I'm still quietly angry about Mozilla's betrayal, even though perhaps I shouldn't be because, as Drew DeVault wrote, Mozilla has been on a slippery slope for a while. Since I can't let this go yet, here are some questions I would like Mozilla to answer because I think they cut to the heart of the larger scale issues here.

1. Does Mozilla believe it has the right to modify people's Firefox installs without their meaningful informed consent?

   (If Mozilla's answer is 'yes', they don't need to bother with the rest of the questions.)

2. Does Mozilla believe that it had meaningful informed consent from people to install the 'Looking Glass' addon? If so, how does it believe this consent was obtained?

   (I don't think people believed they were consenting to this when they left 'Allow Firefox to install and run studies' selected, which means that at a minimum it cannot be informed consent.)

3. How did Mozilla allow this to happen without meaningful informed consent?
4. How will Mozilla prevent this from happening (without meaningful informed consent) in the future?

Up until now, I and likely many other people believed that Mozilla's answer to the first question would be 'no'; Mozilla did not believe that it had the right to yank around our Firefox installs without our permission. Unfortunately, based on Mozilla's public reactions so far, the actual answer appears to be 'yes'. Mozilla is not sorry that it shoved an addon down people's throats without their consent; Mozilla is sad that people are upset about it. For example, from another quote from Mozilla's marketing people:

[...], we heard from some of our users that the experience we created caused confusion.”

This is mealy-mouthed corporate PR weasel speak and may be freely translated as 'we're sorry that we got caught'.

I didn't title this entry 'some questions for Mozilla', because while they are questions for Mozilla, Mozilla is not going to answer them just because I wrote them; I'm an insignificant blogger, not someone with a voice powerful enough to reach Mozilla's ears or get its attention. It is my hope that someone with enough volume and power to get Mozilla's attention does ask something like these questions to Mozilla, and perhaps being explicitly confronted with the first question will change Mozilla's direction.

(I would say 'wake Mozilla up', but I don't think the people in charge of Mozilla are asleep, exactly. They're just indifferent.)

If Mozilla's answer to the first question is 'yes', as it implicitly is currently, then I must take back some of what I said yesterday about not switching to Chrome. Chrome is certainly not better than Mozilla here (Mozilla still has nominal principles about user empowerment, privacy, and so on), but there may be pragmatic reasons that make Google less likely to do this sort of thing with Chrome. But how I see that is something for another entry.

(I don't currently intend to switch away from Firefox 56, mostly because I don't believe there are any good alternatives for me.)