Mozilla messes up ad campaign

Mozilla yesterday apologised for its controversial viral ad campaign in which the company claimed people who used Firefox were less likely to get cancer.

The company set up a website called Firefox Users Against Boredom. The site included links to download Firefox, links to a Facebook page, a fake talk show and a download link for the fight boredom song.

Mozilla published statistics on the site which claimed that aside from being less likely to have cancer or know someone who has cancer, Firefox users are 33% less likely to live with others suffering from high cholesterol, 40% less likely to be widowed, 41% more likely to have watched a documentary and 16% less likely to have fungal infections.

Naturally, there was uproar with TechCrunch staff and readers being none too pleased with the tactless humour.

Firefox pulled the campaign for a rewrite yesterday and Mozilla marketing bigwig, Paul Kim, said that the site was not meant to be publicly available and that it contained several stats from a Nielson study that were offensive in poor taste. He said the stats hadn’t been reviewed before accidentally being published. He assured us that these were not the views of Mozilla and they were working to fix the problem as soon as possible.