to what Mozilla explained to the users. The mechanism was supposed to allow making "studies" from the behavior of the users who agree to take part in them. Instead, it was an attempt to a "viral ad" that was delivered to the whole Firefox using US population. There are multiple wrong decisions in this story.

    Now I hope Mozilla does get the idea that the users do care.