The extension is called “Looking Glass 1.0.3” and this is its description: MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT FROM YOURS. Now that sounds ominous. It’s really not, though. It’s a promotional campaign between Firefox and the TV series Mr. Robot that brings an alternate reality game to your browser. This must have sounded like a great idea when somebody pitched it to Mozilla, but the backlash has been fierce.
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But still, if Mozilla is positioning itself as the privacy-conscious alternative to Google, Microsoft and others, then installing an extension without asking users first doesn’t feel right at all. It doesn’t help that the extension seems to come from Mozilla’s Shield project, which is the company’s platform for testing new features in Firefox with a subset of users who opt-in to giving these types of things a try.
Not sure how many were affected. I was one, and I immediately blamed it for some weird, unexplained performance issues I’d been seeing. Looking Glass probably wasn’t the cause of those, but still.
Mozilla hasn’t yet put out a public statement about it, but I have heard that they now realize it was a big mistake.
So Patreon and Firefox are under the same management? I don’t want to believe that stupidity is an infectious condition, and that it may be widespread.
Way to ruin your image in a stupid stunt. Google’s selfreplicating autoupdates look much more straightfoward and less invasive now.
OK, Firefox is doing a really weird thing today. I pretty much keep a tab open to these forums, and I have Firefox remember my tabs from the last session. Well, today for some reason, every time I quit the browser and start it up again, and click on the tab for Qt3, I get a “cannot load app” message and it tells me “you appear to be offline.” In order to get things to show up I have to refresh the page, then things go back to normal. But even in the same session, if I go to another tab for a while and come back, same problem.
Anyone else seeing this? My ISP is Comcast/Infinity and I’m running Windows 10, if it makes a difference.
Went ahead and switched back to Firefox from Chrome. So far really liking this Quantum release, it’s ridiculously fast. It feels faster than Chrome but that might be “new browser” confirmation bias.
What prompted me to switch is Mozilla’s Facebook Container add-on. This is a feature every browser should have. I like the peace of mind knowing Facebook will have a much more difficult time tracking me now.
Facebook Container isolates your Facebook activity from the rest of your web activity in order to prevent Facebook from tracking you outside of the Facebook website via third party cookies.
