cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/firefox/p/2092438/the-fifa-countdown-is-just-phase-1-mozilla-working-on-full-fledged-sports-widget
Spotted on Mozilla's bug tracker:
[meta] Homepage Sports Widget
Where it turns out the countdown widget was part of a broader plan to add a different permanent widget:
Web calls will apparently be providing
- SportsMatch
- SportsTeam
- MatchStatus
- TournamentPhase
You can also expect a popup on the Desktop that advertises World Cup wallpapers.
The Phase 1 wallpapers and widget remind me of 2017 when they rolled out the creepiest experiment possible and then apologized with language that would be at home today:
"Although we always have the best intentions, not everything that we try works as we want," said Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, Mozilla's chief marketing officer... "This was not a paid promotion but rather a collaboration that was intended to be fun."
Yeah, I understand that might have been their reasoning. But of they force it on us without notice, then they should get even more flak. They want to attract whoever likes that, so they annoy their whole user base (plus those of us using Firefox forks).
IMO it's a fairly minor annoyance. Though I think if the forks allow a feature into their codebase and they wanted to disable by default they could, so that's on them. If you use a fork where that's the case then maybe emailing them to say these features should be disabled by default or even not merged at all would be more productive.