I posted yesterday about a new ad for Firefox that just sucked. It’s not that I found it offensive (many people did!), but I simply thought it was boring, not funny, and well… just stupid. While the ad is still available via YouTube (I’m not linking to it again) it has been removed from Mozilla’s “viral” website, and Mozilla’s VP of marketing Paul Kim has pubicaly apologized stating that,

“There is no way we would have gone live with a site that mocks cancer victims if there had been a review of these stats beforehand. Something went seriously wrong with our content development process, and I’m working to clean this up now. The site is up now for testing purposes, but should have been kept behind password authentication until we were ready to open it up. Regardless of these issues on our end, the main thing is to say that I take responsibility for the situation, and again, apologize to anyone who was upset by this.”

He continued on his personal blog saying,

“The site was not meant to be publicly available and contained several stats, taken from a recent Nielsen study, that were offensive and in poor taste, as pointed out both by readers of TechCrunch and many people here at Mozilla. I want to sincerely apologize for this oversight. We hadn’t reviewed the stats before they were accidentally published and some of them are clearly in poor taste and humor. This does not reflect the views of Mozilla and we are working to fix this immediately.”

Again, I wasn’t personally offended by the statistics, I just found nothing funny about the video. In fact, if I hadn’t read that this was released by Mozilla, I would have thought it was something created by Microsoft to damage the Mozilla/Firefox brand.