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Comment by Yoric | Hacker News Reader

So, people are angry because of an easter egg in Firefox?

It did not collect any data, it did not have any effect on the browser (unless you turned on the preference) except look spooky if you look at your list of add-ons.

So yeah, it was spooky, and it could certainly have been done better, but come on, it was an easter egg dedicated to a spooky tv series.

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Yeah, that attemp at positive spin won't fly here, not with this audience. Silent sideload of a paid-placement extension that changes headers and page content is not an easter egg. Maybe if it were activated by a ctrl sequence, but even then... this is a hole in perimeter security. It's the sort of thing that makes me reconsider my institution's security policy to sanction Firefox as a supported and authorized browser. Not cool Mozilla, we can get by with chrome and IE / Edge... MS might not be bleeding edge in browsers but at least they understand this sort of Enterprise requirement. MS might pull some ad placement bs on windows home, but they were smart enough to avoid it with pro.

Well, thankfully the extension did not actually do anything at all. You would have had to manually enable it in about:config, before it would have done what you described.

Well it's probably not fair to call it an Easter egg if it had a commercial tie-in and presumably resulted in money for Firefox. Those are called ads. No matter how whimsically they're packaged

But yes, people do like to get up in arms about free code bases that they don't pay for. People need to keep in mind the Facebook rule -- that when you don't pay for a service, you aren't the customer, you are the product.

It's not an Easter egg, it's an advertisement for a TV show.

I wouldn't call this an Easter egg. about:mozilla is an Easter egg. Installing a strange, unexplained add-on is not.

Well ignoring that it altered your headers and display of content.... yeah had no effect at all.

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