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."
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.