It's hard to identify with the vitriol in response to this thread, yeah it was dumb and silly but, without reading Hacker News, it would have been a completely invisible event for me. I've been totally in love with FF57 since release and this doesn't really detract from it at all. Very happy to have a fast, open browser that keeps me from needing to rely on Google, Apple, or Microsoft for web browsing, even if Mozilla doesn't always act perfectly.
Some people think Mozilla is different than the other browser makers, that it protects the internet in some way.
Personally I don't see how Mozilla could have any impact on important decisions about internet governance, DRM, etc. with such a small marketshare, and I believe the internet would have turned out the same even if Mozilla had never existed. I can't think of a single case in which Mozilla prevented some standard from being adopted when Microsoft and Google wanted it to happen.
In any case, Mozilla differentiated itself because of that image, and that was one of a small number of reasons people stuck with Firefox through the past several years. I bet a lot of those people are now thinking that they might as well use Chrome because Mozilla is the same as every other commercial vendor.
