Comment by gargravarr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gargravarr | Hacker News Reader

I'm willing to forgive Mozilla this one time - I've been a Firefox loyalist since v1.5 and have no desire to change, but this cut pretty close. To me, it felt like someone at Mozilla trying to one-up their competition by providing the Mr Robot tie-in exclusively. I can almost understand Mozilla's desperation to slow the seemingly unstoppable exodus of Firefox people to Chrome (which I refuse to use for many reasons, chiefly that it's becoming the new IE with web-breaking rendering and extensions that only work on it), or a way to bring in more revenue to a foundation that's probably losing funding, but this was a very short-sighted move that undermines what Firefox has always stood for - respecting the user's choice in their browser. It was bad enough when they bundled Pocket pre-installed, but at least that was clearly announced beforehand, and I only tolerated because I was already a Pocket user. Sneaking stuff into the browser silently, no matter how good the intentions are, is a backdoor in all but name, and that makes me, as a sysadmin, very nervous. Mozilla have a ways to go before my trust in them is restored, but I don't want to switch away. Others may not be so forgiving.

It's just another terrible decision in Mozilla's long history of mismanaging Firefox. They've been dumbing down the UI and turning Firefox into a me-too Chrome for the longest time. They broke plugin compatibility, harming Firefox's big killer feature. For the longest time they pretended their performance was competitive with Chrome, when it quite clearly wasn't.

You already mentioned the Pocket fiasco. I could've sworn they also once bundled a non-Free plugin for enhanced disabled access. They dragged their feet for years fixing a serious privacy issue regarding IndexedDB https://superuser.com/a/1250955/867963

Less scandalously, they use a non-standard licence for no clear reason.

The technical progress in Firefox has been great, but the history of mismanagement is awful. But I'm still using Firefox, for what that's worth.

> Less scandalously, they use a non-standard licence for no clear reason.

What are you talking about? Who defines "standard" for licenses?

The Mozilla Public License is not a standard licence. If you don't understand why it's unhelpful to muddy the waters with non-standard licences, here's a blog post: https://ben.balter.com/2016/08/01/why-you-shouldnt-write-you...

The MPL is very widely used. By what or whose standards is it a "non-standard license"?

It's listed in the OpenSource.org list of approved OS licenses: https://opensource.org/licenses

Your link is about writing your own open source license, not about which licenses are standard. Nowhere in that blog is any mention of Mozilla. I am not sure what you are trying to say by linking to it.

You got me - it's more recognised than I thought.

Wikipedia tells me it's a copyleft licence, but one that's 'weaker' than the GPL.

Are you ready to forgive them again? https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2018/01/24/update-on...

How is the integration of Pocket in any way similar to the Mr. Robot scenario? You just pointed to a recent article where they are explaining exactly the what/why/how details of this integration. There is nothing surprising or being hidden about this integration, and it's been a long time coming if you have paid attention to the beta/nightly/dev channels.

My issue with the Pocket integration is that it's non-removeable - you get it whether you want it or not, and even if you remove the button from the toolbar, the code is still there within Firefox. You can't remove it like a plugin. To me, it adds another security problem that can only be fixed with an update of the whole browser, and you don't have the option not to have it.

But as I said, Mozilla were very up-front with the plans. They weren't with Looking Glass.

Pocket is literally only a plugin internally.

Setting the extensions.pocket.enabled variable to false will disable the addon. That's all there is to it.

Which leads nicely into my thought - then why not make it a plugin? Why not have the browser ship with Pocket as a plugin, thereby giving users the option to completely remove it?

That's a good question and I think Mozilla simply intents to make Pocket something that people choose Firefox over Chrome for (atleast the vast majority of mainstream users). They're also heavily working on improving it's privacy impact, which is already fairly low if you don't use it at all.

What I'm wondering now is if the firing-by-moral-outrage of the Firefox exec in the last couple of years was the start of this campaign to dupe FF users in to using an advertising platform (perhaps it was entirely coincidental)? For real, they're not letting up on the backdoor commercialisation are they.

I'd love to know who, the people, is making these decisions?

For me, this whole fiasco was the last straw: Quantum had already broken the plugins I use for vertical tabs, and then I found that the only reason Quantum was introduced was to allow this Looking Glass plugin to collect telemetry from the whole of the browser window, not just the pages being rendered. Like yourself, I've been a Firefox user since the Phoenix days, but this was a step too far.

I switched to Vivaldi, which is a Chromium with high levels of customization, including a vertical tab bar.

Vivalidi is proprietary though. Switching to that seems like a huge step back to me.

>and then I found that the only reason Quantum was introduced was to allow this Looking Glass plugin to collect telemetry from the whole of the browser window, not just the pages being rendered.

What.

I'd really love to know how you came to this conclusion.

>Quantum was introduced was to allow this Looking Glass plugin to collect telemetry from the whole of the browser window, not just the pages being rendered.

You have no idea what you are talking about. Quantum is a name for a variety of technologies in Firefox, all of which have a shared goal of speeding the browser up. None of them have anything to do with telemetry.

Also, Looking Glass collected no data. It says it right there in the article.

Please omit personal swipes from your comments here, regardless of how wrong anyone else is. It's particularly important to do so when you're right, so you can communicate correct information without discrediting it.

Sorry, I didn't mean it as a personal attack. I meant it as a statement of fact.

If you use negatively charged language about the person you're talking to, you're taking a big step away from factual exchange. On an internet forum, where we have precious little context to convey intent, that's almost always a destructive thing to do—and since it's both unnecessary and easy to avoid, we ask people to just not do it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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