Firefox is on a slippery slope

Mozilla silently sideloaded a promotional browser extension into Firefox as part of a paid collaboration with NBC Universal for the TV show Mr. Robot. The extension, delivered via Firefox's 'studies' feature, modified webpage text matching Mr. Robot keywords and added HTTP headers to visited sites. The studies feature re-enables itself after updates, and the relevant Bugzilla tickets were locked or had critical comments removed. The author argues this fundamentally violates user trust, breaks the browser's core purpose of faithfully rendering websites, and represents a pattern of increasingly aggressive monetization moves by Mozilla including Google search deals, paid new tab links, and Pocket bundling. Mozilla later rolled back the study and eventually issued an apology, but no apology had been made at the time of writing.