The FIFA countdown is just Phase 1: Mozilla working on full-fledged sports widget

5 months ago by XLE to c/firefox

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/...

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:

"Phase 1: Countdown"
"Phase 2: Follow a team and View Schedule"

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."

ilqqe 31 points 5 months ago

Yet more bullshit nobody asked for.

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RIotingPacifist 17 points 5 months ago

Great timing Mozilla, go all in on the world cup nobody cares about.

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syklemil 5 points 5 months ago

Hey, some of us care a negative amount! The only FIFA content I want to see is shit being thrown at their corrupt leaders.

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RougeEric 12 points 5 months ago

Shrugs in Waterfox.

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martini1992 8 points 5 months ago

As long as I can turn it off.

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nshibj 3 points 5 months ago

But why is it turned on by default in the first place?

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martini1992 1 point 4 months ago

Because if it was disabled by default nobody would know it existed. If they added popups to tell people about it they'd get flak for that. They just want to have "cool" things to bring the normies in I suppose.

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nshibj 2 points 4 months ago

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).

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martini1992 1 point 4 months ago

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.

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XLE 3 points 5 months ago

Turn them off.

This Sports thing is two switches (FIFA timer, upcoming sports widget) plus a nag popup. Per install. Per profile.

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roofuskit 5 points 5 months ago

Imagine using non-profit funds for developing a browser to actually improve the browser.

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