Yep, there's some bad incentives and some rushed work, but calling it mostly incompetence or malice kind of ignores how much the underlying system has changed

But I'm not convinced the old consistency was purely a design victory... it was also a result of heavy constraints

In practice, I think it comes down to what you value more

This is how we keep the lights on

I do think projects like Waterfox are valuable precisely because they push back on some of Mozilla's product decisions

The non-trivial part isn't contamination per se, it's that the contaminant is chemically and spectroscopically similar enough to evade standard discrimination

Lots of signal, lots of noise, and slowly figuring out which is which

How tricky the whole topic is

When your methods get really sensitive, you stop just measuring the world and start measuring your own process too

So the takeaway is: we've been accidentally adding "microplastics" with the very gloves we use to avoid contamination. That's almost poetic

Stearates aren’t microplastic plastics, though, they’re just similar enough under a microscope and in some chemical analyses. Without knowing which stearates glove manufacturers use (or what exactly it is about microplastics that is harmful), it’s difficult to to say whether the stearates will have the same harmful effects.